Suddenly he turned round and said: “And this man Anthony—why did he not come with you from Leros?” We looked at each other. “An English Major who also rang up.” To the best of our knowledge there had been no one else in Leros intending to make the crossing; had there been he would certainly have had to ask the permission of Major F, our host. We should certainly have known. “That’s what I mean,” said the Abbot in a distressed tone. “People are always ringing up.”
The storm had traveled over the peak and was now thrashing the palm tree in the valley. We finished the excellent chicken, and the Abbot led us slowly from room to room of the monastery, down winding corridors, up and down stairs. This was where the brothers lived. This was a reception room. This was where the conclave met to discuss ecclesiastical problems, or those connected with the administration of the monastery. In one of these large echoing rooms stood the German field telephone, a replica of the one at the mess in Leros—an ugly bakelite box with a handle and a small receiver. As the Abbot looked at it I saw an expression of disgust and anger cross his face. “This is the telephone,” he said. The rain was pouring in at an open window, stirring the dust on the floor, and shaking the heavy red hangings by the dais. I closed the window, and we went down the corridors in single file. As we emerged upon the penultimate balcony overlooking the courtyard we heard the sound of voices. Looking over, I could see the soaked figure of our captain standing in the great door with a piece of sacking over his head. In half an hour, he shouted up at us, there would be a lull in the storm. If we chose to take advantage of it we could be back in Leros by dinner time. If not.…
“We have not spoken of St. John,” said the Abbot. “Of his wonderful book. You must see his church. Stay with us.” His tone changed to one of hospitable coaxing. It was very difficult to explain that, if we missed the motor launch which was due to start for Rhodes at dawn the next day we should be stranded for a week over schedule—delightful as the idea seemed. He was sad. He had intended an exposition of the Apocalypse.
However, he helped us pack our belongings, and one by one the brothers came out of the various rooms to shake our hands and bid us goodbye. “Come again,” they cried, “come and stay with us. We are on the telephone, you know. You can always ring up and say you are coming. Just come any time, and stay with us as long as you like.”
We passed out through the great doorway into a blinding drizzle that thinned off as we neared the harbor; the little caieque was standing off with her engine going. It had all been timed to a second. With hardly a moment to say a breathless goodbye to the friendly loafers in the tavern we were aboard, and drawing free of the harbor towards a sea that looked foully disturbed, with whitecaps flicking the horizon.
Darkness fell before we had cleared the rough straits but we were making good time. The caieque rode superbly, her round canoe-shaped nose chopping down the head sea. By seven, the black shapes of rocks gleamed wetly at us from either bow, and we slackened speed. Leros hung against the sky, a part of the darkness and yet separable from it if one looked carefully enough; but the middle distance was blotted out by skirls of rain. One could taste the dry salt on one’s lips, feel its powdery dryness upon the throat and ear. Soon we crossed the bar and the few dim lights of the harbor bulged greasily at us. It was still raining as we disembarked and crossed the wet deserted streets towards the mess. The rain rattled like shot among the chestnuts.
In the dark hall we stood for a moment, peeling off our clothes and shouting for the hunchback, who came from the kitchen at last, bringing with him a great bar of light and the gleam of an oven.
Upstairs, the two officers were finishing dinner. It was good to sink into one of the luxurious armchairs with which the German commander of Leros had furnished his mess and sip a drink while our baths were heated up. We gave an account of our trip to our host and thanked him suitably for the use of his caieque. As we were talking the telephone in the hall began to ring. “The damned thing,” said the young officer running downstairs to answer it. “It’s been out of order all day.” In a moment he returned and said: “It’s the Abbot. Wants to know if you are safe. Would you like to go down and do your stuff?” I picked my way down to the dark hall and picked up the ugly little receiver. Damp crepitations echoed inside the earpiece. “Hullo,” I called, and for a moment I heard, as if in a seashell, nothing but the sibilance of sea water lashing those stony promontories, boiling among the shapes of volcanic stones, among the deserted quays of Patmos harbor.
