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

by Lawrence Durrell

  The road winds steeply uphill, past the old Frankish fort called Castello today, and then turns abruptly inland: and rising out of the cluster of hills before us, we saw the frowning crags of Atabyron, the chief mountain of the island. Its massifs of shining black towered up into the sky from a green vegetation line marking the site of Embona. Atabyron in that lucid morning air looked more like some invention of man than a natural phenomenon, it was as if some prodigious rough model for a statue had been abandoned here. The wind and rain had eroded it. The winter snows had polished its slippery black surface until it glinted with a bluish light, as charcoal does. It lay with all the massive pregnancy of a liner at anchor among the lesser hills, and as we climbed towards it the air became thinner, and bluer, while the mountain villages glittered in its rareness like clusters of lump sugar.

  Up there on the final crag, from which one could faintly see the mountains of Crete, had once stood the little temple to Zeus where the great sacred bull had uttered its oracles. There is evidence to suggest that the sacred bull cult had not concerned itself with the worship of a live animal but with a gigantic bronze representation of it, in which the bodies of human beings had been placed, to roast over a fire. Their cries and groans, it is suggested, may have been taken for prophecies.

  Tasting the blue refinements of that air, and watching the geological structure change to granite, we felt the first pangs of hunger steal upon us, though we were far from our objective—Monolithos. We stopped in an orange grove outside Embona and nibbled some bread and fruit, while Gideon cracked a bottle of wine. He had got into the habit of “fining” himself for little errors of taste or judgment. “Damn,” he would say, “I fine myself two glasses of red.” Or else “I simply can’t let that pass without fining myself a glass of white.” Needless to say he derived a certain pleasure from this odd method of self-punishment. Now he fined himself for his rudeness to the American Greek of Cameiro Skala while Hoyle watched him with all the weight of his unexpressed distaste apparent in his expression. “Your liver will have to pay up in the end,” he remarked sourly.

  We passed the road to Embona and turned right, to circle the great charred butt of Atabyron, whose stony ramps of black rock made it seem more than ever medieval—like some old black-letter bible rotting away in a museum.… Gideon showed some disposition to try and climb it but we shouted him down. Monolithos lay ahead, and we pushed on across this razor-back landscape of rock and thistle, punctuated everywhere by springs gushing out of the side of the mountain, and giant walnut trees, Artamiti … Saint Isidore (whoever he may be). The air was thickly scented with pines now, for we were descending gradually.

  To reach Monolithos you must crash over the brow of a hill and think that you are falling into the sea. Miraculously, however, you see that the dirt road continues, and the great hump of rock stabs at you, rising out of the sea like a pointing finger. You crawl down almost to sea level before you reach the pine glade lying at the foot of the castle. “How Mills ever got down here without breaking his neck I don’t know,” mutters Hoyle as he eases the big Mercedes into the hollow with circumspection. But Mills is sitting in a cleft of stone at the very top of the castle, tossing pine cones into the sea, and singing at the top of his voice.

  There was everything to be said for singing. In that dry clement sunlight we climbed the grassy staircases to the summit. Everywhere there were tiny dells dense with anemone and daisies. Chloe had flung herself down between two knuckles of rock, and when she sat up to welcome us we saw that she was covered with bright yellow pollen. The summit of Monolithos is like some great sculptured lion’s paw; between the claws thick mossy carpets have grown up, fed by some underground spring, no doubt, and here you may lie down in beds of flowers for all the world as if you were still in the lowland glades around Rodini. It was in one of these that we had lunch and talked, idly watching the kestrels dip in the blue gulfs beneath us, and the little colored lizards scrabble about among the crannies of the rock.

  Afterwards, Mills and I went off together and climbed the tower of the Byzantine chapel to see if one could spit directly into the sea from this vantage point. Mills was of a distinctly competitive turn of mind. He was always thinking up feats of this kind to test his native skill. Spitting over bridges, playing ducks-and-drakes upon a calm sea, diving for pennies—there was nothing that he would not do for the sheer pleasure of doing something active and, if possible, slightly irresponsible. In the intervals of spitting over the cliff he said: “I say, have you ever looked at Gideon’s monocle? I picked it up yesterday while he was asleep, to see how weak his eye was. Do you know what?”

