Spirit of the Place

by Gregory Feeley

  SPIRIT OF THE PLACE . Copyright © 2001 by Gregory Feeley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2157-5

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  First eBook Edition: March 2001

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  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Greer Gilman of the Widener Library at Harvard for providing access to early nineteenth-century materials, and James D. Macdonald for information concerning maritime vessels of that era.

  T hey set forth on waves of horsehead spume, sails snapping on a wind that blew from Asia Minor and beyond: lands yet scarce known to Christendom save in legend. Fair-skinned Englishmen, their backs red and peeled from the Aegean sun, bent to haul sheets beside olive Greeks, like figures from the Parthenon frieze—soiled with travel but marmoreal white withal—set alongside wooden statues of Byzantine chapels. The Piraeus receded only slowly as the laden brig pulled at last—at last! thought Hamilton in jubilation—from the crowded quay, where crates too large for the hold still awaited loading. Like Anchises from burning Troy, the cargo was being borne by its true sons to safety. The Mentor moved slowly, riding low in the water that seemed to rise, foaming, to see what treasures it contained.

  “Look,” said Leake beside him. “Dolphins.” Hamilton followed the extended finger but saw only the curlicued waves, frothing where the wind tore at them. Then two gray shapes leaped, and another directly behind, aligned like glistening commas above the spray. They plunged in formation, and a second later leaped again, stitching the rugged sea to keep pace with the ship. “Any of these among your carvings below?”

  “No. But they figured prominently in Greek mythology; Nereus and his daughters are often depicted with them.”

  The topographer smiled. “They follow their marble brethren as they are carried into exile.”

  Hamilton stiffened slightly. “Indeed, sir, it is his Lordship’s opinion that the spirit of the ancient Greeks survives today in the British peoples, and that to remove these sculptures thence is simply to convey them to their rightful heirs.”

  Leake, whose military and diplomatic service over the past three years should have quickened his sympathies to Hamilton’s point, merely grunted. “The nymphs and centaurs you have prised from the Acropolis might feel differently.”

  The dolphins were pacing the ship without difficulty, for the Mentor was not yet rigged for sea. With the last crates stowed not an hour ago, the ship was moving under sails still half-furled, which must carry them out of harbor before the tide changed. The east wind blew smartly, but the brig moved with dreamlike slowness through bobbing trash and gulls—which could not, however, diminish the relief Hamilton felt in watching wretched Athens contract from noisome immediacy to the dimensions of a shoreline watercolor. Until they reached Malta, the responsibilities of Lord Elgin’s secretary were suspended: he had been released from cares and schedules into another kind of time.

  The last dolphin flipped its tail as it dived, and Hamilton guessed they would not surface again. What did the hull look like from beneath? Probably no different from the hulls of Agamemnon’s fleet: smooth inverted islands. The triremes and other oared vessels would be edged with churning chaos like rocks in the surf, but the sailing ships would glide as smoothly as fish. Hamilton had spent most of a week worrying about the hull of the Mentor, and was rewarded now with the mental image of its clean lines, as classical (he fancied) in their curves as the proportions of the Parthenon.

  “Twilight soon,” said Leake. Hamilton looked up and saw it was true: although the sky was still the glazed Aegean blue of early afternoon, the Sun was dropping like a burning stone, and would touch the sea within the half hour. More Greek directness: the Sun climbs straight up the sky, then continues across the azimuth and down the far side like a surveyor’s plumb.

  “How can a nation hope to build an empire when no day in the year gives more than fifteen hours of sunlight?” he asked.

  “The Romans managed it,” Leake observed.

  It was an answer, although Hamilton was tempted to reply, And look at them now. In the manner of his Lordship’s famous countryman, Athens failed to become an empire, yet begot them. Her tragedies and

  odes had been preserved by Christian monasteries, just as her priceless statuary was being rescued at last from indifference and malice. Not so happy as his Lordship, and happier? Hamilton set the thought aside.

