In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Sunday 11 June

  Out by car with Mr Nicolaïdis, the Yanina mountaineer, and Robin and Renée to Kónitsa, and through Kalpáki to the Aoös River. We arranged for Mr Tássos, an ex-schoolmaster and watchmaker, to be our guide.

  We went in the little steamer to the beautiful lake-island which was full of Sunday crowds. Ancient plane trees surround the monasteries. We visited the scene of Ali Pasha’s death, then on through a corridor of tall reeds to a marvellous feast of crayfish, frogs and trout, where we were sent a bottle of wine by a party of Cretans (in my honour: because of the TV programme with Gen Kreipe and his captors). We dined in a taverna near the caves at the end of the lake, where more wine was sent to us for the same splendid reason.

  Monday 12 June

  Renée, Robin and I bought stores all morning. Then after packing and sorting, we went back for an even better luncheon of crayfish, frog and trout, with croaking all round us. We drove to Dodóni, the site of the ancient oracle, now lost in the oak woods: august and severe in the heart of bleak hills with drifts of shale and rustling ilex spinneys; mullein grows everywhere. We took our three mountaineer friends and Mr Nicolaïdis’s pretty wife to a return feast at the Epirote place of our first night. Late to bed.

  Tuesday 13 June

  Up early this morning. Sending all our heavy stuff to Papigo in one taxi, we headed for Kónitsa in another. (The policeman at the beginning of the forbidden zone, close to the Albanian frontier, was a Cretan from Alpha, near Réthymnon, who once brought me a message to Prinés when he was a small boy.)

  We found Mr Tásso Eythimíou and set off on foot from the wonderful Turkish bridge which crosses the Aoös River like a rainbow, then followed the spectacular gorge; and passed the ruins of a Byzantine fort which the Turks captured by dressing up as Orthodox monks. He told us that the mosque above the rainbow bridge (once painted by Edward Lear) was said to have been ordered by Suleiman the Magnificent.

  Our path was an overhanging canyon of rock and forest, split up into shade and sun by the early light. A green trout-laden brook rushed through boulders beside an up-and-down switchback path that led to the closed 18th-century monastery of Stómion, which had been blown up by the Germans as a Zervas * guerrilla stronghold, then roughly rebuilt. It stands on a rock above the river.

  From here our way zigzagged uphill through thickening woods of pine, walnut, sycamore, plane and chestnut, ever wider and taller, but so steep we halted more and more frequently. Renée felt awful: I too. It was much too much to take on for the first day. Suddenly Andrew was smitten down, and had to rest every few yards, looking green and ominous and feeling miserable. Carl and Robin helped him along; not his fault, he had been shooting ahead in his best Peruvian style till then. The forest grew steeper and higher. I had awful cramp, legs like cast-iron drainpipes. There were long waits for the others to catch up; a nightmare ascent for all. The heights of Smólikas and Grámmos soar beyond the tree trunks. These mysterious woods full of birds, the haunt of deer, wild goat, boar, bears and wolves.

  One of our helpers got on all our nerves, especially by shouting a bit hysterically when we were crossing drifts of snow. We cut steps with our picks, then spent ages crossing steep landslides where the whole planet seemed to be on the move. At last we got to the longed-for point where waterfalls came roaring down and an icy wind drove through a steep funnel of the mountains. It was here that I suddenly realised I had left my rucksack behind at one of our stops, and our helper leapt back into favour by going back for it, a true benefactor: I felt so tired it was nearly beyond me and Andrew arrived looking awful and collapsed on the grass wishing the earth would swallow him.

  In the end it was decided that Carl and Robin would stay the night with him somewhere out of the wind where they could kindle a fire, and catch us up tomorrow. We left them all our warm stuff but were terribly worried.

  A stiff climb followed, up a steep funnel of tumbled rock and boulders with another snow-torrent rushing down it. We crossed it many times, climbing hand-over-foot, slipping and starting landslides, and falling in. It went on for an hour and a half, with night not far off.

  But when at last we reached the top, we found Alpine meadows and new ranges rearing up all round us like a gathering of castles. They were Gamíla and Astrákas. There was a tinkling and a clanking of flocks, a few scattered tarns, buttercups and lithospernum and banks of snow streaking along the hollows.

