Golding took several decades to realize his dream of visiting Ithaca, and a few months to make his own odyssean journey there by way of Troy.  Many of his descriptions of this and other Greek islands are intoxicating in their brightness and warmth, particularly as one emerges from a long and rather grey, damp northern winter. 

Enjoy the fireworks of broom and gorse, and the bee-buzzing thyme peeking out from under those almost humanly outstretched hands of fig leaves. 

So the car lurched off and up again by stony paths, through rough olive-groves and fields of poor wheat, and everywhere the white and pink and yellow flowers of cistus among the rocks, and gorse and broom exploding like fire-works, and close-cropping thyme, bee-haunted, under the outstretched green hands of the wild fig. 

Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson, 1955), pp. 210-11

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