South of Larissa the landscape began to change. Jude watched an irrigation machine like a giant stick insect creeping over a field, and a tractor racing across another, raking up a dust cloud behind in a brown jet stream.

As they climbed towards Delphi, the cypress trees lined the road like javelin heads, and when they passed its sanctuary of Apollo, a place pagans once thought of as the navel of the world, the light was beginning to fade with the sun…

Jude leant on the hotel balcony railing looking down over the rooftops of central Athens. Below him was a dense plantation of TV aerials, and a building with air-con units slung on the side like finger holds up a climbing wall.

A chipped concrete bunker shaped like an infantryman’s helmet was tilted insolently on a mound at the track’s edge.