Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Paradox reigns. Legend, conjecture and fact have plaited a wreath of deviation about the place; their way of life is all but untouched, they say, and akin to nothing else in the Himalayas. Jamlu owns every square inch of the enormous glen and the villagers are only his tenants: the forests and the pastures, even the narrow descending crescents of ploughland, are all his. (Sangat put the population at 560; Rosser, some years ago, at about 500; and Mackworth-Young, in 1911, at 376.) They belong to the Kanets-yeomen caste, except for a little group of Lobar-blacksmiths, who are allowed no say in affairs; and the village is divided into an upper and a lower half. Haughtily endogamous, but just aware (too late, perhaps) of the dangers of inbreeding, they only marry in theory from one half of Malana to the other and they hope to dodge the threat of imbecility by occasionally taking brides from villages beyond the Rashol pass, the range the two lammergeiers had been heading for; but they never return this favour. Adultery is looked on with mildness, poverty makes polygamy difficult and I think that the polyandry of Lisbeth’s range, once rife in the Himalayas, and perhaps here too, has died out.

  But it is in proceedings from day to day that Malana differs most noticeably from everywhere else. A council of eleven rules the village. Eight of these, the temporal members as it were, are elected every few years, leaving a triumvirate of spiritual colleagues who take precedence of them; these are drawn from an unvarying clan and their offices are hereditary and for life. The first triumvir is Jamlu’s steward, the second his priest and celebrant, the third his oracle. The function of this seer is abetted by prolonged drumming, and, in cold weather, by flinging off all his clothes, which brings on shuddering fits; crises of possession follow soon, when he whirls his uncut locks about in a frenzy and then breaks into prophecy. Apart from this hierarchic trio and the exclusion of women and the Lohar caste, the system is egalitarian in temper, democratic in method, ably administered and scrupulous in accounting, though illiteracy is almost universal. [. . .]

  ‘What are those great spikes for on the dogs’ collars?’—‘Bears.’ The forest is full of them. We spotted a great black pelt hanging from a balcony stretched to dry on crossed poles and when we looked surprised at the presence of leather, they told us that only cow-hide is taboo. (In spite of their ancient origins, this must be part of a post-Vedic belief.) Leopards and deer live in the woods but the favourite quarry of the Malanis, thanks to the enormous prices paid for their scent-pods, is the little musk-deer of Central Asia. Apart from their flocks they have no horned cattle and no chickens; height forbids the double harvests of the valleys and a late thaw can ruin their grudging crops of buckwheat. The village’s isolation when the snow has blocked the Chanderkhani and the Rashol passes is hard to imagine. The invisible canyon becomes their only path to the outer world and to jari (a long day’s march away) where they barter ghee, raw wool, game and honeycombs against maize and salt and metal for the Lohars to beat into tools. People in the valleys profess scorn for their backwardness, for their insistence in particular on pay in kind rather than cash, even at a loss. But there is awe beneath these sneers, and dread: the powerful god of the Malanis daunts them; they fear the aloofness of his followers, their solidarity, their contempt for strangers; and hearsay augments the fierceness of their wild and uncanny nature by a reputation for universal madness. Jamlu may be an unpredictable god; quick to chide and slow to bless; one who visits backsliding or neglect with blindness, leprosy, insanity, and sudden death; but he is the symbol and safeguard of independence.

  The findings of Young and Dr Rosser confirm everything we learnt from Sangat and his friends. But splits are appearing in the xenophobic shell—lamentably, perhaps, scientifically speaking. A school, though shunned till recently by all but one untouchable, will soon begin to erode their ancient ways; and perhaps their growing lenity to us was ethnologically deplorable. For there were return visits to our clump of pines and the next evening, led there by Sangat, half a dozen musicians, including the three terrible boys, all smiles now, settled cross-legged on the grass. A flute trilled and quavered and a drummer in gold earrings hammered at both ends of a long thin drum while the others sang plaintive songs in the Kulu dialect; there was only one song in Kanishta, which I duly noted down. Later, helped by frequent swigs of rice wine poured out of a big brass pot, they trod out the uncomplex figures of mountain dances; the wine mugs were flourished more often; and steps grew swimmingly imprecise, especially when the dancers, with fluttering and clicking fingers, sank unsteadily to their haunches and rotated. There was a bandying of Kanishta toasts—‘Dhalang!’ they cried, and ‘Dhalang!’ we answered;—it was turning into a friendly blind. But when we asked for a closer look at the prettily wrought silver flute, decked like Krishna’s with tassels and chains and bells, the flute-player was seized with hesitant perplexity; his father was one of the triumvirs, and the instrument could be a conductor of spiritual pollution; passed from hand to hand, a current of defilement might have shot sizzling along the metal. Then he laid it carefully on the grass for us to pick up and his face cleared.

