from Chapter 29

A couple from France makes love on the beach, lit by the stars and a full, smiling moon. The next morning they are found drowned, and he has to be cut loose from her because the water pressure has joined their bodies for all eternity. Old Man Socrates, sitting in the barbershop's only chair, tells this story to Petros and some other men waiting their turn. They click their tongues in unison. "Never trust a hole," Socrates warns. "Get in and get out as soon as you can." After a few moments contemplation, he adds, "And don't let her get her arms around you. Do it by the back, friends." The men nod gravely as Socrates lifts his hips out of the barber's chair in a thrusting motion and the barber nicks his throat. At that very moment Socrates' wife, Kyria Roula, pops her head into the barber shop and orders him to come straight home after he is done. "Yes, my joy," he responds obediently, then turns the conversation to politics, a safer topic.

Ariadne hears of these incidents constantly but can never find any proof that they actually happened. There is no local newspaper, only word of mouth, and the clippings from the Athenian tabloids that Karina's mother insists on sending her fallen daughter are hysterical and uninformative. "The Island of Sodom and Gomorra," their headlines declare. The articles that follow express outrage at the nakedness and sex on Nysas and nothing more. "Only anomalies go there," Karina's mother screams in her letters, then submits a self-righteous rant to the editor of an Athens paper, writing about her own daughter as if she has been kidnapped by a cult. Because of such letters, even more anomalies flock to Nysas.