After a time I opened one of my own and saw that the shadows had begun to broaden on the eastern corrugations of the little island and fell to thinking of the innumerable islets scattered round the coasts of Greece: some bearing the ruins of a fort or a shrine, some scattered with un-shepherded flocks during the summer months, some with a fisherman’s hut or two, others with a prison or a hermit or a lonely skite with a couple of shaggy monks half mad with isolation; some utterly deserted. Last of all I thought of Gavdopoula, a satellite islet of St. Paul’s Gavdos of a few pages back, and began to laugh. Joan, half asleep a few yards away in the same beachcombing attitude, wondered what I was laughing at, so I told her a story I had heard from my Cretan guide during the war.
The tiny island was acquired long ago by a Sphakian family called Seiradanis. This region of Crete—Sphakia—was one of the few places, like the Mani, to remain independent of the Turks, thanks to the wild nature of the country and the bravery of the Sphakians. The Seiradanis family, before and since, played a prominent rôle in this struggle, but, in the 1821 war, one of them turned traitor, and, like Ephialtes and Ganelon, sold the pass. The result was invasion and slaughter and the Turks rewarded their ally with the gift of this minute island, seven leagues south of Crete; it has remained in the family ever since and they sometimes pasture their flocks there. Shortly after the last war began, one branch of the family was seriously perturbed by the almost permanent drunkenness of their grandfather; so they marooned him on Gavdopoula near a spring with a plentiful stock of food, hoping to sober him up and change his ways. When they came with a little caique to pick him up, a reformed character they hoped, at the end of two months, they were astounded and horrified to find the old greybeard spreadeagled under a shady rock beaming happily and unregenerately, and still, exactly as they had left him, dead drunk. The first thing he had seen when they had sailed away (he told them between hiccups) had been a black dot on the horizon which floated toward him across the Libyan sea growing steadily larger. When it was close to the land it turned out to be an enormous barrel which soon came to rest on the shingle. It was half-full of Italian wine, probably from some ship recently sunk off Cyrenaica. In a moment he was rolling it up the beach. He managed to site it with the bung strategically placed over a basin-like hollow in a rock. Every half-hour or so he would fill the hollow and lap up the wine like a goat, as he said. “So—hic—you see, lads,” he concluded, waving a horny forefinger, “God and the All-hic-Holy Virgin were on my side.” It was incontrovertible. Back they sailed and the old man finished his life happily and unhindered in the tavernas of Sphakia....
We left this Argonautish bay with reluctance. It resembled most convincingly a brief anchorage on any of the great mythological voyages, where a shipload of heroes might have landed and sacrificed to Poseidon and banqueted and wrestled and run races, perhaps buried a dead shipmate and marked the place with an oar stuck in the shore and sailed away. As Seferis says in his poem:[1] “The water left on their hands the memory of a great happiness.” This country, even after years of familiarity, often calls forth these sudden feelings of naïve and Marvellian gratitude: What wondrous life is this I lead?
Cypresses and poplars fluttered beside the climbing path above the oleanders of the torrent bed. All this random green seemed frivolous, reckless, and miraculous after the harsh regions to which our eyes had become attuned; but beyond it the stern Biblical rocks soared through the evening air. In the middle of them half a mile away a goatherd, with his flock scattered about him like cave-paintings, waved his crook in salutation. How large and distinct he looked! Almost as disturbing as the gigantic Eye of my imagination. This rocky world has the property of making all look momentous, for all is isolated, nothing congregates, everything becomes archetypal and, as it were, symbolic of its own essence, so that the landscape is very sparsely and, probably because of this, over-significantly furnished with archtrees, archthistles, archcactuses, archgoatherds and archgoats. The portrayal of this momentousness and solitude is one of the triumphs of Byzantine mosaic and ikon-painting. Animate and inanimate objects, on ikon and church wall and mountain-side, have the same spiritual effect, the same mystical and animistic aura of immanence. No wonder that Greeks of all centuries have populated these hills with a magical fauna and a dramatis personae and a pantheon.