  As the shadow-line stole to the tips of the peaks our twilight goings and comings were imperilled by an odd and awkwardly placed hazard. In the centre of our clearing, treacherously overgrown with bracken, yawned a wide, deep hole: why had it been dug there? Pleased at the question, they explained. The oracular triumvir is buried in it on his appointment, but only for half an hour. They dig him up gasping, whereupon he sets off to climb the 16,000 feet to the crest of Girwha Koti—‘God’s House,’ a local name for Deo Tibba—to bring back sprigs of the losar and the gogal that grow there. Nobody could explain what these plants were but they shook their heads with misgiving. The summit of Deo Tibba is notorious not only for oreads and fairies; any number of mountain spirits of a more uncertain and perhaps dangerous temper are said to haunt the place.

  Our exit lay along the hidden gorge. But, like ornithologists lowered down a cliff after rare specimens and finding themselves on a ledge above a still more frightful chasm, we were loath to descend. We set off at last and so steep was the downhill zigzag that the snows and the semicircle of crests were quickly out of sight. In another moment, escalades of tree-tops rushed uphill to surround us and we were sinking through green glooms where the hardwoods soon began to challenge the vertical reign of the conifers. Creepers looped the boughs and ended in tumbling mops, there was falling water and moss and maidenhair ferns in the clefts and grey, curdled, orange, and sulphur-coloured lichens crusted tall buttresses of stone under their fronded overhangs; springs dripped, and snails’ tracks of damp gleamed across sheets of split rock . . .

  All the last days the sound of the river had risen in a whisper. It was louder now and willow-trees began to spring up. Bamboos soared and spread in green fireworks among rhododendrons the height and thickness of ancient oaks; their branches were heavy with leaves, ragged with Spanish moss and tufted and festooned with a score of parasites; but all their flowers had vanished with the monsoon. Glimpses of running water began to show; we were nearing the bottom of the abyss; and all at once the ravine filled with noise as the river thundered out of the shadows. It fell from shelf to shelf, rushing through the polished troughs it had scooped in the pale metamorphic rock, separating round boulders, rising in fans of spray and then joining again to rotate in deep, slow pools jammed with bleached driftwood; only to break loose once more. High above, the sunbeams sloping across the gorge were almost out of sight. Dropping downhill with scarcely diminishing thunder, the river coiled towards the Parbati in leagues of waterfalls and jade-green flux.

  There was a stir in the woods below. A dozen villagers on their way back from market were climbing up the single track. They were gnome-like Malanis stooping under their cone-shaped wicker kiltas with bands across their brows. Tattered and barefoot woodland caryatids, balancing heavy loads on their heads, were stepping sinuously up the slanting grass. They must have left Malana before we had arrived; they were wholly unprepared for the shock. Uncorrupte
d by the familiarities and the bibulous tamasha of the night before, they halted in dismay; our attempts at Kanishta greetings, shouted above the crash of a waterfall, must have made our apparition more sinister still. After a glance of incredulous horror they swerved through the rhododendron boles and sped uphill in silence without a single backward glance and the leaves closed after them.

  Greece

  Abducting a General

  Setting the Scene

  The most dramatic exploit of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s war came in April 1944, when he led the team that planned and executed the abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe. Because it was the subject of a film, in which the role of Paddy was taken by Dirk Bogarde, the operation is often presented as a sort of wildly daring prank. In fact it was meticulously planned. Professor William Mackenzie, commissioned by the Cabinet to write the history of Special Operations Executive immediately after the war, described the Kreipe operation as ‘an admirably executed coup . . . The utmost care was taken to avoid involving the Cretans in reprisals, and these were in this instance successful.’*

  The operation had its roots in events that had taken place in Crete in the late summer of 1943, by which time Captain Patrick Leigh Fermor had been living on the island as an SOE agent for over a year. When things were at their lowest in 1942 and 1943, he and his three brother officers, plus their signallers and wireless sets, lived hidden in caves and sheepfolds disguised as shepherds. Like their Cretan comrades, they could expect nothing but torture and death if captured. For the Cretans, it was still worse. If found guilty of harbouring agents or escaped prisoners or wandering soldiers left behind after the evacuation, they faced not only execution, but the annihilation and massacre of whole villages in reprisal.

  News of the Italian surrender to the Allies reached Crete on 8 September 1943. General Carta, commander of the 32,000 Italians of the Siena Division who garrisoned the eastern part of the island, strongly resisted the Germans’ insistence that they should hand over all their arms and ammunition when they left Crete. In anticipation, Carta’s chief of counter-intelligence, Lieutenant Tavana, contacted Paddy (then in charge of the Heraklion region) through the Cretan Resistance two months before the armistice was signed. Paddy arranged for as many weapons as possible to be smuggled into Resistance hands, and laid on a large arms drop in the mountains.

  British agents in Crete feared that the collapse of Italy might persuade the Cretans that an Allied invasion was imminent. There was a real danger of local bands seizing the moment to strike the Germans before the time was ripe.

