Patmos

In the cave where the last book of the Bible was written, the one word a man has never been able to say.

The Ferry from Kos

The Dodekanisos Express left Kos at half past nine, and the run to Skala was a little over two hours across the open Aegean in the soft May light, and she was at the rail of the upper deck before the boat had cleared the harbor.

I was a step behind her. She had on cream linen trousers and a pale ivory shirt and a length of soft grey linen at her throat that the wind off the bow was already working at. Her hair was pinned at the nape. The hat had stayed in the case; it would not survive the open run between the islands. She had not asked which boat or which port. She had taken the names I gave her on the call, Athens then Kos then the half-past-nine boat, and arrived at each in turn without questioning any of them.

The boat ran north through the channel between Kalymnos and Leros, the water the bright blue the Aegean takes in high spring, the chop low, the wind steady out of the northwest. The other islands of the Dodecanese came up off the port bow and went past, dry low shapes each with its own white scatter of houses set into the brown of the rock. She watched them go.

I had told her about the island on the call. That it was small. That the harbor sat at Skala and the medieval town climbed the ridge above it, walled inside a monastery a monk named Christodoulos had raised in 1088. That halfway up the hill, between the harbor and the town, there was a cave where a man named John had laid his head and seen what he saw and spoken it aloud to a scribe named Prochoros, and that what the two of them made in that cave had become the last book of the Christian New Testament. The cave and the monastery above it were both UNESCO ground. Together they made the island a different thing from the other Greek islands she had walked.

She had listened without breaking in. When I finished she gave me two words, low, and they were not a question.

“Tell me.”

They were the small permission one person gives another to keep going. So I kept going. The rock the tradition calls John’s pillow. The triple-cracked fissure in the ceiling the tradition says the Voice of God split when it spoke. The worn recess in the wall where he is said to have steadied his hand. The monks at the cave mouth who do not stop you and do not hurry you.

She let all of it land. Then she said one more thing.

“He wrote it there.”

“And the writing went out.”

That was all. The line went quiet on those words, and after it ended I sat at the desk in the hotel a long while and did not move.

Now the boat made its long approach. Patmos came up off the bow, a low brown shape, the ridge climbing as we closed, the white of the monastery resolving at the top against the deeper blue inland. The harbor opened on the eastern face, a curve of stone quay below the climb to the town, the whole white kastro perched on the island’s highest point.

Her Highness watched the monastery come closer.

“That is the wall,” she said.

“Built against pirates. Christodoulos came down from the Anatolian coast with a charter from the emperor and a single year to raise it. He worked through the year. Monks have lived inside it every year since.”

She nodded and did not take her eye off the white of it. The engine dropped to the low idle of the maneuver, and the boat settled at the quay and the men at the lines made it fast.

The harbormaster stood at the foot of the gangway with his clipboard. He looked up as she came down and held the look half a beat longer than he held it for the others, the private acknowledgement a man gives a woman whose face has been in his magazines, and then looked back at his paper. The half-beat, and nothing more, and nothing less.

The hotel driver waited behind him with a small white SUV. He took the bags, greeted her in careful English and me in Greek with the small nod a driver gives a man whose company had booked the room, and held the door. She got in.

We left Skala south on the coast road, four kilometers along the eastern shore, over a low headland and down toward the bay at the south end. The light off the sea was the clean sharp Aegean light that has been pulling writers to these islands for as long as writers could take a boat to them. She watched the sea and did not speak.

Then Grikos opened on our left, a long oval of deep water held between two rocky headlands, a low brown islet off the south end. The hotel showed on the cliff, low and white and stepped into the rock. The driver took the road down.

The Cliff at Grikos

The Patmos Aktis was the cliff, and the hotel was the long low thing built against it.

Reception stood open to the sea, a stone counter, a bowl of cut white flowers, a woman in grey linen who greeted her Highness in English and me in Greek and walked us along the corridor that ran the cliff. Our suite was at the south end, at the very edge.

A long whitewashed room under a dark wooden ceiling, an iron-framed bed with the linen unbleached and folded back, a writing desk against the seaward wall. Beyond a wide door, a private terrace cut into the cliff, stone-paved, a low wall at the edge no higher than a man’s hip, a pair of canvas chairs under an awning, a plunge pool lying flat at the far end. Below the wall the cliff fell forty meters to the water. Across the bay the white houses of the village gathered at the waterline, and above them, on the ridge to the west, the white walls of the kastro stood just visible.

Her Highness walked to the wall and set her hand on the white stone. She did not look down. She looked across the bay to the village and up to the walls above it.

“That is the town,” she said.

“Hora. Inside the monastery walls. Five hundred people, no cars. We go up tomorrow afternoon.”

“And the cave.”

“Between here and Hora, halfway up the road from Skala. The day after tomorrow.”

She kept her hand on the wall. The wind lifted the linen at her sleeve once and laid it back. Then she turned to me.

“You picked the cliff.”

“I did.”

“You wanted the bay between us and the town.”

“I wanted you to see it across water before you walked in it.”

She nodded, and walked back inside, and left the bags where they stood, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Tell me the days.”

“This afternoon we rest. Tonight, dinner here. Tomorrow morning, the boat to Psili Ammos, the beach the monks have used since the monastery was built. Tomorrow afternoon, Hora. The day after, the cave, at the hour the monks open the inner chamber to visitors who come without the bus groups. The last morning, the boat back.”

“The cave on the third day. You are saving it.”

“I want the island in you before it.”

She let the question rest. She lay back on the bed and folded her hands across her stomach and watched the dark beams. Down the cliff a gull called twice and was not answered. I unpacked.