Someone had left a folding camp chair under the trees above the beach and Marcus suggested that we should photograph each other as a record of our expedition. Once we had done this we hit the beach, descending to it by way of a very well-made stone footpath cut into the side of the hillside. The solitary wanderer had vanished, leaving nothing but his footprints along the shoreline. However there was also a red plastic kayak marooned two-thirds of the way up the beach and, some thirty metres offshore, a speedboat was moored. The latter in particular filled us with misgiving, suggesting as it did contact with an outside world that we had walked so far to escape. Was there, we wondered, somewhere up there in the trees, a horde of dope-smoking hippies waiting to ambush us?
Yet even this horrible thought couldn’t mar our delight in the sea, which was gorgeous. The sand beneath our feet shelved gently and softly into mild crystalline shallows. Close to shore and here and there a little further out a dense miasma of pine pollen lay upon the water, tinting it a weird, almost fluorescent shade of yellow. From the beach we swam out past a headland of veined and fractured grey limestone, where we lingered, treading water and remarking on lovely everything was, before returning the way we had come and lying down on the sand to let the sun ramble over us. As we lay there, in contented silence, we became aware of noises in the trees behind us and looked up to see a pair of young Turkish men striding down the beach. One of the men carried a rucksack, while the other untethered the kayak which he proceeded to drag down to the shore. He looked at us as he passed and it was almost as if we could see him thinking.
‘Kabak?’ he shouted at last, waving towards the speedboat.
Laughing at the thought of being ferried back the way we’d come, we shook our heads. We then watched as he paddled the man with the rucksack out to the speedboat, got him aboard, secured the kayak to the mooring and then, turning the engine over, set off across the bay trailing a long, gently purling wake that evolved, within moments, into a sequence of tiny waves that lapped gently at our feet.
The temptation at this point was to set up camp for the day. But knowing we should never be able to look at ourselves in the mirror again if we failed to reach our destination, we reluctantly got dressed and prepared to depart. Before we could leave the beach, however, another man appeared, a genial Turk with a moustache that drooped comically beneath his great hook of a nose and a generous pot belly protruding through the folds of his unbuttoned shirt. We got to talking and our new acquaintance was all smiles as we described our route to Kalabantia; in turn he spoke of having come, over the course of several weeks, all the way from Antalya several hundred kilometres to the east. It had been a long walk, he said, but he had taken his time and enjoyed every step. We left him on the beach, dipping his toes in the sea and eulogising about the virtues of long-distance walking.
The landscape beyond Paradise was wilder, lusher, more genuinely prelapsarian than that which we had encountered previously in our trek. It was also considerably tougher with steep climbs over sloping shoulders of land and descents made tricky by the exposed roots of trees and sharply tilted planes of loose, shifting earth. Inland the cliffs rose vertically against the dour and murky sky, helping to create an atmosphere that was close and oppressive and somewhat haunted; while the aspect to the east was truncated by a tall headland dark with pines – an outlying bastion of the Yediburunlar, or ‘Seven Capes’ – that sloped downward to a shovel-nosed tip extending far out to sea. Somewhat fittingly, as we forged on Marcus began telling me about a cousin of his who was a US Seal and, Marcus said, had done a lot of wild things that included swimming with alligators in Florida. But my friend’s tale faltered and he lapsed into silence, well before the end, as he sought to conserve his breath.
At last we cleared a final rise and our destination appeared below, heralded by the remains of an ancient harbour works half-submerged in the lurid blue-green depths of the sea. A little thrill went through me and Marcus said something that might have been ‘Jesus’. I think we were both a little knocked out by having arrived at last at Kalabantia. While Marcus continued I paused to take photographs of the harbour and the landscape that surrounded it. I then followed him downhill on a steep rough path leading towards the sea.
Well before I got there the ruins began to appear: solitary walls and half-collapsed houses, some in reasonable condition, standing entangled among the greenery. The buildings had arched doorways and some of the walls retained traces of paint. Significantly, many of them looked like they must once have been quite grand – not merely houses, we conjectured, but official buildings of some sort, standing in uneven tiers around a little cove of shingle beach. More ruins lined the waterfront, including the foundations of one structure, right on the beach, that had become engulfed by the conglomerate on which it had once stood. On the terraces roundabout stood olive trees that looked like they had been allowed to run wild – a sign that at some stage Kalabantia had been intensely cultivated. Nothing moved among the ruins and all was silent but for the faint lapping of the sea on the shingle and the grating of cicadas.
It was a fascinating place and I could have spent an age poking about the ruins. But it was after two o’clock and, as Marcus pointed out, if we wanted to be home by nightfall we had better get a move on. Reluctantly, therefore, we started climbing inland in search of the path to Alinca, passing several more ruins including a chamber tomb that bore on its heavy stone lintel an inscription in ancient Greek. There were signs within that someone had used it as a shelter; the walls, of finely worked, ochre-coloured limestone, were blackened by fire around the entrance and painted in one place with a clumsy red heart. Further on we encountered signs of digging around another underground chamber which led Marcus to conjecture upon the possibility that the place had been raided by tomb robbers. It had certainly never been officially excavated.
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