  Orders went out immediately commanding the local captains to hold their fire, but Kapetan Manoli Bandouvas would not be stopped. He and his men were well armed, having just received a drop of guns and ammunition from SOE in August. On 11 September, his men attacked and wiped out two small German garrisons, then ambushed and annihilated the punitive detachment sent to restore control. The resulting reprisals, ordered by the recently appointed General Müller, were among the most savage that the Germans had ever unleashed on Crete. Between 15 and 16 September, a force of 2,000 Germans slashed and burnt their way through the Viannos region, destroying seven villages and killing over 500 people. Bandouvas and what remained of his band fled to the south coast.

  In this harsh new climate, Müller might well have arrested General Carta for his intransigence on the matter of disarmament. So Paddy and his senior SOE officer, the archaeologist and scholar Tom Dunbabin, arranged for the evacuation of General Carta. The General and a handful of his staff were escorted in secret across the mountains to Tsoutsouru on the south coast, where on 23 September they were picked up by the Royal Navy. Paddy and Manoli Paterakis, one of the great Resistance fighters of Crete, boarded the evacuation boat with the idea of disembarking before she sailed—but rough sea prevented them from returning to shore. So it was that Paddy returned to Egypt with General Carta and with much to think about.

  Ever since our flight into the mountains with the general, two interweaving thoughts, prompted by the horrible events in Viannos, had been taking shape: how could we respond to General Müller’s onslaught, and avoid bringing down trouble? Were such a thing possible, it would have to be some kind of symbolic gesture involving no bloodshed, not even a plane sabotaged or a petrol dump blown up; something which would hit the enemy hard on a different level, and one which would offer no presentable pretext for reprisals. Our recent flight automatically suggested the enemy general as quarry. Looked at like this, our late adventure suddenly took on the guise of a practice run for a much more serious undertaking: an Anglo-Cretan enterprise with old and seasoned mountain friends, rather than a professional Allied coup de main entirely organized from outside; something, in fact, that would reflect the close-knit feeling which had grown up during the last two and a half years. Recent disasters had shown that armed confrontation with no external support was foredoomed. But a small party could be dropped on Mount Dikti as easily as the arms to Bandouvas a month before. And it was obvious—as if we didn’t know it already!—that a small party, with the whole mountain world on its side to guide, feed, warn and guard it, could move wherever it liked in that vast labyrinth, and much faster than any road-bound military force. The false scent of the captured general’s car abandoned with its conspicuous flag not far from deep water would be followed by our flight from those southern coves . . . the stages of our journey were turning into a series of Red Indian smoke signals.*

  In Cairo, the plan to kidnap General Müller was given the go-ahead. Paddy found a second in command, a friend who was a captain in the Coldstream Guards called Billy Moss. These two, with Manoli Paterakis and George Tyrakis, another Cretan friend of Paddy’s who had been much involved with resistance work on the island, were to form the nucleus of the team. Others would be recruited when they reached Crete.

  Paddy was dropped into Crete on 5 February but bad weather prevented Manoli, George and Billy from reaching the island until 4 April. By this time the notorious General Müller had been replaced by a general fresh from the Russian front: General Heinrich Kreipe.

  Cairo authorized the mission to proceed despite this change, and preparations began. Taking advantage of the General’s regular habits, the plan was that Paddy and Billy Moss, dressed as two Feldpolizei corporals, would stop his car on its way back from his headquarters to the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where he lived. The General would be abducted and his car would then be abandoned with a letter saying that the General was safe and would be treated with the respect due to his rank. It also emphasized that the operation had been carried out by British officers, with Greek nationals who were serving soldiers in the Forces of his Hellenic Majesty—not Cretan civilians. The point was to give the Germans no excuse for carrying out reprisals in the area.

  Paddy is always at pains to stress that most of those involved in the kidnap of General Kreipe were Cretan. Reconnaissance was done by Miki Akoumianakis, SOE’s chief agent in Heraklion, who knew the area around Knossos very well. He also had a house there, next door to the Villa Ariadne. It was Miki who stole the German uniforms for Billy Moss and Paddy. Elias Athanassakis, a young student, was Akoumianakis’s lieutenant. It was his idea that the imminent arrival of the General’s car should be signalled by an electric bell. Athanassakis also spent a lot of time studying the General’s car, the noise of its engine and the shape of its lights. It was thanks to him that the group found the vineyard of Pavlos Zographistos, which was twenty minutes from ‘Point A’ where the car was to be intercepted. Pavlos and his sister, Anna, both agreed to help. Antoni Zoidakis, who had been helping SOE in its efforts to shelter Allied stragglers, and Stratis Saviolakis, both had good cover as local gendarmes. The other members of the team were Dimitri (‘Mitso’) Tzatzas, Nikos Komis, and Antoni Papaleonidas from Asia Minor. In the background, in case of trouble, was a band of partisans led by their kapetan, Athanasios Bourdzalis.

  On the night of 26 April, as the General’s car swept up the road towards Heraklion, the two German cor
porals stepped out of the dark. All went according to plan, and having captured the General, the party split into two groups. Accompanied by George Tyrakis, Paddy drove the car to the spot where it was to be found, with its letter. He and Tyrakis then walked south to the village of Anoyeia.