  A shout from above, and the two young Englishmen looked up to see a sailor standing on the top yard, gesturing energetically with his free hand.

  “Will the sculptures be presented to the Crown, or perhaps the British Museum?” Leake inquired.

  “I believe that his Lordship intends the marbles to decorate his estate in Scotland,” Hamilton replied shortly. He did not feel obliged to point out that Lord Elgin had borne personally the expenses of the excavations, as well as much of those concerned with running the embassy.

  Another shout, and a second later the wind changed abruptly, provoking curses from the men on deck. Hamilton realized that the sailor above must have seen it approaching, a change on the surface of the water. He raised his face and felt the wind. It was coming from the south, the worst direction for getting them out of harbor, but at least did not smell of Athens. Salt, seaweed, and a hint of odd flesh. What did the sea smell of, to smell like this?

  “The captain walks,” Leake observed. Hamilton turned to see Eglen, hitherto out of sight behind the binnacle, now coming forward to get a better view of the crew’s exertions. Hamilton inclined his head politely, but the captain, though scarce six paces away, did not meet his eye.

  “I trust there exists no coolness between the captain and yourself,” Leake murmured.

  “Not at all,” Hamilton replied. “His Lordship was anxious that the larger pieces be brought on board, but Captain Eglen had worries for the safety of his ship.” Hamilton guessed that Elgin would be displeased that the captain had refused to enlarge the hatches in order to admit the seven largest cases, but he respected the judgment of the ship’s master, who had seen the Mentor through that spring’s perils in Syria. He could also appreciate how the captain, after overseeing repairs to the hull, should have been reluctant to approve the carpenters cutting into his deck.

  Eglen did seem to be glowering, but his attention was fixed upon his crew. The able seamen were in the rigging, leaving the deck occupied by the boys, who were mostly Greeks and new to the sea. The imprecations raining down upon them suggested that they were slower in learning their new trade than Englishmen liked.

  “It is too small a ship to share with enemies,” Hamilton continued. “I will be friendly to all, however firm my intention to pursue a regimen of reading.” With a pang he abruptly remembered that he had seen his trunk lowered into the hold rather than taken properly to his cabin.

  The south wind was shifting back to the east: still not the most propitious direction, but the sails were set to derive some benefit from it. It was enough that the Hellespontian did not interfere with the tide’s steady work, which was drawing the ship slowly from harbor. What puffs and gusts may snap the sails, thought Hamilton in sudden inspiration; but it is that which pulls below that truly moves.

  And with this thought he took himself down: from the realms of air and water, into that of wood.r />
  The atmosphere at supper was congratulatory, the voyage at last under way. It was also the only night on board for the harbor pilot, who agreed to come in long enough to take a glass of hock. A Greek with less English than Malis possessed, he politely declined the mutton with greens (their last fresh meal), but shyly offered an expression of goodwill to the English, whom he preferred, Hamilton gathered, to the Turks.

  “Well said,” declared Squire, who had conceived the meanest opinion of the Ottomans following their party’s late excursion in Syria. “It is distressing for any Englishman to see Greece under the control of these plunderers.”

  Manoles Malis translated the last word for his fellow pilot, who nodded vigorously. Hamilton would have been happy with a less forthright expression: the Turks remained England’s ally against the French; and it was the Sultan’s goodwill that had produced the firman authorizing his Lordship to remove antiquities from the Acropolis.

  “He says,” Malis offered after listening to the pilot’s reply, “that you speak the very truth. The Turks are now taking money to permit Europeans to carry away our most ancient treasures.”

  Squire frowned at this, and Hamilton thought he saw Leake smile. He could feel the heat rising in his cheeks and looked sharply at Malis, whose open face betrayed no cunning.

  “I must wonder at the attachment the Greek people have shown to their antiquities, which the Turks regard as merely idols,” said Leake, perhaps to relieve the situation. “While many feel pride in their days of past glory, I wonder whether some of their countrymen, though professing Christianity, do not still worship the gods these statues represent.”