  “No. What?”

  “It’s made of ordinary glass.”

  “But what’s the point of that?” Mills sighed and dusted his blue pea jacket with his hands. “Humanity is so constructed that when it wants to hide something it is forced to accentuate it, to throw it into relief: I doubt if you’d notice Gideon’s glass eye at all if the poor old thing hadn’t drawn attention to it by wearing that monocle.” I had not noticed any signs of shyness about Gideon, I must say, and the idea came as rather a surprise to me. “But Gideon could carry a couple of glass eyes and a pair of wooden legs with ease,” I exclaimed. “He bluffs his way through life like a tenth century man-at-arms.” Mills jumped down from the rock and began picking flowers. “Have you never heard Gideon’s own definition of an Englishman?” he asked. “It fits him perfectly. An Englishman may be defined as a soft-centered creature with a tough and horny shell, through which two sensitive antennae (humor and prejudice) explore the world around him.”

  The journey down into the flat and featureless valley to Cattavia was uneventful. Gideon discovered Hoyle’s copy of the Abbe Cutlet in a pocket of the car and regaled us with quotations in an exaggeratedly correct French accent. “Après Lindos, Cattavia,” he intoned, “paysage plus riant.” It wasn’t really “riant”—simply a stretch of alluvial marshland, poorly cultivated, and lying at the back of the eroded mountain we had crossed. After an hour or so we hit the nondescript, flatfish, amorphous coastal belt, with a few villages fast asleep in their flea-tormented isolation. Here sunlight was a drug.

  Nearing Lindos, however, it all changed abruptly and rose up into a gnarled rock-hewn landscape—a coast bitten out in huge mouthfuls of metamorphic rock, gleaming dully with mica, and shot through with the colors of iron and trap. It was as if a storm at sea had suddenly been solidified and compressed into these frowning capes and fastnesses of colored rock. The sea boomed upon the sand of the long beaches, while everywhere the rusty wire and the skull with its legend “Achtung Minen” spoke Prussian to us. To the east tiny figures knelt in a frieze along the thundering coastline, as if engaged in some obscure rite. They were lifting mines. Even from this great range one could see the tense preoccupation that convulsed them, kneeling there within the sound of the sea, burrowing in the sand with their nervous fingers. Later at a bend in the coast road we saw the little island where Lady Hester Stanhope was washed up. It is called “the biscuit”* on the charts today.

  Doubling back a quarter of a mile before Calato you come upon Lindos through a narrow gulley of rock. It is as if you had been leaning against a door leading to a poem when suddenly it swung open letting you stumble directly into the heart of it. The road bores through a blank wall of rock and turns sharply to the right, running down an inclined plane. Lindos with its harbor lies below you—as if at the bottom of a pie dish. The configurations of the promontory upon which the town is built suggest something like the talons of the crab. The little harbor is all but landlocked and the blue of it drenches you like spray. The beach shallows are picked out in lime-green and yellow, against the reddish, deckle-edged surfaces of stone. In the air above it rides the acropolis. It does not insist. It can afford not to presume, so certain of the impact which it must make on everyone who comes upon it through the gulley in the rock. Is not Lindos the official beauty spot of Rhodes? The contrast with Cameirus is remarkable—f
or where Cameirus is refined, turned in upon itself in sunny contemplation, Lindos is bold, strident. Cameirus has all the stillness of an amphora in a Museum, with its frieze of dancers caught in a timeless dancing; Lindos, under the sweetness of its decoration, is like a trumpet call, beaten out in gold leaf and vibrating across the blue airs of time.

  The little modern town which lies at the foot of the acropolis is perhaps a quarter of the size of ancient Lindos. Its beauty is of a scrupulous Aegean order, and perfect in its kind. The narrow streets which rise and fall like music are paved with clean sea pebbles, and crisscrossed with little inter-communicating alleys. Their width is enough to accommodate two mules abreast, but no car can enter them. Everything is painted white, a dazzling glitter of plaster and whitewash, so that if you half closed your eyes you might imagine that Lindos reflected back the snowy reflections of a passing cloud.

