On the Island of Fire - Four Tales of Santorini

by Linda Talbot

  The Earthquake

  Spiros stumbles through the rattling black stones of the volcano. His uncle Dimitri, with two distant and rather dull relatives, has stalked off, his gruff voice and heavy footsteps soon fading.

  Now there is no one - only the jagged black rocks that cooled over the centuries to creatures with claws and gaping mouths, windowless turrets, an old man with a wizened beard. And sharp stones that were thrown in fury against the ground - now as silent as the surface of the moon. The sun beats down, but Spiros shivers.

  He starts along a steep path, slipping in his old rubber shoes; the stones tumbling eerily under his feet. “Uncle Dimitri!” he cries. His voice bounces back over the rocks. There is no reply.

  Spiros knows volcanoes erupt and that, many years ago, the biggest volcano in history blew apart the island of Santorini where he lives. The island had been round, but now it is shaped like a horseshoe and other islands have appeared in the deep bay where the middle collapsed.

  Spiros is lost on The New Burnt One, which still erupts and now hisses softly as he climbs. “Don’t erupt today.” His lonely voice drifts unheeded over the stones.

  As if in reply, the island rumbles. He slithers as he starts to run between the fierce faces of the grumbling black beast, the turrets with bent tops sharp as razors, the litter of burnt pebbles beneath his feet.

  He stops before a jagged rock, towering with a long zig zag, cut by volcanic force. It broods in the late afternoon sun and suddenly Spiros sees, through the crack, hissing steam. It eddies against the white hot sky, followed by a shooting flame, licking the corners of the crack like a hungry tongue.

  “The volcano is going to erupt!” shudders Spiros and wants to run away. But, as though they do not belong to him, his feet carry him towards the rock. Through the steam, Spiros hears a low groan and a bubbling voice, filled with fire, utters, “Help! Come here boy, and help me!”

  Peering inside, Spiros sees nothing. “The crack’s too narrow, I can’t get through,” he says. But he is wrong. As he draws close, it widens, and he is able to walk inside. Smoke swirls. The heat is intense. He coughs.

  “Come closer!” pleads the fiery voice, and in the dimness, Spiros can just see a writhing mass of coils, like slippery serpents hopelessly entangled. Drooping on the ground are vast shapes that look like wings, and high above them, a hundred dragon-like heads, each with a gibbering voice. Fire flashes from the many eyes and from the mouths fall rocks that glimmer, their fires dying as they hit the ground.

  “W-w-w-what are you?” gasps Spiros, terrified.

  “What AM I?” gibber fifty of the voices at once. “I am TYPHON, the most miraculous monster. I took these islands and threw them around like stones. I was born of the Earth and the Underworld. I terrorise the Gods of Mount Olympus. They ran away to Egypt dressed as animals. Ha-ha!”

  “Except Zeus,” mutter several of the fainter voices. “He stayed and fought me. I stole his strength and hid the sinews in a cave. Then a prince, dressed as a shepherd, tricked me into giving them back, pretending he wanted them as strings for his lyre.

  “There’s a rumour that Zeus threw the island of Sicily at me and that I’m buried under the volcano of Mount Etna. But as you see, that’s not true. It’s Enceladus, the last of the giants he fought, who’s lying under Mount Etna. I caused the first BIG BANG here, you know, that shattered Santorini.”

  “That’s nothing to be proud of,” points out Spiros.

  “But now look at me,” continue most of the voices dismally. “I’ve been cramped inside this rock for years and my coils are so entangled, I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels. Help me get sorted out, boy.”

  Plucking up courage, Spiros says, “Why should I? You’ll erupt again. Then where shall we be?”

  Typhon heaves his tangled coils irritably, trying and failing to belch fire from his many mouths. Spiros hopes he is powerless while in such a muddle. But he is wrong.

  Typhon lashes at him with four of his writhing serpents, their eyes glinting in the dark, their jaws snapping. Spiros scrambles up the slippery mass of the monster’s body. The smoke billows more thickly and Spiros almost chokes. But he clambers on, clinging to the slippery scales. He tumbles head over heels, onto the fiery ground and Typhon’s many hot voices grow fainter as Spiros totters to the edge of a vast molten sea - the middle of the volcano - heaving as restlessly as Typhon seeking release.

  “You can’t swim in there!” huff Typhon’s distant voices. Spiros agrees.

  THULP THULP heaves the red hot liquid.This is what pours out when Typhon erupts, thinks Spiros, gasping for breath. I suppose I shall have to help disentangle him or I shall never get out.

  Spiros steps gingerly with burning feet over the red hot ground and can soon see Typhon’s eyes gleaming like lamps in the dark. The monster gurgles and groans in his hundred voices and as he shuffles his coils, the ground shakes.

  “I’ll help you if you promise to keep quiet,” says Spiros bravely. He might as well have asked a cat not to eat a canary.

  “Agreed,” burbles Typhon, unconvincingly.

  But Spiros does not know where to begin. The serpents that writhe below Typhon’s waist are knotted and irritable. How can he prise them apart? Spiros slithers up one and down another. They snap at him and their dry scales scrape his skin.

  “If you can’t do it, I shall blow you up!” threatens Typhon, spitting a few feeble rocks from his mouth. “It won’t be as grand as the first time, but I think I can manage an earthquake.”

  Desperately, Spiros pushes, pulls and stumbles, heaving up and down in the darkness and smoke. “I can’t do anything to help,” he sobs at last. “You’re too big and in too much of a muddle.”

  “Then I shall blow you all about like pebbles,” retorts Typhon. Spiros feels the serpents sucking him down, down, down....

  Typhon – in too much of a muddle for Spiros to untangle.

  He wakes outside the zig zag rock. The sun is low in the sky and distantly, he hears a voice. “Spiros, where are you?” His uncle Dimitri.

  “Here!” he cries, stumbling dizzily to his feet. His uncle appears over the black rim of the path. “We’ve been searching for you everywhere,” he says. Spiros looks at the narrow entrance to the rock and cannot imagine he has been inside. He cannot hear Typhon, but the ground is still hot under his feet as he sets off with his uncle and the relatives - who now seem even duller - for the boat at the bottom of the path.

  “And the monster with a hundred heads and coiled serpents instead of arms and legs, strode through the Aegean, scattering the Cyclades like white stones....” reads uncle Dimitri from the book of legends at bed time. Spiros, who shudders in the warm night, feels again the scrape of dry scales.

  Two years later, in 1956, a violent earthquake shakes Santorini. Much of the island lies in ruins. Luckily Spiros and his family had left for a holiday in Athens. Many people from Santorini join them there, never to return to the island.

  Only Spiros knows what really happened. His teacher explains how the earth’s crust had cracked with pressure from the rock within, but Spiros knows it was Typhon, entangled and enraged, who was to blame.

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