In 1976 Peter Adam took Lawrence Durrell author of several Greek Island books, back to Greece. Their journey took them to Corfu, Rhodes, Crete and Hydra. Durrell has often said that words alone cannot express the true nature of Greek landscape and village life. In this film he pushes aside the debris of the present and guides us through the Greece of his youth. In a sequel to the Greek Spirit of Place, Peter Adam takes Lawrence Durrell back to the setting of his four famous novels. The journey starts in Alexandria and follows the Nile to Upper Egypt, to Aswan and Abu Simbel. Durrell revisits the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrun, the oasis of Fayum, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. He talks about his beliefs, his craft and his experiences as a writer, and evokes Egypt's two landscapes - the desert and the great river.
'The Greece that I knew as a young and aggressive poet has changed. Nevertheless I feel there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps recreate a little bit of the Greece which is not finished yet and gone for good, and whose ghost still rises up to afflict me from time to time. 'I would like to recall those golden years and to throw open the many-coloured background of Greece's own history so that the landscape may be evoked before the eyes of the viewer who is not free to touch with his own hands or to feel the beauty of Greece.'
'After 30 years, I return to Egypt to see again places which, either from a literary or a persona) point of view. meant something to me or marked me or moved me. and to see what traces, if any, remain of that extravagantly coloured world I painted in The Alexandria Quartet.'