  We had intended to sleep on the summit of the acropolis, but the women declared that they would prefer beds, so we accordingly did what all travelers in Greece must sooner or later learn to do if they explore areas where there are no hotels. In the sunny tavern of Lindos we asked for the mayor of the town, and when he arrived, introduced ourselves and set him down to drink a glass of wine with us. He was eager enough to help, and without much difficulty managed to find rooms for us. The nature of Greek hospitality is such that no traveler who flings himself upon the mercies of a village “demarchos” will ever go bedless.

  The sun was low, but there was still time to admire the little Greek church, inspect samples of the famous Lindos ware in some private villas, and admire the four or five Crusader houses which were still standing, and in excellent repair. All the latter were inhabited by Greek families who offered us cups of coffee and the polite possibility of a political discussion. Mills did his “Florence Nightingale act” as he called it, and visited the sick. By the time he came back to the tavern we had sorted the baggage and prepared such food as we had to carry up the acropolis. The sun was westering rapidly as we walked up the winding paths of the Acropolis behind Markos, the guardian of the site. He was a slow-spoken, lazy-looking man, with a fine head set well back on broad shoulders; his broken nose gave him a slanting quizzical expression. He had been a commercial traveler and regretted that we spoke Greek, for he would dearly have loved to conduct the party in French, which he said he knew well. He was as breathless as we were, however, by the time we reached the carved rock relief of the ship which marks the entry to the fort, and which had been executed in ancient times as a trophy—perhaps even to celebrate the long Thalassocratia of the Rhodians, which endured some twenty-three years of naval competition about 900 BCE. Markos sat him down on a stone and waited for his breath to come back as he rubbed his hands along the stone bows of the vessel. He accepted a cigarette from Mills who had completed the ascent at record speed, and who betrayed no signs of strain. “You’re too healthy,” said Gideon.

  Hoyle had been left miles behind, resting on a convenient rock and staring down into that blue circle of sea whose outer end is marked by a stone tomb rising out of the sea which, say some authorities, is where Cleobolus is buried. I walked back to accompany him. As we toiled up the hill, he chatted knowledgeably about Athene Lindia who had been worshipped in Ancient Lindos with “flameless sacrifices.” It was at the remains of the temple of Athene that we found the others. They were lying on their stomachs and gazing down six hundred feet into the eye of the sea—that peacock-green twilight eye, glimmering with caverns and deeps where only enough light penetrated to print the diffuse markings of rock and seaweed. Markos, the guide, was in full flight. “This is Athene Lindia’s temple. There.” He picked up a pebble and threw it. “There, the temple of Zeus Polieus.” Nobody, I am sorry to say, was listening to him. Down there on that darkening water lay a tiny fishing boat like a model. “Listen,” said E. In the silence, like the voice of an insect, came the thin strains of a fisherman singing. The sound slanted up at us through the canyons of colored rock. We stared down it, watching the curdled greens and reds of the seaweed wavering under it. From this height we could see fish moving under the boat which were invisible to fishermen, traveling in little phosphorescent sparks of light. “Athene Lindia” I was repeating to myself, like an incantation. Somewhere there had been a grove of sacred olives dedicated to her. Pindar’s great ode on Diagoras of Ialysos had been graven on tablets and placed in the temple. In the height of her glory strangers had sent her offerings from Syria and Egypt.

  The sun had been sucked down into the sea; dazzling spokes of silver spread out for a moment on the blue, as if from some great lighthouse. Then the uniform dusk. “Cleobolus was a remarkable old thing,” Hoyle was saying, for the stream of classical evocations which had seemed to dwindle away had suddenly come to life again. The fisherman was out of sight, his singing out of sound. “Tell us about him, Markos.” Markos took a deep breath and fired out his knowledge in demotic. “He traveled in Egypt, was very beautiful, and wrote thousands of lovely acrostics, distiches, and other verse. He was one of the Wise Men, and a close personal friend of Solon. He lived to be seventy years old. His famous epigram ‘Nothing in excess’ is one which the Greeks have treasured to this day.”

