The Acropolis by night, without permission

We came into Piraeus in the morning, and there was Athens, six miles off, and the Acropolis above it, and the Parthenon on top, the most famous building in the world. And there was a small boat with a man in it, who informed us that we came from a country with cholera in it, and we would stay on the ship for eleven days, and then go somewhere else. It was the cruellest thing ever said to me by a man in a small boat.

Four of us decided, at dinner, that we had not come four thousand miles to look at the Parthenon through a spyglass. At eleven o'clock we got a boatman to put us ashore on a quiet bit of beach. We went up through the vineyards in the dark. The grapes were ripe, and we were hungry, and I will not pretend we left the vineyards as we found them. A man shouted at us out of the dark in Greek, which I do not speak, and we answered in a way that did not need translating, which was by running.

I have never been more sure of the existence of Greek history than I was that night, with a Greek farmer and his dog chasing me through it.

We got to the top a little after midnight. The gate was locked and there was a guard. We gave the guard a dollar and the gate was no longer locked. And then we were in among it, the columns going up white in the moonlight, and the broken statues lying about in the grass like a battlefield where the soldiers were all marble, and Athens below us asleep. None of us said anything for a long while. It was the best thing on the whole excursion, and it was the one thing the excursion had forbidden.

We got back to the ship at four, with our pockets full of grapes and our boots full of Greece, and nobody ever found out, until now. I would like to say I am sorry about the grapes. I am not. They were very good grapes.