  Huge black-and-white dogs dashed at us barking fiercely. Then a tall and fine-looking Sarakatsán * of the Tsouman clan turned up, splendid in black hooded cloak and steel-hooked crook across his shoulders. We hobnobbed for a while, sitting on the grass, his dogs panting all round him; then trudged on over heartless tracts of shale till we reached the Refuge just as it was getting dark. It is a beautifully fitted-out hut of the Pindus Mountaineering Society, opened and made ready by our pack-driver, who had arrived earlier from Papigo with another eager young drover called Theodore and three horses, our stuff and a few more young Sarakatsáns and their dogs. We told him to take ropes and slings and pints of hot tea down the ghastly giants’ causeway tomorrow morning to help Carl, Robin and Andrew. Renée cooked a delicious stew of bully beef and onions, preceded and followed by plenty of whisky. Mr Tássos seems much nicer all of a sudden. We went to bed in tiered bunks – it was rather like being in a four-poster – dog-tired and rather anxious.

  One of the worst bits that afternoon was crossing a slanting acre of scree entirely covered with huge umbellifers and a six-foot-high forest of stinging nettles, only passable by holding our ice picks over our heads and laying about with them like battle-axes. Ah, the slipping on the pine needles and the steep grass underfoot! The solid-looking blocks we lurched across came loose and hurtled downhill in avalanches.

  We saw three snakes, one brown, one green and a rather sinister one symmetrically speckled in a pattern of black and white. I started a pheasant and two ptarmigans rattled through the branches. Bright-coloured butterflies abound – including Red Admirals and Purple Emperors. There was a plant that looked like gunnera in the deeper canyons, and sudden bursts of hellebore and yellow marguerites scattered the meadows above, and crimson and purple anemones, and small flowers like forget-me-nots.

  Wednesday 14 June

  Tássos and Theodore went down with three horses, some Vitamin B pills, ropes, carabinas and flasks of hot tea wrapped up in newspaper. But after breakfast Carl arrived at the hut as cool as a cucumber; he and Robin had helped Andrew up that infernal path and traversed the meadows with the flocks, then taken the scree-path to this Refuge, all without seeing the horses; they must have missed each other on the opposite sides of a large intervening bluff. Then the other two appeared, Andrew looking much better. What a relief ! Theodore came back two hours later. He had gone all the way down, found the remains of the fire, shouted for a while with no answer, climbed back again. An eager, nice, intelligent boy. How lovely to be among mountain people again!

  They had spent a warm night in a sheltered nook of the rocks, keeping a fire going all night; Andrew had been enveloped in one of those silver emergency blankets that fold up to the size of a bar of chocolate.

  This has been a day of rest and recuperation. Yesterday’s 12-hour climb should have been seven at the outside. It was a wringing ordeal for the most hardened. We are on a ridge overlooking a wandering hollow of bright grass and we watch Egyptian vultures sailing past below us and settling beside the tarns with which the hollow is sprinkled. To the north lie the massifs of Smólikas and Grámmos, and the skyline is jagged with millions of pine trees; the other side of the now-invisible Aoös River, and to the east is Ploská, behind which lies the Gamíla massif and to the south are steep green overgrown landslides; and just in front soars the jagged Bastille of Astrákas: perpendicular limestone cliffs and needles that look totally unscalable, but which are nevertheless to be assailed.

  To the west, between Astrákas and another great nearby bluff, an immense vista unfolds: range upon range,
dominated to the northwest by the massif of Nemétzikas beyond which loom the peaks of Albania. They run on to Chimára and the Acroceraunian range and from the top of Astrákas, the Adriatic can be descried, with Corfu floating along the horizon in mid-air.

