Later, during the empty midday hours when the deserted street seems to waver beneath the eddies of dust where the land breeze and the sea breeze collide, Lewis took his siesta in the stillness of a kind of solar midnight. Towards five o'clock he went out on to the balcony. Just opposite lay the customs house, its miniature Parthenon front set into the ochre barracks, over which the Greek flag floated, like a sky cut into strips. Beneath the solitary eucalyptus, the proprietor of the only Ford which was for hire (ΦOPΔ) invited his friends to sit on the torn American cloth and to take long, motionless journeys. Donkeys came back from the fields, so laden that only their ears and their hooves emerged from the bundles of olive foliage. Above the leper-house rose a flat blue-patterned moon. "How could the Greeks have lived on these rocky rafts? Was it for these remote and dreary fishermen, for this Southern European Ireland, that the whole of romantic Europe had shed her blood and her ink?" Lewis asked himself. Twice a week he went down to the café to read _Le Journal d'Athènes_, edited in French. There he met officials in white linen and black-rimmed glasses who let their nails grow a yard long to show their contempt for manual labour; the lighthouse keeper who willingly lent him his telescope, out of the end of which he screwed marine panoramas, a water-melon seller, the priest with his alpaca sunshade, bearded to the eyes, his coiled hair streaming with oil, who they said had never converted anything except drachmæ into dollars. There they drank bitter coffee in little metal cups that burnt their fingers, and water so clear that the priest, giving thanks to the blue sky, made the Greek sign of the cross over it. Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it, seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean anæmia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a torpor akin to an agreeable demise. He really began to think that he was dead.