This light, of which I have talked so much, has many odd foibles and conjuring tricks. One of these is the lens-like function of the air. All the vapours that roam the Italian atmosphere and muffle the outlines of things are absent here. A huge magnifying glass burns up the veils of distance, making objects leagues away leap forward clearly as though they were within arm’s length. The eye shoots forth a telescopic braille-reading finger to discern the exact detail and texture of a church, a wood or a chasm ten miles off. Things in the distance co-exist on equal terms with those hard by; they have a proprietary and complementary share in the patterns that immediately surround one. A distant cordillera completes a curve begun by the vein along the back of a plane-tree leaf, a far-off belfry has the same intensity as a goat’s horn a few yards away, a peninsula leans forward to strike the stem of a dried-up thistle at right angles. Mountain ranges that should melt with the heat-haze and recession, lean forward and impend till one is at a loss to say whether a hill is a small nearby spur or a far-away Sinai. Perpendiculars only exist in walls and towers and tree trunks—unless the trees are olives, in which case they unite and revolve like dancers or contortionists—and the only horizontal is the horizon. The sea stands bolt upright and the sun’s track across it is not a highway that retreats with the curve of the globe’s surface, but, till sunset flattens it and lays it on its back again, a blazing pagoda. At this late afternoon hour, the hard-hearted mountains turn golden and lavender, the valleys become ground porphyry and powdered serpentine. Where the weathered limestone has fallen away in a landslide, the virgin rock glows bright orange as though infernal forges were at work within. The light also performs several simultaneous and contradictory acts; it chisels and sharpens everything so that the most fluid curve can be broken up at once, by a shift of focus, into an infinity of angles; it acts like an X-ray, giving mineral and tree and masonry an air of transparence; and it sprinkles the smoothest and most vitreous surface with a thin layer of pollen like the damask on a moth’s wing. The stones and walls, as well as staying warm to the touch long after the light has left, are absorbent to the light; they glow as if lit from inside with a wick that burns down very slowly as darkness deepens. The strangest phenomenon of all occurs with the shadows. What little there is at noon is grey and dead, and when the colours revive in the afternoon, they are a cool clear blue and archways are curving waterfalls. But in the late evening they outglare the solids that fling them, falling across white walls or grey stone courtyards or the dust of a pathway with an intensity like a magnesium flare, standing from the surfaces that register them in electric-blue and orange and sulphur-green shapes as separately as though they were in high relief or deep intaglio. The motionless trench dug by a tree-shadow or the shifting and instantaneous bird-shaped cavity that crosses a terrace looks far more real than the tree trunk or the swooping bird which they echo; both of these the light, by comparison, has immaterialized. It is probably because of all this that a strong mystical and sentimental significance pervades the actual surface of the earth, the rocks and the stones, of Greek mountains. The adjective theobadiston, “trodden by the feet of gods (or God)” in ancient Greek and in the Byzantine liturgy, comes to mind. In an old ballad which describes a quarrel between two great mountains, free Olympus is held to be good because it is Klephtopatiméno, “trodden by klephts,” as opposed to the Tourkopatiméno, the Turk-trampled, the shameful flank of wretched Ossa.
These characteristics have a strange effect on the Greek landscape. Nature becomes supernatural; the frontier between physical and metaphysical is confounded.
All the evening phenomena were at work as we climbed through the groves and the first houses o
f Phlomochori. The shadows cast by the rising moon, shining like a silver fish beyond the network of olive leaves, were crossing swords with those of the sun: so faintly that they might have been made of flimsy material which could be snipped off with scissors and rolled up. A number of hawk-like birds were hovering and wheeling in the air above the village. It was a cloud of gregarious red-footed falcons, great ruin-haunters and birds of prey that thrive on such small quarry as the high-flying insects that abound in the evening. The high watershed soon blocked out the sun and the moon’s shadows and her glimmering light were uncontested among the olive trees and the gathering towers. The warm dust underfoot was succeeded by cobbles and there was a sound of running water. Cigarette-ends glowed in doorways and under the trees and each orange constellation of cigarettes sent out a murmured chorus of greeting.
* * *
These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o’clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of the late afternoon, the evening, and the night.
This night was no exception. There was no inn, but our adoption as guests by a villager for dinner and accommodation occurred as though the hamlet had been long forewarned. There was much affectionate talk under the trees after dinner of British soldiers who had taken refuge here and been fed and hidden by the villagers when the Germans overran Greece. Did we know Sandy, Len, Jack, Sid, Peter, Stanley and Ron, Herbertos and a tall Australian from Adelaide—“o Lophtis”? The tall one? And Spike—Spaïk, o Neozelandos—and Yanni from inside London, the one who was so badly wounded in the arm? “Po, po, po! He was a good boy,” an old woman croaked. “We hid him in our olive grove for two months, and I used to take him eggs and cheese and potatoes. How his arm must have hurt—it had swallowed three bullets, but he was always laughing. We got a doctor for him. He used to call me ‘Ma.’” There was a pleased reminiscent cackle. “They took him off to England by submarine in the end.”
“Not to England,” said the priest gently, “to Egypt.”
“It’s the same thing. To London. He went with the good, poor lad. I wonder how he is in London and if he found his mother and father all right. He had one married sister—she was married to a rich man, an important baker—and one was still free.”
Oddly enough, we did know one of these names. A couple of men from further north in the Mani asked us if we knew an officer who had come in secret to organize rescue parties—O Markos, Captain Marko the Skotzezos, who was captured by the enemy?[2] Indeed we did, and were able to give recent news. Our shares shot up and we basked in pride of friendship as a fresh supply of wine appeared. There had been one more such encounter, but a sadder one, while we were in the Deep Mani. On the way back from the temple of Kiparisso an old man asked us if we had any news of an Englishman called David—a tall chap, who walked across the hills like this—he took a few giant strides—making notes about all the Frankish castles of Greece? Always writing? He had come that way a year or two before the war. It was easy to recognize David Wallace. Here our news was not good. He and all his brothers except one had been killed in the war, David fighting the Germans with a party of guerrillas in Epirus, where he had been parachuted. We told him he had been buried in the churchyard of the little cathedral of Paramythia, where a street had been named after him. The old man crossed himself sadly. “Krima sto pallikari! May the earth rest light on him....”