  Most of this day of recovery is being spent lolling about the stone terraces outside the shelter, and chatting with the Sarakatsáns who gather every now and then; all belong to the Tsoumánides clan. Their flocks are scattered on many of the green levels and round the lakes; horses graze there as well and ply to and fro between the milking-fold and some cheese-huts about a mile away, beyond the bluff, laden with great tin milk-cans, flat on one side for lashing on wooden saddles. The nearest flocks are all sheep, except for the enormous black-and-white ram that leads them, and several smaller goats – NCOs – wearing heavier bells with a deeper note than the sheep’s light chimes; all of them unite in a fluctuating chord that hovers in the air. We are well above the tree line and it’s a magnificent scene, though rather a bleak one with its sweeps of grey shale, relieved by the blue tarns, the grazing horses and the flocks; great masses, like pinnacled cathedrals rise into a blazing sky, and beneath us a tremendous vista of mountain-ranges recedes, floating dim and far.

  Renée and I remained alone in the shelter while the others scrambled to the top of the bluff to have a look round. To my consternation, a small caravan of laden horses appeared from the direction of Papigo. It was Mr Ioannidis, the mayor, and two brothers, Mr Christodoulou, and a local civil servant from Patmos. Renée went to break the news to Robin and the others. They had come for the night to see that we were all right and they turned out to be both delightful and helpful, and we had a great banquet. They lit flares with Butagaz cylinders to signal their achievement in getting here to doubting souls in the village below; then they packed snow into buckets to cool bottles of ouzo and fizzy wine from Zítza (where Byron and Hobhouse stayed for a night or two) and unloaded all sorts of good things – delicious fresh tomatoes, onions and garlic, excellent tyrópites and alevrópites (cheesecake and fritters), and two punnets of strawberries. It was a happy evening, full of friendly and jovial chat about the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Augustus, King Pyrrhus, the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns.

  Thursday 15 June

  Our guests – or hosts – left early, with promises of reunion in Papigo. After breakfast we set off down the steep approach path in the direction of Gamíla – grudging every inch of height lost – then through alternating layers of scree, rock and grass, climbing over stretches of snow and up the massive blocks and bands of rock beyond Ploská to the first of the rock-blades which jut into the void to the north; they form a fan of humps which gives the range the name of ‘Camel’, though it is more like a dromedary with many humps; and I remember peering up at them from leagues away on the Metsovo road ten years ago with Coote Lygon and Joan, never dreaming that one day I’d be in these terrific heights.

  Gentians cluster in every fissure. Some of the rocky wastes we crossed resemble scores of wrinkled and interlocking polygons with clefts plunging all round them, jagged and pocked and spiked: ankle-breaking yataghan terrain of the kind that used to make Xan and me blaspheme in Crete. We made exciting descents of the snow-drifts later on, half ski-ing on our heels, as it were, and braking with our ice-axes. Robin and Carl were experts at this.

  At one vantage point we watched a hawk pursuing a marten, which took refuge under a rock while the hawk circled and swooped fiercely, but in vain. Rock-finches – grey when settled, black and white in flight – fluttered about the wilderness: in this treeless amphitheatre enormous grey mineral blocks were tumbled into galleries, buttresses, bands and pinnacles. It seemed all wind and sun.

  We ate raisins, chocolate and almonds, sprawling beside a lake in a basin under the peaks from which, two days ago, we had looked down at the conifer-spiked watersheds we had threaded; and, over the now-invisible Aoös river, at the three eagle-nest villages, with their windows all gleaming, on the wooded flanks of Mt Smólikas. The frogs croaked in the lake, salamanders flickered about the shallows. (During the Occupation, SOE [3] used to make parachute drops of arms and stores in the hollow below.)

  After a lake-side snooze, we went down by easy stages over snow and rock and grass, treading on lovely green lawns covered with flowers, and surrounded by rings of grey rock – glade on descending glade – until we were down again by the lake under our hut, where a score of hobbled Sarakatsán horses were grazing. Then – an unkind final touch – came the gruelling climb to our Refuge, with the sweat pouring off us. Andrew, to all our amazement, declared he was vexed by his lack of stamina the day before and immediately charged down to the bottom, then back to the top again, without drawing breath, in what seemed record time. An astonishing performance.

  Delicious lentils for supper. We slept out, dozing off under millions of stars.

  Friday 16 June

  I awoke on the stone terrace, after a marvellous night, to see Carl, Renée and Robin rope-slung and axe-grasping, moving off to tackle the great hump of Astrákas. I followed them with binoculars for an hour or so. They were moving at high speed, up landslides, then across snowdrifts, till they disappeared in a fold, to re-appear much higher, later on, much smaller. Peter has his tripod camera geared to the summit, but we will probably miss them.

