“There it is,” he said. “The entrance to Hades.”
He was afraid to stop his engine, declaring it was a devil to start again, but he would steer in circles until I got back. So I dived in and made for the cave which yawned like the lopsided upper jaw of a whale (the lower jaw being submerged), about thirty feet above the sea. As I swam inside a number of swallows flew out and I could see their little nests clinging to the cave walls and the flanks of stalactites. The cave grew much darker as it penetrated the mountain-side, and a couple of bats, which must have been hanging from the roof, wheeled squeaking towards the light. The roof sank lower, and, swimming along the clammy walls, I found a turning to the right and followed it a little way in; but it soon came to a stop. I tried all the way round and swam under water to see if there was a submerged entrance to another sea cave beyond. But there was nothing. The ceiling had closed in to about a foot and a half overhead, as I could touch it now with my hand. The air was dark but under the surface the water gleamed a magical luminous blue and it was possible to stir up shining beacons of phosphorescent bubbles with a single stroke or a kick. Strangely, it was not at all sinister, but, apart from the coldness of the water which the sun never reaches, silent and calm and beautiful. The submarine light from the distant cave-mouth makes an intruder seem, when he plunges phosphorus-plumed into the cold depths, to be swimming through the heart of a colossal sapphire.
I had never imagined the whole of the cave’s floor to be under the sea. None of the legends mention it, though there is not a shadow of doubt that this is the cave through which those famous descents to the Underworld were made. When Aphrodite, in a rage, sent poor Psyche here to bring back the mysterious casket which would restore her beauty, Psyche was advised by a friendly tower (grown articulate at the sight of her about to fling herself from his summit), as follows: “The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out of the way place to find. It is on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you’ll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through it and you’ll see a road running downhill, but there’ll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto’s palace. But don’t forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.”[2]
Could the land have tilted here, plunging far under water one of those measureless caverns so common in the Greek mountains that go wavering into the dark mineral for slithering and zigzagging furlongs, along which, with sudden strange draughts blowing one’s taper out, one crawls past organ-pipes and chasms and stone honeycombs, and between stalactites and stalagmites like the molars and wisdom teeth of some tremendous monster on the point of clenching, to arrive at last, deep in the airless mountain’s heart and pouring with sweat as in the hottest of calidaria, at (he stifling shrine of some local, troglodytic and half-wild saint like that of St. John the Hunter on the Acrotiri in Crete), installed to counteract the ancient chthonian demons which dwelt there before Christianity came? An endless grotto from which the Lacedaemonians, knowing whither it led, recoiled in terror? Its mouth might lie drowned and swamped somewhere in the hyaline chasms beneath my water-treading feet; a landslide may have effaced or a boulder sealed it. The damp surrounding walls were seamless and solid. Fortunately, mythology is seldom so literal and the fact that Charon might not have been the first boatman Psyche had to pay on the day of her descent is of no importance. Down there lay the way to the river afloat with ghosts and the horrible three-headed dog (for whom the two sops, like the two coins for the ferryman, were a return ticket), the dim fields and the long sad halls of Persephone; the grey world where the ghost of the mother of Odysseus was wafted again and again from his arms like the shadow of a dream. It was under this very cave that the bereaved Orpheus, making the dread journey in quest of lost Eurydice, lulled the hateful Cerberus to sleep with his lyre; and here that Herakles dragged the hell-dog into the upper air, slavering and snarling (and, it seems to me, soaked to the skin), by its triple scruff.
There is always something about these earthly identifications with Hades that fills one with awe. Lethe, they say, rolls its stream of oblivion near the Syrtes in Africa. The source of the Styx sends its little cascade down the rocks of Mount Chelmos in Arcadia, and I have followed the baleful windings of Cocytus across the Thesprotian plains in Epirus, not far from the deep forested gorge under indomitable Souli where the Acheron falls thundering. (For literary reasons I swam across it victoriously three times.)[3] It is somewhere near here that Odysseus, on the orders of Circe, descended among the shades. The most sinister of all, a few miles from Naples, beside the small gloomy mere of Avernus, is the deep tunnel through the volcanic tufa where the Cumaean Sibyl lived and where, by flickering torchlight, one can see, so far from its Achaean source, a tributary of Styx. It was here that Aeneas made his facile descent. In the meadows near Enna, the Sicilian peasants still point to the spring of Cyane where Pluto opened the earth with a trident-blow to carry Persephone down to his dismal kingdom.
A few strokes carried me round the corner of rock, the roof lifted and the sunlit mouth of the cave beckoned in a brilliant semicircle round which the swallows were still twittering and wheeling. Beyond, in the flashing sunlight, the caique, although it was quite close, looked very small and far away. It was still travelling in a ring, refurrowing its circular wake again and again. Joan sat at the tiller, Panayioti leant against the mast lighting a cigarette. How clear the daylight looked, and how bright the colours! I caught hold of the anchor on the boat’s next circuit and, grasping the shank and putting a foot on the one rusty fluke, took Panayioti’s extended hand and climbed on board. Joan pulled the tiller towards her and the wake uncoiled into a straight southward course. Panayioti offered me a cigarette and lit it with his butt.
