Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  The air was sweet with the damps of night as we set off, and we walked steadily until we reached Kremasto, where we explored the church with its holy well and immense cypresses; and where the vicar, who looked like a dispossessed earwig, conducted us from ikon to ikon with great circumstance and a wealth of pointless detail. Afterwards we took a glass of sticky liqueur with him in the sunlit courtyard whose floor was paved in pure white sea pebbles, dusted spotless by the brooms of two old women who seemed to be nuns. Kremasto is the scene of the greatest festival of the year, held on Assumption Day, and on the ninth day after that date, in honor of the Panaghia. Here, as in Tenos, the holy ikon performs its yearly miracle of healing, and here come crowds of foreign visitors from Turkey and the islands round about. Along four sides of the monastery are the cells in which they are accommodated during the festival. Despite the prevailing dislocation of traffic with the mainland a good crowd of suppliants is expected, says the old man. During the war years everything was at a standstill, the narrow straits were mined, everyone was starving. Now … peace is here. He leaned forward and took one of Gideons hands, pressing it warmly between his own. “England has brought us white bread,” he said, nodding that rusty old head on his shoulders.

  We moved off in good order down the sunny main street of the town which was lined with barrows full of bright vegetables, for Kremasto is the nearest market-town to Rhodes, and it is here that the peasant unloads his stocks if he does not feel like traveling to the capital in search of a buyer. Needless to say, keeping a vegetable stall is one of those occupations which do not take up all one’s time; there is plenty of time to drink, to gossip and play cards—and these seem to be the major occupations of the stall owners, who sit in the little cafés lining the main street and while away the hours in this manner. Here we bought some apples, not without difficulty, for the owner of the stall was engaged in a game of backgammon and sent us a message with a friend to say that he was indisposed; he was sitting in full view at the time, his big coarse face bent over the board, his coffee cup beside him. We entered the café and after a long argument prevailed upon him to serve us. He did so with hauteur.

  We made good time in the direction of Villa Neuova along the broad motor road for it was early as yet. Gideon chatted amicably as we walked, pausing from time to time to cross the hedge and peer anxiously into the features of a goat or a cow. By the early afternoon we had reached a hollow in a hillside beyond the town of Villa Neuova where a number of sources broke from the mossy banks of a hill and created a shady pleasance—I do not know how else to describe it—encircled by some tall plane trees, forming a sort of pavilion around the little whitewashed tavern where we proposed to halt and eat. The sunshine was, by this time, fierce enough to have turned Gideon’s thoughts in the direction of a siesta. There was no food to be had beyond a boiled egg or two, so we were glad of what we had brought with us. There was, however, plenty of good red wine, served in generous tin cans which had originally been intended as measures for oil. The tavern-keeper was a tiny emaciated man in the last stages of consumption. He served us deftly and quietly, and paused with pride to indicate the superb view from the little earth terrace upon which we sat. It was indeed worth looking at—that sloping foreground of mulberry trees, thinning away to the bold blue of sea and the violet cloud of mountains opposite. But it was not a view that one “saw” in the strict sense; it radiated over one, dancing in that brown heat, pouring into the eyes and spreading within the five senses—as light enters the pinhole of a cameras lens but floods the whole gelatine surface of the negative; so that we sat in a kind of dark inebriation, tasting the sweat and wine mixing in our mouths, and breathing in the whole landscape with every breath we drew like a perfume.

  The wine was ice cold, for the pitcher had been hanging down the well all morning on the end of a rope. Our host came timidly to the table and sat down with us to watch us eat and to ask the inevitable questions. He accepted some bread and lamb with a dignified air, stretching out his thin talons in a way that reminded one of something fastidious and small—a cat, perhaps: and this impression was strengthened by his thin black moustache which grew limply enough, but whose ends were waxed and turned up like a cat’s whiskers. He was called Panayiotis Porphyrogennis. “But,” he added modestly, “they call me Pipi here.”

  You have guessed it? The inevitable happened. Gideon, animated by his own excellent conversation and the weather, drank more than three glasses of wine, which turned him the color of brick dust, and sapped his stamina as a walker. There was nothing for it but take a short nap on the mossy bank under the planes until the sun had westered a bit. This we did, and it was not until four that we mustered up enough energy to strike the road again. “We shall never make Cameirus,” groaned Gideon, as he stumped along. “We shall be picked up by Mills and he will jeer at me, I know it. He always swore we should never reach Cameirus if we found a tavern on the way.”

  We did however manage to get a tidy way across the Kalavarda valley with its long flat grape orchards, and its hundreds of metal windmills imported by the Italians to draw up water from the artesian wells. Despite the fact that each of these rather crude contrivances bore the legend MADE IN CHICAGO they looked very poetical in the greenish afternoon light, slowly turning their metal flukes in the north wind. The roads were shaded too and everywhere there sounded the noise of water flowing out along the irrigation channels on to the parched red soil. Storks had built their crazy muddled nests in some of the water wheels and we heard their cracked voices as we passed, mingled with the bubbling of water, and the swish of wind in the silver-grey olives that stretched away in clumps towards the receding hills.