  “But haven’t lived up to,” said Gideon dryly. Markos avoided his eye and pretended that he had not heard the interruption. “He was, with Pythagoras, one of the first to admit women into the circle of knowledge,” he said amiably baring his teeth at E. “His daughter Cleobulina was also a writer and left many beautiful poems.”

  It was getting chilly. We made a leisurely circuit of the battlements, peering down into the little inlet where, says popular tradition, St. Paul was shipwrecked on one of his many voyages. Out at sea the light was fading upon four little islands which Markos pointed out to us; the fourth was a mere shaving of rock awash when the sea was rough. “Look,” said the guide, “those islands they call Tetrapolis.”

  “Who does?”

  “Everybody. The people of Lindos. In ancient times, they say, four cities were there, and all of them sank in a great earthquake.” Gideon was getting restive. He preferred sharper lines of demarcation between legend and attested fact. “Who says this?” he demanded—and to do him justice you will not find the story of Tetrapolis in any of the authenticated histories.

  “Since before my grandfather they say so.”

  “But who says so?”

  Markos became a trifle impatient. He waved his arm like a wand over the dusky village beneath us. “Everyone,” he said with a trace of sulkiness. “Is it true?” said Gideon. Markos nodded vigorously. “Once,” he said, “the truth was proved to me by sponge divers. Every summer they worked this coast and everyday I drank with them in the tavern. They had seen columns of marble and statues under the sea when they dived for sponges. Once they gave me some coins which they had brought up and I sold them to a German for bread.”

  We slept well that night at the tavern, and next morning did the run to Rhodes in good style, wheeling up through the rock face where the road turns at right angles to run down to the green plains by Calato. The jagged ruin of Pheraclyea lay on the coast to our right, but Gideon had assured us from an earlier visit that nothing remained of the fort but rubble, and that extensive minefields thereabouts made it hazardous for tourists.

  We lumbered through Malona and past the sunburnt farms which the Italian government had subsidized and settled with Sienese farmers—one of the richest agricultural areas in Rhodes. Here Gideon stopped for a brief chat with his Italian overseer. Many of the families had stayed on to wait for a passage to Italy, and they still worked the fields as they had always done, singing and smiling.

  The road curls around the shaft of the mountain called Tsambika and through a pass, so that the entry to this second valley is nearly as sudden as the entry upon Lindos.

  But at last we ran out along the final spine of the island and saw, at a turn of the road, the spires and turrets of the capital come into view. Here there was time for
a final cup of coffee before separating about our various business. We took it under an olive tree, on dry grass already waking up to the drumming of cicadas.

  My heart sinks as I think of the mass of proofs, of correspondence, of files, which await me.

  Mills starts up his car and gets into it slowly. “We have a little while yet,” he says. “Before they scatter us all over the world.” The dust rises on the road as the cavalcade sets off.

  * I am wrong. It was at Lindos or perhaps Malona.

  * The bat-infested underground water conduits of Cameirus I never had the courage to explore until one memorable day when Paddy and Xan and the Corn Goddess shamed me into following them down its dark tunnels.

  * Paximadi.

  The Age of the Knights

  XV mile the See brode is

  From Turky to the He of Rodez

  At the beginning of this Ile

  Wit in but a litell while

  Is a thorp that hight Newtoun:

  And on a hull there alle alonen,

  Is a Castell stiff, and strong,

  That some tyme was a cite strong.

  The Castell hight men saie soo

  Sancta Maria de Fulmaro.…*

  A strong toun Rodez hit is,

  The Castell is strong and fair I wis.

  —MATTHEW PARIS,

  Purchas His Pilgrimes

  WHEN IN THE sweltering July heat of the year 1099 the city of Jerusalem fell at long last to the Crusaders, the Rhodians might have claimed a share in the victory, though they played no part in the appalling massacres that followed it—when some seventy thousand human beings were butchered in the streets, and when the Crusaders who had dispatched them, knelt upon the blood-stained cobbles of the Redeemer’s shrine, “weeping from excess of joy,” to give thanks for their victory. The sea transports of Rhodes had helped to provision the besiegers. But even before this the island had sent out supplies to the Crusaders when their forces were encamped about Antioch. In this they exercised a religious rather than a political preference, though it is hard to distinguish between the two in the affairs of this age.