The shades of evening were obliterating those mountains. Bit by bit the last rearguard of the cicadas had fallen silent. Outside, the desolate spinney of gesticulating ping-pong bats was hardening into silhouette and the sun was disappearing in a sad elaborate pavane over the bare sea. Bare, because the Messenian peninsula had been drawing away westwards to its ultimate cape as we moved down the Mani and now had died away. Due west of the window the sea ran unencumbered for hundreds of miles in a straight line, until, just missing the southernmost rocks of Sicily, it broke on the far-away Cartha-ginian coast. I watched the conflagration die in a suitable mood of sunset melancholy, that affliction of northern people in the Mediterranean. Sonnenuntergangstraurigkeit! It was a sudden feeling of exile and strangeness and of the limitlessness of history which left these Maniots untouched.
Their discourse of livestock reminded me all at once of the last injunctions of George Katsimbalis in the Plaka before leaving Athens, “...dirges, yes, wonderful dirges! And I believe they have extraordinary bullfights! Des corps à corps! They’re all tremendously strong fellows with biceps like this,” his eyes became twin beads of urgency as he extended his thumb and fingers like gauging calipers agape to their utmost; “they catch hold of them by the horns and wrestle with them for hours, tiring them out—the bulls are tremendous brutes—and then with a sudden twist of their arms,” George’s fists, grasping ghost-horns, described two brisk semi-circles, “they whirl the whole bull round in mid-air, yes, in mid-air—crac!—and bring it down flat on its back in a cloud of dust!”
I asked the Nyklian and the old men what they knew about wrestling with bulls in the Mani; about tavromachia...? There was a bewildered pause.
“Wrestling with bulls?” one of them said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Never,” the other said.
“For one thing,” said the Nyklian, “there are no bulls in the Mani.”
“No cows either,” said one of the old men.
“Not even a calf,” said the other.
“Or a tin of bully beef,” said the beautiful girl.
“In fact the only horned animals in the Mani, except the goats,” whispered the old man beside me (a bachelor, whom some years in the tin mines of Lavrion in the nineties had endued with a tang of obsolete urban sophistication), “are the husbands.” With a thumb like a fossil, he indicated his neighbour whose ravaged gums parted to allow a thin wheeze of tickled laughter to escape,[4] and everyone began to laugh. Quietly at first, and then the idea of the phantom bulls began to grow on us. “Bulls indeed!” The dark room was soon ringing with hilarity. “Bulls in the Mani!” One of the old men leant forward in a horn-grasping posture, “The very idea...” The girl filled the glasses again, holding her plaits back and laughing happily. Tears of laughter had begun to flow by now. “Plenty of pigs!” said one of the old men. “Yes, we could wrestle with pigs,” said the other, mopping a rheumy eye. The Nyklian policeman lifted his glass and said:
“Here’s to the bulls of the Mani, the best breed in Greece.”[5]
[1] It is also a local name for the Taygetus, so it might be a kind of spirit of the range.
[2] Taxiarch, in the Greek army, is the rank of brigadier. In orthodox hagiography, it is the epithet of the Archangel Michael, the commander of the Heavenly Host.
[3] The strange first digit is the symbol for 6, not a terminal sigma. The preceding inverted apostrophe makes it 6000. It is also the Byzantine abbreviation for the combined letters sigma and tau....
[4] Jokes like this, I have noticed, are only risked in regions where such a suspicion is unthinkable. In the feuds of the Mani, infidelity or questions of female honour are the rarest of all casus belli, in the same way that blasphemous oaths and profanity are always most prevalent in communities where religious belief and practice are unchallenged.
[5] In point of fact, George Katsimbalis may have been nearer the truth than my interlocutors. The association of the Mani and bullfighting was implanted in his mind by the brilliant short story “Petrakas” by Spilio Passayanni, himself a Maniot, describing just such an encounter.
