that the great god Zeus had once dispatched two eagles, one flying east and one flying west, to find out where they would meet. They came together at the center
of the earth, Delphi, whose main temple, the Sanctuary of Apollo, contained the domelike boulder Omphalos, there¬after named the "navel of the world." Here east and west met.
He'd parked the Alfa on the roadway down below, and now as he stared up the mountainside, past the conical cypress trees, he could just make out the remains of the stone temple where almost three thousand years ago the priestess, the Delphic oracle, screamed her prophesies. She was a Pythia, an ancient woman innocent of mind who lived in the depths of the temple next to a fiery altar whose flame was attended night and day. There, perched on a high tripod poised over a vaporous fissure in the earth, she inhaled intoxicating gases, chewed laurel leaves, and is¬sued wild, frenzied utterances. Those incoherent sounds were translated by priests into answers appropriate to the queries set before her.
Delphi. He loved its remote setting, its sacred legends. Those stories, in fact, told that the god Apollo had once summoned priests from Crete, the ancient font of culture, to come here to create this Holy of Holies.
Was he about to become a