Durrell subverts the colonial mindset that allows him to define and delineate a foreign landscape for foreign readers, while nonetheless engaging in an attempt at reconciliation—a pilgrimage—between his various adopted ‘homes.’ Focusing on “Oil for the Saint,” I argue that a close examination of the physical landscape of Corfu shows that Durrell ‘dupes’ the trusting reader into a series of misconceptions. By performing the role of the colonial traveler meekly fulfilling his conciliatory pilgrimage to an imagined home and real shrine, Durrell’s narratorgives a disturbingly exact rendition of the tourist-reader’s expectations of such a voyage and place. In so doing, the text subverts the reader’s easy acceptance of the travel narrative as a means to ‘knowing’ a place or people, while it leaves the reader with an uncanny perception of himself or herself mirrored in the foreign ‘deus loci.’