7. DARK TOWERS
THE DEEP Mani road still hobbled on for a few miles, the cratered and rock-strewn surface becoming more lunar in aspect with each advancing furlong. We got a lift along it next morning in a brittle-looking lorry full of water melons for the thirsty Maniots. The three young fruiterers, with tango moustaches and side-whiskers, plastic belts, bi-coloured shoes and coloured combs projecting from their hip pockets, seemed queerly townish after the rough-hewn peninsulars. A skittish little celluloid can-can dancer jerked to and fro on a string before the driver; the other two, buried to the waist in dark green footballs, clutched the sides to avoid being unhorsed, groaning a mánga song about the last tram rattling through the rainy streets of Athens. The road petered out into a stony footpath. Half a dozen mules were waiting, and the three fruiterers unloaded their wares with the skill and speed of Rugby-forwards passing, then drove off waving towards the delights of Gytheion or Kalamata. A muleteer took our stuff, promising to leave it at a kapheneion in Yeroliména where we could collect it next day, and the cavalcade set off in a column of dust. The grooves of chariot wheels over these rocks are an indication that transport facilities have declined since ancient times. On the foothills of the Taygetus stood the villages of Vamvaka and Mina spiky with Nyklian towers, the latter dominated by one immense campanile. But we took a lane running seawards steeply down to the derelict village and the little bay of Mezapo.
This small combe whose rocky sides were asprawl with the cactus-choked shells of earthquake-shattered towers was deserted except for two half-naked men sifting gravel (who knocked off for a cigarette and a short chat about politics; both were eager Royalists) and a woman flinging coloured rugs onto the sea: floating parallelograms of lemon yellow, brick red and magenta, which, up to her thighs in water, she was thrashing with a heavy stake. A little boat lay beached and after a search through the ruins we discovered a haggard boatman sitting gazing at an enormous fish about a yard and a half long which was stretched before him on the pebbles. Great gashes showed where the head and the dorsal fin had been cut off. He said it was a palamida—a kind of tunny—but the head, which he said he had thrown away, had been severed so far back that the awful suspicion that it might have been a shark flitted through our minds. It was steely blue on the back, a colour which faded through paling gun-metal to a white belly. As he was off to Pyrgos to sell it that afternoon he told his daughter and son to row us across to the Tigani. The girl was twelve and the boy eight and both looked half-wild. We asked her about sharks. After a great deal of hesitation she told us, with her eyes protruding as she rested on her heavy scull, that a vast fish had been landed last year and when they opened it, a man’s hand and an army boot were discovered inside. Asked if any had appeared since, she shut her eyes and flung back her head in a shocked negative.
The Tigani is a spit of rock like the handle of a frying pan (which is what the name means) stretching from the other side of the bay three miles from Mezapo and expanding at the end to a great high rock. This is covered with a ruin: the Castle of the Mani, the Maina, or in French, le Magne—from which the whole region takes its name. It was built by William II de Villehardouin, fourth Frankish prince of the Morea, in 1248, and was one of the three great fortresses defending his domain of the south-eastern Peloponnese; the other two were Mistra and Monemvasia. All three fell to the Byzantines after their crushing victory over the Frankish chivalry at Pelagonia and became bastions of the Byzantine Despotate of Mistra. The connecting panhandle is a filament made of wicked cones and serrated jags of rock pocked every few yards with salt pans. The rocks felt as sharp as razor-blades through our rope soles. A shadowless, desolate wilderness. In this pitiless glare, two tatterdemalion and barefoot women, a mother and daughter in antique straw hats as wide as umbrellas, their faces burnt black by the sun and eyebrows and tangled hair caked white with dried brine, were gathering rock-salt
in broad wicker baskets. They worked here all summer, they said, and sometimes in the winter too, sleeping in the huge cave by the chapel of the Hodygytria (Our Lady of Guidance), where there was a little spring of brackish water for them to drink and dip their paximadia. It wasn’t much of a life, the mother said. How much could they sell the salt for? It was the equivalent, in drachmae, of sixpence an oka. And how much could they gather in a day? On good days, she said, a bit more than an oka; on bad days, rather less. It all depended. Then she threw back her head and let out a laugh of genuine amusement in which there was not a trace of bitterness.