  Andrew has set off with flower-presses under his arm to the regions we crossed yesterday to try and find some specimens. He has been doing a lot of prep at Kew but, as it was with Kurdistan in view, it may not be much help in the Pindus. He sounds dazzlingly proficient to my untutored ear.

  I’m writing this at the indoor table at the Refuge, and I have looked up twice to find a tall Sarakatsán leaning on his crook, peering down, and only exchanging greetings after I say something. All the time, while we chat over a cigarette, his eyes flicker away to all the elaborate photographic gear that litters the table. I feel a bit ashamed to be surrounded by all this opulent stuff in front of these austere men.

  The Astrákas party, then Andrew, got back in the early afternoon, both fully successful. It is swelteringly hot, and very misty in the valleys.

  At four, Theodore turned up with the mules. We had cleared up the shelter and left it bright as a new pin.

  Robin, Andrew and I started off downhill and the others followed with the beasts. It was steep and shingly at first and dotted with small pine trees. A scattered forest of juniper came next; then we were sauntering down through park-like ledges of green with poplar and hazel and tall, queerly lopped oaks, stopping to drink now and then at charming springs. It was like Paradise, all the trees casting long shadows, thousands of flowers, eglantine climbing everywhere: hellebore, geranium, alyssum; down, down . . . We sat for a while by a spring and a slate-roofed shrine to St Panteleimon under a plane tree where an old crone came to fill the icon lamp. Then all at once we were in the steep, slanting lanes and the massive walls of Papigo. We found quarters at the inn of Cléarchos Starás, a fine old house where we sat out and drank shandy gaff, our new passion, looking down on the armadillo-roofs of the village while goats came down from the mountains in clouds of dust, bells clanking. The church is a three-apsed basilica in a gallery of squat pillars and with a free-standing belfry among gigantic planes and ilexes. There are flocks everywhere.

  Dinner under the plane trees. There were lachanópita (spinach pasties) with much wine and lots of strawberries. Our mountain friends of the other night all came and we sang for a while. Mountain bastions towered overhead.

  Saturday 17 June

  Two cars from Yanina had arranged to pick up our stuff and meet us in Víkos.

  We got up at dawn and set off, with Stratí quoting the Latin names of all the plants we passed; he had an active hunting bitch on a lead and loosed her on the mountains; she was off in a flash, yelping after hares or foxes. His conversation was all about Miss Devlin [4] being allowed to say what she likes: ‘Lucky English! Lucky Bernadette, to belong to so great and civilised a country! Democracy
in action! No wonder England is loved and respected!’ He’s very much against the present Colonels’ regime here. Quite right.

  We slanted down the steep northern bank of the Víkos gorge, past jagged pinnacles of rock like rotting tusks, descending into the plane-tree-shaded headwaters of the Voïdomátis River: they came roaring out of the rock and twisted away in a deep, right-angled and leaf-dappled zigzag, teeming with trout, under diving swallows, a nymph-haunted, nereid-struck place. We lolled here in the green shadows, then climbed across meadows with cows grazing and up the steep twists and turns of this extraordinary gorge to the sleepy and half-deserted village of Víkos, where we lay under another giant plane outside a handsome triapsidal church and watched the schoolmaster with ten little boys and girls, superintending the hoisting of the flag, then prayers and the singing of the National Anthem. Hopelessly tuneless mites.

  Vassílis and Dimitri turned up with two taxis and off we rolled through the leafy and soporific blaze, back through Kalpáki, down to the plain (where I saw the Cretan gendarme again) then up into the Zagorochória, through Vítsi and Monodéndri. Stupendously beautiful. The houses might be in the Cotswolds, with honeycombed slices bevelled off the corners – all lived in by civilised villagers with fine manners. Then, on to the monastery of St Paraskeví. Eagles floated above the gorge where the monastery hangs like a disintegrating house-martin’s nest. Both the cliff-sides are deep in clinging shrubs, creepers, ivy and cow-parsley. Echoes resound into the distance.