“Hullo.” The Abbot’s voice emerged from a crisscross of scratchings and whirrings, as if from some old prewar gramophone disc. “Your Beatitude,” I said, giving him, for good measure, what was really a patriarch’s due. “We arrived safely, thank you.” And I added compliments suitable for the occasion. The young officer came downstairs and stood beside me as I spoke, putting a cigarette between my lips and lighting it. “After you,” he said. The Abbot sounded squeaky and alarmed. No doubt he was unused to telephones. “This man, Major Anthony,” I said, “who is he? The old boy wants to know whether to prepare food for him or what.” The officer took the phone from me and began a bantering conversation with the island. “No such person, Abbot,” he said. “Your imagination again. No. You won’t be disturbed for some time now.”
Together we walked upstairs to the lighted room where the cards had been laid out upon the table and where a sleepy E was already beginning to put her things in order against packing. Tomorrow, at dawn, the naval launch would take us back to Rhodes. Much later, when I was already in bed, listening to the whacking of the palm tree up the hill, the young officer came to say goodnight standing at the open door with a candle in his hand. We should not see him before we left. “Is the Abbot often mistaken about visitors who ring up?” I asked on a sudden impulse.
“It’s just one of those things,” he answered indifferently. “Beastly things, these German phones.” Then he added: “It’s curious. The Abbot always seems to be getting phone calls from this Anthony chap. I wonder who he could have been—if at all, I mean. … Well, goodnight.” I wondered, too. Lying in bed, tasting the luxury of the sleep which was moving toward me across the noises of the house, and the deep hushing of the wind and the rain, I suddenly thought to myself that perhaps this was a ghost which for some reason or other was destined forever to long for Patmos (which is after all a symbol of something for which we all keep a place in our hearts).
On the way home, another storm is brewing. Heading for the harbor we pass a poor wretch in a leaky boat, half-naked, setting out lobster pots. He does not even turn to watch us as our wash sets him bouncing. Through those patched rags I see the lean muscles of his arm tighten as he struggles for purchase in that crazy cockleshell. Yet he does not even turn to curse us—and in a flash I see the Greece I love again: the naked poverty that brings joy without humiliation, the chastity and fine manners of the islanders, the schisms and treacheries of the townsmen, the thrift and jealousy of the small-holders. I see the taverns with their laurel wreaths, the lambs turning on the spit at Easter, the bearded heroes, the shattered marble statues. Eastward now lies Anatolia, its sunburnt mountains brooding under the eagles where the shepherd treads all day among myrtle and arbutus stabbed scarlet with berries. Some day I shall find the right way of dealing with it in words.…
The run is perfectly timed; behind us, the wrack of the coming storm, before us a dead calm bathed in afternoon sunlight. From this angle Rhodes looks unbelievably romantic. It is this entry into the harbor which I thought of when I wrote:
If you should have the luck to approach it, as perhaps one should, through the soft yellowish tones of a June nightfall, you would undoubtedly imagine it to be some great sea animal asleep in the water. The eastern spit of sand upon which both ancient and modern town were built shelves slowly down into the channel from the slopes of Monte Smith, so called because Sir Sidney Smith once set up his battle headquarters there. This would constitute the hump of your whale. Eastward loom the weather
-worn Carian Mountains, casting shadows so dense that the sea is stained saffron by the last rays of the sun. Nestling in the natural amphitheater where once stood the white buildings and temples of the ancient town, the Crusader fortress with its encircling walls and crumbling turrets looks for all the world like a town in pen and ink, situated upon the margins of some illuminated manuscript: the medieval dream of a fortress called Rhodes which the mist has invented for you, and which will dissolve again as you enter the little harbor of Mandraccio to anchor under the fort of St. Nicholas where once, it is suggested, the Colossus stood.
This is the entry that Gideon and I should have chosen for ourselves when we set out from Alexandria.
