The Golden Step Read Online Free Page B

easternmost of Crete’s many gorges. ‘The Valley of the Dead,’ Mr Daskalakis told me. ‘We call it this because of many old tombs high up in caves in the walls. You will see tomorrow.’
    Kato Zakros was a single strip of buildings – three or four tavernas, three or four rent rooms – on a curved beach of grey pebbles between headlands of rock. It was as muted and quiet as could be. I checked into a room and took final stock. It was pretty clear by now that I had planned the contents of my backpack badly. I could hardly lift it from the floor, and when it was up between my shoulders its weight crushed me forward into a kind of painful old man’s stoop. There was no way on God’s earth I was going to be able to carry it 300 miles up gorges and across mountains. A ruthless cull was the only solution.
    The rejected items made a small but expensive mountain in the corner of the room. Out went my spare and heavier sweater, my jeans and my leather shoes. Out went my only T-shirt, my travel pillow, one of my two sets of thermal underwear. I tore out the pages I needed from my guide books and added the mutilated volumes to the pile; my collapsible umbrella, too. I considered sacrificing sun cream and survival bag, but thought better of it. Harmonica? No – too good an ice-breaker. Books – were they a luxury I could do without? I had only brought two, after careful thought: a paperback volume of the Psalms for day-to-day inspiration (I was going to allow myself 3 a day), and a copy of the Odyssey because I’d never read it and would need a real proper Greek hero to look to in times of trial. No: Homer and the Psalmist had better come along.
    After lightening the pack, I felt lighter in spirit, too. I gave my inner poltroon one final pep talk. It’s here now. Tomorrow you are going to be out there on the first step of the way with no GPS, no mobile phone, no Greek apart from a few bare phrases to save your neck, nothing to find your way through hard country with but a plain old compass and those shifty maps. Everything’s exactly as you’ve imagined and wanted it to be. Let go of the idea that this is some kind of tough-guy challenge. If you want to bail out at any time, feel free. If there’s an editorial voice still lurking in that downsized backpack of yours – the voice that says set the goals, get the story – ignore it. This adventure is not supposed to be like that. If you worry yourself by anticipating problems every day, you’ll worry the whole walk long. Dogs? Sod ’em. Just take it as it comes. Go west, middle-aged man, and savour every moment.

Out East
    (Kato Zakros to Kritsa)
    â€˜Blessed is the man that walketh …’
    Psalm 1
    A t eight o’clock on Easter Monday morning I gave my boots a ceremonial dip in the sea, and selected a small pebble from the beach, grey and sea-smoothed, to carry with me for luck. Then I hoisted the pack and set off for the Valley of the Dead. The early April sun struck through the carob leaves, the sky was a stone-washed blue.
    Near the entrance to the gorge a chicken-wire fence ran beside the path. Beyond it, dusty terraces rose up the hillside. A small hand-painted notice hanging by a dilapidated wire gate said, ‘Minoic Palast Zakros’. The gate was locked, the whole place deserted. A large hole in the fence invited goats, dogs and passers-by to try their luck within. It was a characteristic introduction to a Cretan archaeological site – and the Minoan Palace of Zakros is one of the richest and best in an island laden with magnificent and still only half excavated treasures, an island that could well be styled the cradle of European civilisation.

    Cretans developed their own version of their native history thousands of years before a British archaeologist named Arthur Evans began to excavate a little knoll in the Iraklion suburb of Knossos at the turn of the 20th century. The Cretans