* * *
The summit of the peninsula sank steadily as we followed our southward course. At last the trim lighthouse of Matapan appeared and the rocks fell steeply to the cape. At the very moment that we reached it, the engine spluttered and seemed on the point of extinction; but the caique sailed slowly past. Leaning over the edge, it was possible to touch the last sharp edge of rock where it met the water. This quick, rough contact with a geographical feature my finger-tip had often covered on the atlas page was a satisfactory moment, like the nursery ambition of closing one’s fist one day round an actual north pole in the snow. That final jut of barnacled limestone was the southernmost fragment of continental Greece and, except for the Andalusian rocks below the flat Moorish roofs of Tarifa beyond the Pillars of Hercules, of Europe too. All the islands lying further south—though nothing actually intervened between this point and the desert—were scattered Greek outposts and skirmishers on the road to Africa and Asia; this was the phalanx-tip. These are simple pleasures.
A few feet further along, the lighthouse keeper was sitting on a rock fishing with rod and line. He looked surprisingly neat and sedate for his lonely promontory. We were sailing so close that he only just managed in time to pluck his line clear. His face lit up.
“What news?” he shouted. “Ti nea?”
“Good,” we shouted. “All good. Ola kala!”
“Order and Quietness,” Panayioti supplemented. “Taxis kai isychia!”
“May God be glorified,” he answered. Taking a pear out of his haversack, he put it back and chose a better. We were well past him now but the pear sailed through the air and alighted as though by magic in Panayioti’s hand. Then he stood up to throw two more which fell safely into the bottom of the boat. “Go towards the Good!” he shouted as he settled down again to his fishing. Joan pushed the tiller to port and haltingly we sailed along over the remaining half a dozen yards which turned us north-east into the Gulf of Laconia.
Away to the east we could discern the dim outlines of the Elaphonisi—Deer Island—and of Cythera, the birthplace not only of Aphrodite but of
Lafcadio Hearn, both hovering on the water as insubstantially as puffs of pale blue smoke: between them and Cape Matapan lay an extent of water which one would have thought (and thought, it seems, wrongly) no cockcrow could ever span. The sky and the sea were a single pale blue and only these wraiths of islands hinted the whereabouts of the far-away horizontal border, until the eye, travelling upwards, could discern high above that invisible horizon a yet frailer ghost: the long sierra of the Laconian peninsula in a faint and hair-thin seismograph climbing and falling and climbing again across the sky, and dying away northwards at last on its aerial journey to the main body of the Peloponnese.
Here and there as soft as a feather hung the suggestion of a salient, the thread of a celestial ravine descending a little way and vanishing into the sky on which, half-way to the burning zenith, that whole imponderable range was afloat. It died away long before one could follow the drop of its southern extremity to Cape Malea. Behind the two transparent islands, the sea and the sky melted together in the vague and luminous unity of a painted Chinese background. There in the blue haze, circled by tempest-haunting birds, lay the terrible Cape whose storms almost dashed the ships of Menelaus and Ajax, and those of many later seamen, to fragments. The storms of Malea carried Odysseus clean off his course, past Cythera and away for days till he stepped on to the island where—(ah, where?)[4]—the Lotus-Eaters lived. At the beginning of the last century an anchorite had his hermitage on the very tip and lived off the alms of passing sailors.
Scarcely a wave had rocked the St. Nicholas as she rounded Matapan but many a ship has been smashed on those sharp rocks. The faltering engine died with a gasp and we were becalmed. A sluggish current carried us slowly northwards and while Panayioti laboured at the engine—promoting, again and again, brief velleities of action that petered out in a cough—we toiled with poles fending the caique’s bright timbers off the sharp peninsular rocks.
Hours passed and ashore all shade vanished as though it were a liquid whose few pools among the rocks the sun of noon had quite dried up. We anchored and waited, with the sail hanging dead, for the summer wind. Even swimming round the boat and lying on the decks or the rocks, the lapse of time and the merciless triumph of the sun began to grow oppressive. It must have been for this afternoon wind that Cephalus, hot with hunting and stretched on the shores of Thessaly, called with such longing that poor Procris, hidden in a brake, thought it was a rival’s name and met her death. But no wind came, and at last it was a dapper caique, the St. George of Piraeus bound for Kalamata, which, late in the afternoon, picked us up and carried us, several miles off her course, to the bay of Porto Cayo. Panayioti, besides having paid for last night’s dinner, tried to refuse all payment as he had not been able to drop us where he had promised. This time, fortunately, we won.