In Rhodes things are moving. The portentous soldiery has entrenched itself securely in the rococo building which once housed De Vecci’s staff. A martial hauteur may be remarked upon many faces. Gideon has been making a few friends and many enemies—the usual proportion, as he says. “I never could get on with haberdashers in pips and crowns,” he adds sourly. However, there are compensations. The lighting unit for the town has been fixed, and the whole harbor cleared of enemy equipment in record time. The post office has started to work, and has been inundated with remittances from Dodecanesians all over the world. One street lamp in ten has been persuaded to light after dark. These are not small things—they are part of that unknown quantity, civilization—for the street lamp brings order, and the post office confidence. Nevertheless, Gideon says that he smells the odor of garrison life creeping over the town. This is because he hates the British Officers’ Club and yet the cheapness of whisky there forces him to have his evening drink there. He is making a list of conversational gambits overheard within those august precincts. Some of them, I fear, have the air of being manufactured. We amuse ourselves in trying to guess the speaker in the cases of phrases like: “Ol’ Fuzzy-wuzzy is a jolly decent chap when you get to know him,” and “I found the Swahili a perfect gentleman,” and “The Greeks are perfectly bloody don’t you think?”
A passage from a letter which reached Gideon yesterday from G:
So you are in Rhodes? We landed there briefly among the first few units. I was shocked. It was simply a shell of what it had once been. Walking on the shattered seafront in the dark I tried to reconstruct a pre-war incident whose flavor has never quite left me. I was walking here in 1939 at that indeterminate twilight hour, after dark but before the lamps had been lit. I collided in the darkness with the soft figure of a woman. She stood before me without speaking. “Who is it?” I said. She did not answer but softly placed a hand upon my arm, and I understood. We stood thus for a moment by the harbor wall.
I fumbled for a box of matches and struck one, saying as I did so: “All right, if you are beautiful.” The match flame copied itself into two dark eyes: a face much older than itself—serious, beguiling, and most world-weary. We climbed the slopes of Monte Smith and lay down together in one of those rock tombs, still warm.
She was lean and half-starved and her clothes tasted of sea salt. Her poverty was poignant in a way that no one who has not experienced the Mediterranean can understand. In her I tasted the whole of Greece, its sunburnt airs, dazzling bony islands, and the chaste and honorable poverty which the people has converted into a golden generosity. Her name was Aphrodite—I know! I know! She walked all day by the sea gathering firewood and sea-coal. Her husband had been a prosperous fisherman but he was now in the last stages of consumption. She made a little money as a casual. Everything that might have seemed ugly or dirty was transformed somehow by the human experience which underlay her actions; she knew the full measure of them, so to speak. It would have been unworthy of me to regret or criticize either of us. Life had been too big for her; by accepting she was conquering it. It may sound silly to philosophize over a casual encounter with a prostitute but there are lessons to be learnt from her. She had a rock rose fastened to her shawl with a pin. When we parted she detached it and handed it to me with a magnificent friendliness. I had an inkling then that the Greeks were still the natural poets of the Levant. They understand, you know, that hunger is not proud and that the Tenth Muse is really Poverty.
“Poverty,” mused Gideon. “Well, I wonder.” He added that what he respected in G was his readiness to make a place for new experiences. “Most of us simply cannot squeeze in a new sensation which does not conform to the established prejudices with which we have been paced. I should have been horrified—or should I?”
Hoyle lit a cigar. “You know,” he said, “on such a high literary level the whole incident was probably invented. Though of course that would not invalidate its essential truth.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gideon, “I think it is true. This last passage convinces me, where he says: ‘Here I am, a writer, thirty-one, who cannot bring his equipment to bear upon material of this sort without running the risk of sentimentalizing something which was as clear as a glass of water. If I touch it I damage it. What a dilemma.’”
The Sunny Colossus
I HAVE PROFITED BY the absence of Hoyle and Gideon in another island of the group to assemble a few hasty notes upon the Colossus—in the manner of a man talking to himself. Mills is away also in the south of the island upon some errand of mercy. And while I miss my companions I have taken the precaution of borrowing their works of reference on Rhodes. Thus I have time at last to tackle history—that vast complex of analogies without getting lost among the shoals and quicksands of argument and polemic. For no companion to Rhodes would be complete without a reference to the island Colossus; and yet the subject cannot be touched upon without some reference to the siege out of which it was born, and to commemorate which it was designed.
