This time, however, happy memories have drawn me to Milos, an island of volcanic landscape that was formed in the same way as Santorini, by the sea breaking through the walls of a collapsing caldera, or depression, at the top of a volcano, forming the huge, water-filled bowl where the ferries now come and go. In 1820 one of the world's great works of art, the Venus de Milo, was found in a farmer's field here. What I most remember about Milos, though, is not its famous limbless statue but its beaches: more than seventy of them, including some of the most unearthly imaginable; one of these, Rivari—although it gets only a brief mention in guidebooks—I recall more fondly than any other.

In Adamas, the harborside port town, I contract with a taxi driver to take me to three beaches. The driver is enthusiastic about my plan, probably because of the considerable distance it involves. "Sarakiniko! The beach that looks of yogurt," he says, no doubt since most of it is not a beach at all but smooth white rock appearing to be a creamy concoction that solidified in a giant mixing bowl. "Papafragas! Ah, the tunnel of love," he chuckles, in a man-to-man kind of way, referring to the flooded, fjordlike passageway leading from the beach to the sea. "Rivari? Yes, I know," he says, the slightest shadow flickering across his face before he recovers with a cheery, "First time to Milos?"

As we drive north from Adamas, a workaday village, I reflect that Milos is an unusual island not only because of its landscape but because ages-old mining operations, still going on, have long dampened the tourist trade. That dynamic is changing now but only slowly, as a small inventory of basic hotels and restaurants continues to grow.

"It reminds me of Santorini ten or fifteen years ago," says a rare American visitor who is sunning himself, monk seal-like, on the white rocks at Sarakiniko. "You arrive at two in the morning and somebody will find a room for you—a simple room, but a room." Such untouched authenticity is just what I find attractive about the island.

The beaches themselves at Sarakiniko and Papafragas are insignificant patches of sand made memorable, as are many of the beaches on the island, by their setting amid rocks contorted into such weird shapes by the volcanism that they appear to be from somewhere else in the solar system. How ironic, I think, that on an island associated with one of our greatest artistic achievements, the really impressive stuff was sculpted by an altogether different hand.

Rivari is way around on the south side of the harbor, and when we arrive at the pleasant but undistinguished sandy stretch, my driver can refrain himself no more and asks, "Why here?"

I tell him this story.

Almost ten years ago, I arrived on Milos with a small tour group. We were to depart Adamas aboard a yacht for a cruise to Santorini. As we were preparing to set sail, however, a storm came up. It was not a meltemi, the summer wind that blows hard from the north, but instead a much rarer sirocco, an African wind blowing fiercely from the south.