They led us nimbly on their bare feet from rock to rock until we reached a shallow, stepped ramp for cavalry leading up the bluff of stone to the sally-port of the castle. How horses can ever have made their way across that jagged wilderness remains a mystery. Most of the walls are down, scarcely an arch remains and the maze of corridors and courtyards are now a vast chaos of large limestone blocks chopped from the sides of the rock on which the fortress stands. Countless wells sank to deep cisterns, one for each day of the year, said the woman. The castle must have been colossal. She told us that it had once been owned by a beautiful young princess; but a powerful king came with many ships and captured it after a long siege. The princess, rather than fall into his hands, mounted a white horse, spurred it to a gallop and leapt over the parapet, down into the sea below, where the horse, breasting the waters of the bay, bore her to safety.... With her forefinger, the woman outlined a round slot in the rock which was dented there by one of the horse’s hind hooves as he leapt into the void.
Another legend, embodied in verse, tells of a mysterious potentate, Mavroeidis, the Black-Shaped One, who brought a “five-times” beautiful princess here against her will, to make her his wife. He fortified the castle with steel and iron from the country of the Franks, adorned it with crystal from Venice and with pearls and marble from Constantinople, filled the tanks with glittering goldfish and imprisoned the princess in a tower of bright glass. But Charon galloped up on his black horse and challenged the castellan. They fought in full armour on a steel threshing floor. The sinister duel went on for hours until at last the Black-Shaped One was down. Charon compelled him to bring the girl from her glass tower and pointed ominously along the coast to the last wave-beaten cape. There, he cried, lay the path; he was taking them to his cavern in the cliff side. It led to the Underworld and the land of Tartarus where the dead lived: a pitch-dark warren hung with cobwebs, all its branching caves softly padded with the tresses of beautiful maidens. They were never seen again.[1] (Taenarus, the ancient entrance to Hades, lies about fifteen miles from here as the crow flies.)
At the extremity of the peninsula the castle wall jutted above a sheer drop in a rampart cloudy with cystus and thyme and overhung with swags of elderflower that filled the air with a scent one might expect more readily at Bodiam or Pevensey than among the battlements of this Grecian headland. Lizards darted over the hot slabs and froze at gaze in stances of arrested action. It was odd to think of Frankish sentinels shouting the alarm here, at the sight of Byzantine or Saracenic galleys, in the patois of Normandy and Champagne; of the fair-haired garrison hauling mangonels to the battlements under the fluttering lion rampant of the Villehardouin.... To the north-west hung the phantoms of the Messenian Cape and to the north cape after cape of the Mani followed each other, each growing dimmer in a succession of uptilted table mountains. The sea blazed with gold from the horizon to the spiked base of the rock, where it was a purplish blue that turned green in the shallows. The rock blades were rimmed with white foam. I threw a stone which took several seconds on its trajectory. It fell back almost out of sight so that I had to crane forward like a gargoyle to see it strike the sea, its faint plop startling a cloud of gulls from their ledges; they circled mewing above the slowly expanding disc of white foam.
Back among the salt pans, the woman offered us a drink from their pitcher and a share of their paximadia and dried olives. This little store was hidden on a shadowy ledge along with their shoes. We refused and tried in vain to give them some money for showing us the castle. It was quite impossible. We left them there under their immense hats, growing smaller with each oar-stroke. I often think of them. They are probably scraping for salt among those infernal rocks at this very second.
* * *
We got out of the boat on a lonely, crescent-shaped ledge of rock that almost surrounded a deep blue pool. The children rowed back to their ruined village and we dived out of the blaze of the noonday into the cool world below. It was a blue-green paradise of submarine canyons and grottoes and rock shelves with copses of dark green seaweed. But when, after lying comatose in the sun, we dressed and tried to strike inland again, the rock wall (which had looked so easy from the sea) was unscalable. It was only after wading and scrambling along the shore for half an hour that we could find a way up a slithering landslide that threatened to deposit us into the sea below at every step. At last, panting, thorn-riddled, caked with salt and dust and bitterly regretting the woman’s pitcher of water, we levered ourselves onto the blank Mani again and stumbled up an endless lane of rolling pebbles and ankle-snapping boulders in the stagnant glare. The sun and the sea had unhinged our joints, turned our limbs to lead and our throats to limekilns. “Tell them you’re in a hot place called the Mani, where there is nothing but stones”; the words of the innkeeper’s wife rattled around in our empty brain pans. There was not a tree to relieve the skull-like blankness. The miracle of the afternoon wind had failed; the balloon had not gone up. At last, turning a shoulder of rock, two broken towers came in sight in a clump of prickly pear. Our spirits revived at the thought of water. But, hard as we knocked on their doors, nobody opened; a thing which was all the more strange as a middle-aged man peered at us through the bars of an upper window. So we dragged ourselves from the doorstep and the harrowing trek continued. But at the top of the next switchback of lane the sight below made us wipe the sweat from our stinging eyes and gaze.
