Too tired to eat anything, we slept like the dead, then sent for tea and toast and some wonderful Asia Minor Welsh rabbit came up as well.My limbs having turned to stone, I slunk off in a taxi to a nearby hammam and lay dissolving on the marble slabs, watching the daylight fade beyond the colander-perforations in the cupola. Meanwhile, a burly masseur was slowly taking my body to pieces and then assembling it again by trampling up and down my spine like a processional elephant in a durbar Outside, dusk was falling. The Hellespont is much warmer than the Bosphorus, which flows, after all, straight out of the Black Sea, where the Danube, the Dniestr, the Dniepr, the Donetz and the Don pour into it from the west and the north; but these frigid Euxine waters are warmed by their torpid sojourn in the Sea of Marmara before they dash south-west through the narrows and into the Mediterranean.Everyone agreed that our day had been the last chance this year. I was cold to touch when I got back on board, but didn’t feel it. The attempt would have been no good in the evening: at my pace, dark would have overtaken us; and the next day turned out cold, windy and overcast with an angry ruffle a-midstream. But, going by the rather blurred photocopy of the mid-19th-century Admiralty chart in the British Archaeological School in Athens, it may perhaps have been a mile farther south, at the mouth of a stream called Suandere – which must be the same as Sogandere (the Turkish g with a diacritic on top is hardly pronounced at all).Thank heavens, the sea had been warm.

Sevki said the poplar-clump was called Havuzlar – “pools” – and it is marked on the Admiralty chart as Avuzlar. Suddenly the boat slowed and Joan shouted “You’ve done it!”; I dropped my legs; my toes touched pebbles; and soon, a couple of hundred yards from a wooded headland and a row of poplars along a valley, I was stumbling into Europe among shingle and boulders slippery with green weed.Splashing back into the water and hauled on board, I drank some tea brewed by the fisherman, then swallowed a slug of whisky brought by Joan. It was a joyful moment, and we headed full-tilt for Canakkale and Asia, where Xan andMagouche were waiting with champagne: they had been following our course with field-glasses from a balcony, like Zeus and Hera on Tenedos.I had reached the other side at 11.55 am, after swimming two hours and 55 minutes: I’m still not quite sure of the distance, but I think it was about three miles, perhaps more. (The abrupt emergence of this deep-flowing and furtive north-east current is shown on the chart by little arrows like air-gun darts all pointing upstream.)I tried swimming on my back but, with the contradictory behaviour of the water, the steamers’ wash and, I suppose, by now, the noon-tide waves, I couldn’t see where I was going, so thrashed on as before, very tired, and in a sort of trance.

I felt Joan might be sitting on her hands to avoid wringing them, and churned on. The Asian shore had faded into the distance, yet Europe still looked distressingly far; but, straight ahead, a row of bathing-huts slid by, quite clear in every detail, followed by a shuttered and derelict-looking hotel; then, quite suddenly, there was nothing at all except a hill-side, some pine trees and a dry torrent-bed.Abruptly and bewilderingly, the coast was in full retreat. The channel was widening fast and I had alarming visions of being carried down the Hellespont and out into the Aegean between Cape Helles and Kum Kale. Describing this reach, the chart says – at least I think it does: it is rather indistinct – “current 4 knots at times”; and, all at once, there was a strong and discernible drift upstream. Seeing our prospective landfalls retreating north one after the other, he asked her how old I was; when she said “sixty-nine”, he looked surprised, nodded with a fatalistic sigh that was half a groan, then backed her up with encouraging cries: was I all right? I was, though rather tired. This was the narrowest and deepest stretch of the whole channel and the vast castle of Kilid Bahr, with its great cylindrical bastions, its flutter of crescent-flags and its two mosques – one with the tall tapering cone of its minaret painted green – were rushing up from the south.Joan told me later that Sevki was disappointed that I didn’t shoot through the stiff midstream current at a lightning crawl; instead, I was advancing at a stately mid-Victorian clergyman’s rate. They are supposed to surface, but they don’t – or only one in every 30 or 40.”)So here I was, floundering across the wake of the Argo, a mile north of Xerxes’ and Alexander’s bridges of boats, only a few leagues from Troy and about a mile south of the point where Leander, Mr Ekenhead and Lord Byron swam across; but too concerned with the current to think about them in more than fitful snatches The giant inscription had coiled upstream and off-stage.

(I mentioned this a few days later to Mr Nuri Birgi, the Turkish Ambassador in London for many years, in his splendid wooden palace on the Bosphorus, and he laughed and said, “Don’t you believe it: they’re Russian submarines, I often hear them out here at Scutari. It suggested the grinding of enormous masses of pebbles and silt many fathoms down. The surface current flows south-west from the Sea of Marmara but, close to either bank, deep under this, two dark and mysterious currents stream out of the Aegean to the north-east, and I thought that the noise, brought about by the narrowing of the Dardanelles, might be the shock of rival alluvia in never-ending collision. It was very sinister, like an echo in a vast dark room underneath. The giant lines of Turkish verse beside him became more legible with every stroke:”Stop O passer-by! This earth you tread on unawaresIs where an age sank”.On the Aegean side, just beyond the watershed, lay Gaba Tepe, the site of Anzac Beach in 1915.Swimming side-stroke, I began to notice a strange hissing and fluctuating sound under my left ear. Straight ahead, the flank of the Hill of Kilitbahir was picked out, in the same primeval sgraffito technique as the White Horse at Uffington, with the tall figure of a Turkish soldier on guard over a sacred flame.