But these barbaric doings have left no trace in the atmosphere that hangs over Kyparissos. Pirate fleets and jangling Nyklians seem equally remote and equally irrelevant. The slow fall of the evening among this smashed and scattered masonry, the decrescendo and then the silence of the cicadas, the wide unruffled gleam of the sea below and the nerve-stilling quietness of the air, hold a different message. A spell of peace lives in the ruins of ancient Greek temples. As the traveller leans back among the fallen capitals and allows the hours to pass, it empties the mind of troubling thoughts and anxieties and slowly refills it, like a vessel that has been drained and scoured, with a quiet ecstasy. Nearly all that has happened fades to a limbo of shadows and insignificance and is painlessly replaced by an intimation of radiance, simplicity and calm which unties all knots and solves all riddles and seems to murmur a benevolent and unimperious suggestion that the whole of life, if it were allowed to unfold without hindrance or compulsion or search for alien solutions, might be limitlessly happy.
The dusk was reducing those marble fragments to pale shapes among the thistles. It was in just such a mood of serenity that we retraced the winding path to Alika. A hint of moonrise behind the dark towers soon turned the steps to a shallow silver staircase. Down this, buoyed still by the elation that the wreck of these unimportant temples had provided, we seemed to glide or fly. The reflected lamps of Yeroliména were shining in the bay.
* * *
Down a few steps we found a long, barrel-vaulted room. Pinned to the whitewashed walls were Singer sewing machine advertisements, pictures of King Paul and Queen Frederika, and of the late King George of England, the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth II. Leaning into the cooking alcove a thin handsome woman was delicately arranging twigs, with the economy that treeless regions compel, under a sizzling frying pan. Down a ladder at the other end of this semi-cylinder lay a little platform of rock with three tin tables. It hung immediately above the sea, hemmed in by sweet-smelling herbs in whitewashed petrol tins and a dozen tall sun-flowers. The cluster of masts, the criss-cross of rigging and the sea’s many reflections were so close that we seemed, as we settled there, to be under way. The three caique captains were drinking retsina and playing a record so old and defaced that it was hard to detect in the tune an Athenian music-hall song twenty years old. The battered gramophone was armed with a petunia-coloured horn like a giant convolvulus, its open bell painted with faded nosegays. One of the captains, affected by the soft influences of the night, had put a sprig of basil behind his ear. After an omelette and some lentils, we noticed that the water our hostess brought with the coffee tasted slightly of wine. We asked the sailors if they had noticed. The one with the basil—he had a dark intelligent face hard as leather, deeply lined and bashed with vicissitudes, a kind of alert and humorous physiognomy which is just as essentially Greek as the chipped capitals on the headland—said, “Yes, but don’t say anything. She’s in despair about it.” She had stored her wine in a room above the cistern which warrened the rock under the whole house. One of her barrels had leaked and the wine had dripped through a broken floor-slab into the dark cistern below, draining a hogshead in one long, fatal night. The cistern was filled by rain water led there in conduits from the flat roof, and when the calamity had occurred, spring was on the way and not a drop could be expected till October or later...not till the quails came....
“Have you ever eaten quails in Greece?”
“Yes, once, a few years ago. In Santorin.”
He abolished the little volcano with a wave of his hand.
“Here’s the place for them. Why, in good years, they used to send hundreds of thousands of them—hundreds of thousands—alive, to Marseilles. And those French know how to eat, the cuckolds. You should stay on till the quails come.”
I reminded him that we were off before dawn for Cape Matapan with his neighbour.
“It’s a fine journey,” he said, “and the first thing you see when you round the cape is the island of Cythera. Have you been there? You know Aphrodite was born near there, out of the waves? Hm.” He turned to his companions, and said, “You see? Foreigners know more about our country than we do ourselves. But did you go to Egg Island? What, not to Avgo? You ought to have gone there; its about an hour’s rowing from Cerigo,[3] a small round island, covered with seagulls. You only have to clap your hands,” he did so, “and the whole heaven fills up,” his hands fluttered expansively above his head, “with millions of gulls! And there’s a deep cave there, with the sea running in, bright blue inside like the sky. There are plenty of seals swimming about too. You can see them lying on the rocks with their wives and their children.”