Porto Cayo is a beautiful but rather mournful bay, a deep inlet scooped from the eastern slope of the peninsula, corresponding to Marmari on the western shore, the steep saddle between forming the isthmus that links Cape Matapan to the Mani. It was on the high rocks between here and the cape that the temple of Poseidon had stood, on the emplacement of one to Apollo in Mycenaean times. It was the central shrine of the Spartans, an inviolable sanctuary for anyone on the run and the seat of an oracle. It was also a great meeting place for the elders of the cities of Laconia and one of several shrines in Greece where the souls of the dead could be summoned by their slayers and placated by sacrifice. Marble slabs found among the ruins prove that human sacrifices were not unknown. Pausanias—not the historian and geographer but the victor of Plataea—was starved to death here in the temple when the Spartans discovered his secret intelligence with Xerxes.[5] It was probably, as we have seen, destroyed by the pirates of Cilicia. Little remains, and many fragments and memorial slabs from here and Kyparissos are scattered in the neighbouring villages. Up the steep northern flank stretch the ruins of an enormous Turkish for-tress, built at the nadir of Maniot fortunes at the same time as Kelephas. It was the scene of hard-fought Maniot triumphs over the Turks during the reign of Zanetbey: actions commanded by the great Lambros Katsonis and by the father of that Odysseus Androutzos who was later to share a cave near Delphi with Trelawny, while in Missolonghi, down the coast, Byron lay dying.
It is called Porto Cayo either from Porto Quaglio of the Venetians or a Port aux Cailles of the Franks for the surrounding rocks are the last place where the quails, migrating south in thousands, alight before flying off to Crete and to Africa. I have seen the fringes of their departing hosts further east in the Cyclades, and of another mass departure, that of the storks, in the Dodecanese. These are prone to hug the Asian coasts, huddling at night in vast unwieldy encampments on every available tree, fidgeting and shifting all night long until at daybreak they spread their wings again and sail away south in straggling interminable armadas. They set off from southern Poland and the Ukraine gathering contingents in Bukovina and Bessarabia and Transylvania and all the Balkans and Greece until, craning their necks towards the flat roofs of Arab houses, they benight the air. The western route, from Austria and Germany and Alsace Lorraine to the coasts of Portugal, lies over the straits of Gibraltar; once across, they disperse in companies to become the roof-guests of Arabs and Berbers and the Atlas tribesmen. Their shaggy nests, meanwhile, are left all winter long to be blown about by the winds of Europe and filled with snow on many a roof-top and belfry and minaret. The cranes I have never seen but Cretan shepherds have told me of that endless caravan lasting for hours stretching beak to tail from one edge of the sky to the other so high above Mt. Ida as to be almost out of sight, but accompanied by a strange unearthly sound like a far-away conversation; all, it used to be thought, heading for the forests of Central Africa to re-engage the pygmies, who are waiting for them with full quivers and, according to Aristotle, astride goats, in their never-ending war.
The stupor of a lagoon overhung this gulf. There are a few houses widely scattered, and salt and apathy seem to have eroded their dwellers. The Mani, in the accounts of many travellers and by the Greeks themselves, is reported to be mistrustful of strangers; though once their affections have been tried, the same sources declare, they grapple them to their souls. This was the first time I had seen a trace of this initial mistrust. It took a long time and some languid and sulky bargaining, quite out of tune with the normal friendly game, to find a man with a mule to take our gear to some pleasanter village inland. Each time that we protested against the outrageous price he suggested, he shrugged and made as though to drive off, and when we had to give in, without another word he struck the mule’s rump a savage blow with his stick and let out a string of oaths as though the beast were standing proxy for these foreign disturbers of his gulf-side vacancy. Greek manners to strangers are so good—a hundred times better and more friendly than anywhere else—that these rare exceptions are disproportionately distressing. All four of us (except perhaps the mule) set off up the steep stream bed in a rage, cursing the thistles and cascading pebbles at each arduous step.
When we reached the saddle and sat on the stones to cool off these bad humours began to disperse. The mule and its churlish owner disappeared round a curve of the mountain-side and left us to gaze down at the beautiful bay of Marmari; for we were on the western slant once more, high on the side of the Kakovouni whence the sun had poured that morning. A fair-haired girl climbed the path towards us carrying a lamb slung over her shoulders and round her nape, fore and hind feet held in either hand in the manner of many archaic statues. She sat down still holding the lamb and the friendly inquisition began. Where did we come from? Was that our mule that had passed? How much had we paid for it? We told her and she exclaimed with a commiserating laugh that we had been robbed. Where were we heading for? We said that we didn’t know; any of the villages inland from which we could continue up the east coast next day. She got up and readjusted her burden. “You must come and stay in my father’s house,” she said, “in Vatheia, a big village about half an hour away. We live in a tower.”
Ahead of us as we rounded the outcrop of mountain a long backbone of rock advanced westward from the massif, dipped, and then rose in a high bluff to sink through loop after widening loop of olive and corn terrace to the sea and then melt into the westward-reaching coast that slanted away under familiar villages to Yeroliména and Cape Grosso. The wide ridge was jagged with broken towers like the spikes along an iguana’s back and as it swept upwards to the bluff they spread and climbed with it, growing in number and height. An angular stook of towers was rooted in a cloud of cactus and olive, ending on the brink of the steep fall of the ledges and their many round threshing floors where the horses and mules, shrunk by distance, rotated like toys. This eclogue world and the brooding castellations unfolded in a flowing and passive enchantment through the tired gold light of the summer evening.
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