This was the last night in the rustic Mani. To-morrow we were leaving for Gytheion, at the head of the Laconian gulf. A hint of valedictory sadness hung in the moonlight overhead as I lay, agreeably drugged with wine and padded by half a dozen blankets from the thick layer of newly threshed grain which was spread from parapet to parapet of the flat rooftop. Ruined towers stood all round. A nightingale, a little way downhill among the trees by the stream, made everything seem yet more liquid and fleeting and sad. A nibble on one side of the moon showed that its course was more than half run, but it was still too bright for all but a few undistinguished stars to twinkle dimly in the corners of the sky; they hide themselves, just as Sappho says, when the moon at its full shines over the whole earth. In a few days all the famous constellations and a myriad other stars would be back: steady patterns across which the showers of summer comets fall in long and erratic arcs. How familiar some of them become, in their slow marches across the heavens, from constant sleeping out! One lies there gazing like an astrologer. The fixed North Star, both Bears, the large W of Cassiopeia and the tilted lozenge of Orion with his three-star belt; Greekest and subtlest of all—again, perhaps, because of Sappho—the Pleiades, that fugitive and misty little group that resolves itself into a far-away badminton racket warped by the dew through being forgotten overnight on a vicarage lawn.
The brief night over, it was only a question of standing up. Except for shoes, dressing was done. A small boy playing a flute in a doorway, as much as the sun, had performed the act of rousing. The sun was well over the Laconian peninsula the other side of the gulf, the gulf itself shone pale and new, and the Mani stretched to north and south below us in an imponderable imbrication of stage-wings lightening slightly with each successive cape. The cypresses and poplars and olive trees sent long backward-seeming shadows sloping up the hillside towards us. After coffee and farewells we climbed down through the oleanders along the bed of the brook, swam in the cool waters of the cove, to the island and back, and walked along the coast to Kotronas. We had left our bags here in a kapheneion, the day before. In an hour or two, a steamer would call and carry us up the gulf to Gytheion.
[1] The Argonauts: George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner.
[2] It was Mark Ogilvie-Grant.
19. CASTLES AND THE SEA
IT WAS lucky that Kotronas was such an agreeable haven, for the weekly boat was hours late. They often are. There was another giant fig tree for shade, from one of whose lower branches someone had hung a big synagrida, the fish that kindled the envy of Poor Prodromos, the Villonesque beggar poet of Byzantium, friend, it is said, of the Emperor Alexis Comnène, when, peeping through the window, he saw one stuffed with spices and covered with sauce on the table of a rich abbot....
The waterfront was given over to net-making. One had to walk with care. Strips of filmy russet netting three feet broad were draped a hundred yards along the ground, the fishermen sitting on the ground at one end, stretching the net wide with their big toes and skilfully crocheting mesh after mesh with darting shuttles. A row of fishermen sitting along a low wall were busy baiting their lines for trolling. One had lost a hand through dynamiting, as usual. A basket on his knee was filled with a coil of twine, the rim set with corks stuck full as a pincushion with fish hooks. He looped the slack round his stump, tied a short length of nylon thread to the brown twine with his other hand, pulled it tight with his teeth, baited the hook with a chunk of fish and paid it out onto another loose coil, all at high speed, smoking ceaselessly and only stopping for a second to throw me a cigarette when he saw me fumbling my pockets in vain.
It looked as though no ship could ever come. The horizon sundered the identical light blues of sea and sky with a dark blue ruler-stroke and the smooth surface of the water was dulled here and there with a faint wind like breath on a looking glass. Across these misty patches occasionally ran a smooth narrow line caused by a current or perhaps a faint contrary breeze, as though traced by the erratic rub of a fingertip. A large, full-bottomed schooner weighed anchor heading south for Matapan and Kalamata. There was not enough wind to hoist sail. Trailing a dinghy, she swung swiftly out of profile till the two bare masts converged, leaving
a long scar across the polished and the arrowy water: then, turning the first stage-wing of the promontory, she profiled again and dwindled against the espalier valleys towards Matapan, as though being thrust up the perpendicular screen of sea on the point of her lengthening wake. The fierce and bandit-like kapheneion keeper gave us a large red rose apiece to console us for the delay.
But, within half an hour, we were off; sending out, as the steamer left the little gulf of Kolokythia, one of those siren blasts that sound so strange inland when they reach the ear along a maze of canyons.
This coasting steamer, sailing to and from the Piracus and calling at all the small ports of the south-eastern Peloponnese once a week, seemed very sophisticated to our bucolic eyes. The panelled Edwardian saloon, the brasswork and the curtains, the striped canvas chairs, the elaborate ouzo glasses and the saucers full of fat Kalamata olives and the slices of Cretan cheese and salami brought by a stylish steward (white-jacketed but, like me, unshaven) were symptoms of almost Capuan luxury.
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