The siege itself was a colossus in kind—so that to write of the statue of the Sun God is to write of a colossus born of a colossus: of a peace born of a war.
Demetrius (surnamed Polyorcites or “Besieger” after this epic attempt) was the direct author of the battles and the indirect author of the statue which commemorated them. The coins, Gideon tells me, show a fleshy face and a long sensitive nose, expressing clearly the mixture of coarseness and sensibility which one reads into his character as Diodorus described it. If the motto of Cleobolus was “nothing in excess” that of Demetrius must certainly have been “excess in everything”; as a general he was considered a candidate for the honors of a second Alexander. He excelled in two qualities: science and lubricity. The inventive side of his genius came to full flower in the giant Helepolis—a third colossus—which so nearly overpowered the defenses of the Rhodians. By the time he arrived off Rhodes in 305 BCE he was already at the height of his powers as a soldier. He had thrashed Ptolemy and Cassander in summary fashion, and was a claimant for the empire which Alexander had left to fall to pieces after his death—an empire disintegrating under the attacks of many claimants like a jellyfish stranded on the beaches of Time.
The causes of the war were as follows: Antigonus, the father of Demetrius, had solicited an alliance with Rhodes against the Egyptian Ptolemy; this had been refused by the Rhodians on perfectly logical grounds. Their trade with Alexandria played too large a part in the economy of the island to be surrendered at the whim of a predatory old tyrant.
Rhodes, at this time, could afford to decide for herself. Her history, like that of England, might have been summed up in the words seapower, gold and neutrality. Both by geography and temperament Rhodes lay just outside the storm centers of trouble, and at every turn in her ancient history she took advantage of the fact. Where possible she reserved judgment and trusted in a fleet so powerful and skillful that it was as famous in ancient times as the mythical colossus is in modern. The Rhodian sailor was famous for his courage and daring. they said of themselves—“Ten Rhodians, ten ships.” For a great trading station lying upon the main routes of the Aegean there was no other course. But here and there this enviable neutrality was broken. A choice was forced upon the peaceable Rhodians. Always they chose with an eye to the main chance; their one obj
ective was to retain their independence. They did not always manage to do so—Artemisia, Cassius, are fateful names among those who broke the spell, and there were others.… So that the news of Demetrius’s arrival off the coast of Rhodes must have been received with mixed feelings. The Rhodians had sought no quarrel with him; indeed they continued to treat for peace right up to the moment of embarkation, and even voted a public statue to Antigonus in the hope that flattery would do what policy had failed to do; but it was in vain. Demetrius had been sent to teach them a lesson, and there is nothing to show that he was loath to add yet another victory to those already to his credit.
The general was a thorough man; whether it was a question of debauchery or of scientific invention he gave himself wholly to it with admirable singleness of mind. His preparations for the siege left nothing to chance. Transported laboriously across those miles of sea his infantry numbered some 40,000 men. This figure excludes cavalry, sailors and engineers. The 170 troop ships were convoyed by some 200 men-of-war of different sizes—some perhaps the fifteen-bench galleys designed by Demetrius himself which struck such terror into the defenders of the coastal forts who watched them advance to the attack. This great fleet, as it rolled across the blue carpet of the straits, under the Carian mountains, was followed, say the chroniclers, by countless ships of provision, and a horde of smaller vessels—vulture boats—manned by itinerant adventurers who had followed the conqueror in the hope of chance spoil. Standing on the flat rooftop of his house, with the whole dazzling panorama of the town glittering in its marble amphitheater below him, the Rhodian sentry who first caught a glimpse of this armada might be forgiven a momentary pang of fear as he watched it, contrasting the peaceful temples and colonnades of his capital below with that minatory horde of vessels forming up for an attack on the harbors. Across the still waters of the gulf he must have heard the creaking of tackle, the neighing of horses, and the hoarse voice commanding; the shrill squeaking of bosuns’ pipes and the crunch of oars as the galleys moved up the channel.
Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes Page 8