  “It is certain that they do,” replied Squire. “You recall Clarke’s tale of the statue he found in Eleusis, whose removal the peasants violently objected to? After two thousand years and more, they were still making offerings—and on Christian feasts days at that—to the goddess Ceres!”

  “It was Demeter,” Hamilton replied, uneasy with the subject. The great statue was now en route to England, for all that Clarke had felt free in denouncing Elgin’s acquisitions from the Parthenon. He did not wish to see the harbor pilot offended by this, as the discussion of his countrymen’s religion might already offend him, whether he be Christian or recusant pagan.

  “They are indeed a superstitious people,” said Malis suddenly, “especially those who live inland. Just today, the new deckhands—all farm boys, you know?—they complain about voices in the hold.”

  Hamilton felt a gust of relief that the pilots, worldly men of commerce, had not been affronted by the implications of the conversation, assuming they had understood them. Leake, however, was frowning.

  “Voices, did you say?” he asked.

  Malis gestured deprecatingly. “It is dark in the hold, like a cave. Someone thinks he hears strange sounds like a voice, and now they all speak of it.”

  “Do they imagine that the statues are talking?” asked Squire.

  “The cargo is securely crated,” said Hamilton firmly, “and I doubt that the new crew members know or care much of its contents.” If the pilots did not know that the ship was carrying marbles from Acropolis Hill, he saw no reason to enlighten them.

  Malis, sensing some tension between the Englishmen, seemed anxious to dispel it. “It is superstition,” he insisted. “A ship’s hold groans and creaks; the peasants know nothing of these things.”

  “That is interesting,” said Leake, as though the pilot had clarified some long-obscure point. “The removal of that Demeter puts me in mind of our earlier conversation—” with a nod toward Hamilton—

  “regarding the disturbance of antiquities from their original sites. I wonder if the natives are not troubled in part because they fear that the genius loci, the ancient spirit of the place, might be angered.”

  “Genius loci is not Greek,” Hamilton replied shortly. He could not now remind Leake that the Parthenon marbles had never been worshiped.

  “That is true, to be sure,” said Leake in mild surprise. “I wonder what the Greeks called it?”

  The harbor pilot, who had finished his hock, drew up the blanket around his shoulders and rose to return to deck. The Englishmen had to shift to make room in the cabin, and when the cook’s boy entered to clear the table, Hamilton found himself feeling rather oppressed. Bidding good night to his companions, he went back above, where he straightened his back with a grunt.

  Even six feet farther from sea the ship’s roll was perceptibly greater, and Hamilton spent a minute regaining his legs as he surveyed the unlit deck. Pinpoints of light shone from the shore, but most of the evening’s illumination was moonlight diffusing through clouds. Timbers creaked unseen overhead, and Hamilton did not hear his servant approach until Gavallo spoke.

  “Sir, do you require a light?”

  Hamilton started, although he recognized the voice an instant before his muscles jerked. The mind is faster than the body, he thought. Gavallo drew on his pipe, and his face appeared above it for a second.

  “No thank you, Peter.” The candle at supper had shone too dimly for comfortable reading, and on deck would scarce illumine a sphere the radius of his arm. The prospect of taking one into his jakes-sized sleeping compartment gave Hamilton no pleasure, and he resigned himself to reading, and writing, by day. In any event, he remembered, his books were down in the hold.

  “We must retrieve my trunk tomorrow,” Hamilton told his man. “I intend to complete a good deal of study, directly I complete my report to his Lordship.”

  “I could fetch it now, sir,” Gavallo offered.

  “You should hardly care to try it in this darkne—” Hamilton stopped himself, feeling foolish. The hold would be no brighter at noon than it was right now.

  “Very well,” he said. The deck was not unpleasant, but he could return later. “Let us go find the captain.”