  We passed through one or two dirty and dilapidated villages—Gideon religiously averting his face whenever we were confronted with the word “Kapheneion” written on a wall or lettered out on some crude signpost. By the time Mills’s little hornet of a car came whizzing up we had good enough reason to be pleased with ourselves, for we had covered a good part of the way to Kalavarda. To Gideon’s surprise and relief Mills was full of admiration for our prowess. He had collected the mattresses and flea bags and proposed to go on ahead to Cameirus. As there was no room for us in that tiny car—which barely accommodated Chloe and himself on two seats shaped like egg cups—he roared off again along the dusty road, and left us sitting in a dry riverbed among a clump of vivid oleanders to wait for Hoyle and E. Gideon was much relieved at Mills’s respect for his day’s walk, and felt disposed to boast a bit, and he was still in this vein when Hoyle’s old German Mercedes came into sight. Hoyle, however, seemed surprised to see us so soon. “What?” he said, “I thought you people told me you were going to walk?” He commented briefly on Gideon’s partiality to tavern life, adding dark asides about the lower nature of man, until Gideon was quite out of humor, and pretended that a sprained ankle had prevented him from walking as far as he might have done.

  We climbed into the car, and swept down the long straight road into Kalavarda. Here the country changed abruptly, very much as it does when one enters the valley of Epidaurus, and the change was like a premonition, a quickening of something inside one which only the sight of Cameirus itself could satisfy. The hills were low here, and the road ran along the seashore. A sense of something definite and pre-arranged, as in the landscapes contrived by those ancient Chinese gardeners for the rulers of old China. Or, as Hoyle put it, “Limestone formations, with a thinnish top crust of green. Look here, Gideon, holm oak and juniper.” Gideon was still disposed to be testy. “My dear Hoyle, that’s not holm oak, its barbed wire from a gun post.” At last we came to a fountain set in a circle of young plane trees, and here we found Chloe washing great bunches of grapes against dinner, while Mills, who had run his car off the road under the pines, was lovingly tinkering about in its entrails with the air of a surgeon performing a delicate operation.

  Leaving them to fill the water jar, we climbed the tree lined way which leads up the hill to Cameirus, the car groani
ng and panting in second gear at the steepness of the slope. Beyond the swaying tips of the pines somewhere lay the city, and in ancient times this gracious tree lined approach to it from the little harbor of Mylantia was made more lovely by the population of statues that stood beside the road to welcome the newcomer. Now the fleshy scalp of the hillside showed the ugly workings of anti-tank gun sites. This had been part of the defensive system manned by the Italians. We deduced this from their refuse which always contained a high percentage of empty hair oil bottles and discarded clothing. The road wound higher and still higher, passing the ugly cemetery for German troops (pitched with such vandalistic accuracy slap in the glade below the town) and breasting the green hummock which cuts Cameirus from the world.

  You arrive in the center of the ancient town almost before you know it; it is as sudden as a descent from a balloon. The whole thing assembles itself before your eyes like a picture thrown upon a cinema screen. It lies there in the honey-gold afternoon light listening to the melodious ringing of water in its own cisterns, and the faint whipping of wind in the noble pines which crown the amphitheater. The light here has a peculiar density as if the blue of the sea had stained it with some of its own troubled dyes. The long sloping main street is littered with chipped inscriptions. One can make out the names of city fathers long since dead, of priests and suppliants; they rise in a long progress up the chalky pathways of the town to the red earth wall beyond which the archaeologist has not trespassed, to the rather over-poetic votive column which, one can guess without being told, is part of the most recent Italian restoration work. Nevertheless Cameirus is beautiful in a way that persuades mere ugliness to conform to its grace of air and situation; even the curator’s Nissen hut, now crammed with verminous filth, smashed bottles, shed equipment, and bandages—even this cannot intrude upon the singing beauty of this ancient town uncovered by the spade of the archaeologist. If such a city, you find yourself thinking, if such a landscape-out-of-time was not able to strike the right chord in the human heart by its appeals to clemency, truth, and intellectual order of life, what chance have we with our unburied cities to do so? And when you see the gravestones from the little necropolis of Cameirus stacked up in our museums (it is inevitable that the treasures of towns like these are hoarded up in Museums) it is the so often repeated single word—the anonymous which attracts you by its simple, obsessive message to the living. It is not the names of the rich or the worthy, not the votive reliefs and the sepulchral epigrams, but this single word, “Be Happy,” “Be Happy,” serving both as a farewell and admonition, that goes to your heart with the whole impact of the Greek style of mind, the Greek orientation to life and death; so that you are shamed into regarding your life, and realizing with bitterness how little you have fulfilled of the principle behind a thought so simple yet so pregnant, and how even your native vocabulary lacks a word whose brevity and grace could paint upon the darkness of death the fading colors of such gaiety, love and truth as does upon these modest gravestones.

