He knew he looked hardly presentable for knocking on someone’s front door. He itched all over. Somehow removing his leather outer garments and tending his wounds had changed the pain from a general background roar that could be ignored to a set of isolated screaming sensations. He had been injured on other expeditions, of course. Often far worse. But never had he felt so generally abused.

Pavlos took one last swig from his canteen, then hoisted his pack.

“All right,” he mumbled, fighting off dizziness. “This had better be worth it.”

The air was cleaner up here, almost tasty. The smell of the cedars was sweet and pleasant. He entered the grove and almost at once saw the outlines of the building through the trees.

He paused for a moment, struggling not to fall to his knees. It couldn’t be true!

It was pure beam and column construction. Not an arch could be seen. The columns were Doric, or even pre-Doric—chaste, simple, unadorned, but beautiful. Their rounded contours might almost be Minoan.

And the beams resting on the columns! Where a Doric entablature was strictly sectioned into the three horizontal bands, here there was only one, carved in intricate figures that seemed to march upon a protruding lip, like the rim of the door lintel of a Cretan palace.

The structure was obviously designed to stand open to the wind, yet someone after the original builder had chosen to close off the interior in a crude fashion. The openings between the columns were blocked by slabs of white marble, roughly mortared; the flaking remnants of ancient paint still clung in spots.

Pavlos walked forward slowly, silently, as if in fear the sounds of his footsteps would blow it all away. He felt telescoped as he approached—the marble seeming to come to him, like the advancing of a dream.

No graffiti… no carved names and dates. The figures of heroic horses and feathered men in combat using spears and rounded shields, these bore no defacement other than that which Time itself had meted.