  Captain Eglen was standing at the bow, looking (as Hamilton discovered upon approaching) not out to sea but back upon his ship. He received Hamilton courteously enough, but seemed to bristle when the young man proposed to enter the hold.

  “Have we not settled such matters to your satisfaction?” he asked shortly.

  “It is but a question of retrieving some books,” Hamilton explained. “I thought it better to venture down before we set sail.”

  He wondered whether Eglen had heard word of voices in the hold. It seemed likelier, however, that the captain remained sensitive regarding the late issue of enlarging the hatches. His obduracy might indeed cost him his command when word of it reached Constantinople, as Lord Elgin after all owned the ship.

  “Very well, but be quiet about it, and don’t trip in the dunnage,” Eglen said at last. “Can your man handle a lamp on poor footing?”

  “I will take it down myself,” Hamilton assured him. He bade the captain a civil good-night and returned with Gavallo to the aft hatch, passing the dim figure of the pilot as he stood unmoving behind the wheel. They descended once more to the main cabin and, nodding in reply to his colleagues, proceeded forward: through the corridor, scarce eight feet long, that gave onto the passengers’ quarters and led to the rude curtain where the platform deck ended like the edge of the world.

  Darkness greeted Hamilton as he drew aside the cloth, but the whisper of air across thirty feet spoke of open space, the only one (however crowded) belowdeck. He held the lamp as Gavallo found the rope ladder and threw it down. A smell of tar and crushed rock rose from the depths.

  Hamilton handed Gavallo the lamp and climbed down carefully. His boots swung on emptiness, then crunched on the dunnage below. Raising his hand to take the lamp, Hamilton peered at the half-ceilinged world around him. The platform deck ran straight back to the stern, a strikingly small area to support the main cabin plus quarters for the passengers and junior officers. Past its edge lay darkness, the deck (which occasionally clumped with footsteps) well beyond the lamp’s reach. Still shapes, crates and casks, crowded about him in every direction.

  The footing was
uneven, but easier to negotiate than the swaying decks above. The ship-sounds—creaking masts, flapping sails, thudding feet—that penetrated the deck to fill the passenger’s quarters were reduced almost to silence in the close and humid darkness below.

  Hamilton placed his hand against a crate, one of the metope cases. No danger of this cargo shifting; the marbles were as solid as foundation stones. They had gone into the hold first, leaving space for trunks atop or between them. Holding the lamp before him, Hamilton ventured forward, stepping carefully over the rubble. Another case loomed in the lamplight, and a trunk—not his—behind it. Some of the dunnage was wet, he noticed with a frown. He remembered that the ship slowly took on water, which the crew regularly pumped out; but did not like to see it now.

  He proceeded forward, craning his neck to peer around the cargo. The forecastle deck seemed absurdly small, a wooden triangle pushed snug against the bow: yet it slept ten men, five each watch, their hammocks almost touching. No curtain separated it; Hamilton could hear a drowsy murmur as he pushed his way closer.

  By the time Hamilton reached the forecastle it was scarce six feet above him, the keelson having given way to the ascending stempost. He stooped as he stepped forward to hold out the lamp. He felt as though he were crawling into a root cellar.

  He found his trunk beneath another one, which he shifted with difficulty in the angled recess. Dampness had swollen the straps, and he was cursing under his breath before he managed to slip them free. Seeking to set the lamp inside the trunk so that it would illuminate the books’ spines, Hamilton carelessly passed his wrist over the flame, and his hand jerked back an instant before he felt pain. The body is faster than the mind.

  “Damnation,” he muttered as he shifted on his haunches to peer into the trunk. The Greek texts were providentially near the top: Homer, Hesiod, his school lexicon. Hamilton had resolved to read the classic works entirely in their own language (in school he had made surreptitious recourse to Pope), but in three years abroad he had only gotten as far as Pindar. The age of Phidias and the sculptures now about him still lay beyond the horizon.