On the other side of a hot valley rose a long saddle of rock on either end of which a village was gathered and each village was a long solid sheaf of towers. There were scores of them climbing into the sky in a rustic metropolis, each tower seeming to vie with the others in attaining a more preposterous height: a vision as bewildering as the distant skyline of Manhattan or that first apparition of gaunt medieval skyscrapers that meets the eye of the traveller approaching San Giminiano across the Tuscan plain. But there were no bridges or ships here, no bastioned town wall or procession of cypresses to detract from the bare upward thrust of all these perpendiculars of sun-refracting facet and dark shadow. The tops were sawn off flat, the gun slits invisible. These two mad villages of Kitta and Nomia shot straight out of the rock in a grove of rectangular organ pipes, their sides facing in every direction so that some of the towers were flanked with a stripe of shade, some turned bare and two-dimensional towards the sun, others twisted in their sockets and seeming to present two visible and equal sides, one in light and one in shade, of symmetrical prisms. Nothing moved and in the trembling and fiery light they had the hallucinating improbability of a mirage.
We crossed the intervening ossuary of hillside and stepped inside the nearest town. The canyons of lane that twisted through the towers were empty and silent as though the inhabitants had fled an aeon ago or a plague had reaped them all in an afternoon. And yet there were signs of recent life: a dozen sacks of dried carob-pods in a courtyard, a child’s cart made out of a box and fitted with castors of cotton-reels, a scythe leaning against an iron-studded door. A cat stretched sound asleep along the coping of a wall. Cobbles or slabs of stone alternated with the muffling dust underfoot and tower after tower soared on either hand. The town was empty or locked in catalepsy, paralysed in a spell of sleep which seemed unbreakable. The main square was scarcely larger than a room, and the steep ascending planes of masonry that elbowed it in on all sides lent it the aspect of the bottom of a dried-up well from whose floor sprang
a few motionless mulberry trees. The heat and stagnation, the heavy breathlessness of the air and the warm smell of the dust cast a mantle of utter strangeness over this town. It seemed not Greece at all but a dead city of Algeria or Mauretania that a marauding desert tribe had depopulated and abandoned, vanishing into the Sahara or the Atlas mountains three lustres ago. An admonishing silence hung in the air enjoining the newcomer to walk on tiptoe and laying a finger across his lips.
We soon stopped our vain and sacrilegious tattoo on the shutters of the only shop and settled under a stone loggia in speechless exhaustion. The walls of the little square were whitewashed in a dado several yards high and the worn ledge of a stone seat ran all the way round. Misspelt slogans in lurching black characters across the whitewash cried Long Live the King! Another said long live eternal Greece, and a third, Death to all Traitors. Even the cicadas in this necropolis were silent.
Our torpor was broken at length by the appearance of an old woman in black with a face like a flint. She clicked her tongue in commiseration and padded quickly away, returning with a pitcher and a glass and a plate of prickly pears, saying she had sent her great-granddaughter to rouse the shopkeeper. He arrived, tousled with sleep and repeating, as he unlocked the shutters, that it was a shame we had been made to wait. “In Kitta, too!” he said waving his hand at the towers. “I’m sure it wouldn’t happen to me in London....” I had a vision of his solitary and despairing figure in a mysteriously deserted Piccadilly, squatting with arms akimbo on the steps of Eros’s statue in a heat wave...
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