  The party was not nearly as riotous as the one we had enjoyed the previous night. Cameirus, glimmering whitely below us, was perhaps the reason. Its silence and its utter self-possession forced themselves between our sentences like the blade of a knife, separating thought from contemplation, and filling one with self-consciousness by their volume. So it was that for the most part we ate silently, staring out from the dim circle of wavering yellow light to where the late moon had quick silvered the marbles of the old town, and picked up the three small promontories which jutted into the sea below Cameirus, one of which contained, in ancient times, a temple to Pan. But if our conversation was desultory it reflected in no way upon the humor of the company; Gideon had recovered from his fit of pique—a bottle and a half of white Kastellaneia had seen to that. Hoyle himself was disposed to be complimentary about our walk; he was always slow to reach what he himself called “a considered opinion,” and perhaps by now he had realized that Gideon’s annoyance at his teasing was genuine and not simulated.

  Mills and I walked about the ancient town for a while before turning in. The moon was all but gone, yet the light brimmed the whole amphitheater, casting a surface of glittering aluminum over the white houses, and blocking in great masses of shadow on the seaward side. Despite the light frost, and the thick nap of dew which had fallen over everything, we were only mildly cold; a few moments of walking about, and we found ourselves warm again. In the silence we could hear the water gurgling somewhere down there, below the earth.* An owl whistled once, twice, and we heard its creaking flight from one tree to another, like the rustle of a linen skirt. I suddenly remembered other moments of time spent in this landscape, time printed upon silence with all its real colors up: the faint burring of honeybees in Agamemnon’s tomb; one glittering spring day, the noise of snow melting among the meadows at Nemea; a bird singing stiffly at noon like a voice on stilts from the bushes where we had slept; the crash of a falling orange in an island—all isolated moments existing in a peculiar dense medium of their own, which was like time but not of it. Each moment to itself entire, populating a whole continuum of feeling. Coming over the ridge into Sparta, bursting through a cloud to see the lime-green Eurotas gushing into the valley carrying with it a multitude of tinkling spots of ice.… And these separate moments, quite loose, not stitched together except by their parentage in the same quality of feeling, suddenly added themselves to this quiet second of time spent with Mills, sitting in the frail moonlight of Cameirus, tracing an inscription on a votive stone, feeling the chisel’s edge hard through the moss, spelling out “Be Happy,” “Be Happy.” Then the owl whistled once again from a different quarter, and someone struck a match up there under the trees. We rose by mutual consent and walked back up the long main street of the town.

  Next morning I awoke with a start to see Mills on his knees pumping the Primus stove. The sun had risen, but was still behind the hill. Its warmth, however, penetrated the crust of the island, warming the statues back to life, drying the dew from the houses of Cameirus, and offering us the auguries for another lovely day. A green lizard had crawled up to a favorite stone, and was warming itself in the indirect light of the sun. Its satin throat quivered as if with song.

  Today we intended to complete the circuit of the island, and spend the night at Lindos—a journey which would put us within striking distance of Rhodes for the morning following; when we were due back at our respective establishments. We started off together, but the sedateness of Hoyle’s driving soon wore out Mills’s patience: he passed us on a corner and disappeared across the valley in a cloud of dust. “It’ll be a case of physician heal thyself one of these days,” remarked Hoyle sadly. His own driving technique, while accurate enough, would perhaps have been more suited to a landau. It was as if he had carried over his tendency to have “little rests” into his driving—or else as if he had infected the engine of the Mercedes with some of his own heart trouble. At any rate, when a new idea struck him, it was his habit to slam on the brakes, stop the car, and sit awhile to consider it from every angle.

  The sun was up now. I sat behind with E while Hoyle and Gideon shared the front. We ate grapes and watched the valley unroll itself before us. Hoyle and Gideon were still deep in the subject of vampires, I remember, a subject which sounded more than ever fantastic in that clear air. The road from Cameirus runs along the flat sea line, dotted with beaches. Shallow hills like green tumuli stretch away landwards, studded with bushes of myrtle and thyme—a haunt for the red-legged partridges and the rock dove. The road is a bad one, so that we were quite surprised to catch Mills up by the time we reached the little harbor of Cameiro Skala. As we lumbered up across the plain we saw why he had stopped. Three yellow fishing boats had just put in and were piling up their catch. In the middle of a chaffering crowd of Symiot fishermen Mills was standing, blond and stocky, bargaining for half a dozen red mullet. Gideon’s resourceful eye had already noticed a tavern by the roadside, and here we waited for the deal to be closed,
drinking a mastika that tasted like horse embrocation and listening to the squibbling of a clarinet played by a fisher boy. Here, too, we met the inevitable American Greek who made the inevitable comparison between Detroit and this “lousy country,” and complimented us on speaking our mother tongue as well as we did. Gideon flew into a temper with him: “You stinking empty-headed son-of-a-bitch,” he said, with an excellent imitation of a New York accent, “why the hell do you come back here and poison the air of your mother country with your cheap snarls and your passion for Coca Cola?” The man recoiled as if he had received a push in the chest. Hoyle clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Really, Gideon,” he said. “An officer and a gentleman simply doesn’t, you know.” Gideon adjusted his eyeglass. “Perhaps he doesn’t,” he said mildly. “But I do, old man. I definitely do. The cheek of these people.” Mills by this time had concluded his business and stowed the fish in the toolbox of his car. We set off pursued by the cries of “Good journey” “Come back soon.” Greeks adore partings.