Having been to Cythera less than two months before, this was shattering news for us. I have always longed to see a seal in Greece and always in vain. The only one I have ever come across is a shrivelled and stuffed one hanging over the door of a sailors’ tavern on the waterfront of Canea.
“...and on clear days on Cape Matapan,” he was saying, “you can hear the cocks crowing in Cythera.”
“I’ve never heard them,” said Panayioti, the skipper of the caique we were to take on the morrow, “never.”
“Neither have I,” said the other.
“Then you ought to buy new ears. I’ve often heard them when I put my nets down on the windward side of the cape. You need a quiet day and a very gentle ostrolevante blowing; a small southeaster, but very small. Then,” he said, leaning back against a sunflower, a finger behind the lobe of his ear, the other hand outstretched with splayed fingers to represent Wind, his wide-stretched eyes indicating Distance, “it comes floating towards you over the water, you can only just hear it.” His voice sank to a singing whisper: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo!” His eyes rolled ominously from one to the other of us. Hypnotized by the dying fall of his onomatopoeia and delighted at the awe of our silence, he repeated this ghostly cockcrow; still more softly and in a slightly different key: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo....”
* * *
They left soon afterwards. We sat on in the cool silence of the floating garden, talking of these phantom cockcrows; and with a special reason. If the reader knows Mr. Henry Miller’s book about Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi (which I humbly recommend), he will remember an appendix, a letter from Lawrence Durrell to the author soon after his departure; it describes how, following a tremendous dinner in Athens, Durrell and his fellow diners climbed up to the Acropolis but found the gates shut; Katsimbalis, suddenly inspired, took a deep breath and (it is Durrell speaking) “sent out the most bloodcurdling clarion I have ever heard: Cock-a-doodle-doo...” and then, after a pause, “lo from the distance, silvery-clear in the darkness, a cock drowsily answered—then another, then another.” Soon the whole night was reverberating with cockcrows: all Attica and perhaps all Greece.
Perhaps all Greece. The distance between Cythera and Cape Matapan on the tattered map in my pocket, was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. This enormously extended the possible ambit of George’s initial cockcrow. If the Maniots, with a helping wind, could hear the cocks of Cythera, the traffic, with a different wind, could be reversed, and leap from the Mani (or better still, Cape Malea) to Cythera, from Cythera to Anticythera, and from Anticythera to the piratical peninsulas of western Crete; only to die out south of the great island in a last lonely crow on the islet of Gavdos, in the Libyan Sea.... But a timely west wind could carry it to the eastern capes of Crete, over the Cassos straits, through the islands of the Dodecanese, and thence to the Halicarnassus peninsula and the Taurus mountains.... The possibilities became suddenly tremendous and in our mind’s ear the ghostly clarion travelled south-west into Egypt, south-east to the Persian Gulf; up the Nile, past the villages of the stork-like Dinkas, through the great forests, from kraal to kraal of the Zulus, waking the drowsy Boers of the Transvaal and expiring from a chicken-run on Table Mountain over the Cape of Good Hope. North of Athens, all was plain sailing; it would be through the Iron Curtain, over the Great Balkan range and across
the Danube within the hour, with nothing to hinder its spread across the Ukraine and Great Russia—the sudden hubbub in a hundred collective farms alerting the N.K.V.D. and causing a number of arrests on suspicion—until it reached the reindeer-haunted forests of Lapland, and called across the ice towards Nova Zembla to languish among igloos. How far north could poultry thrive? We didn’t know, but every moment the wind was becoming a more reliable carrier and further-flung and the cocks robuster. Thus, as the northern call fell silent among the tongue-tied penguins of the Arctic floes, the westward sweep, after startling the solitary Magyar herdsman with the untimely uproar and alarming the night-capped Normans with thoughts of theft, was culminating in ultimate unanswered challenges from John o’ Groats and the Blasket Islands, Finisterre and Cape Trafalgar, and a regimental mascot in Gibraltar was already rousing the Berbers of Tangier... Due to the new impetus of Leghorn—enough to send a tremor through the doffed headgear of Bersagliere in many a draughty barrack-room—the Sicilian barnyards had long been astir.
The south-eastern tributary meanwhile, after sailing across Baluchistan, was initiating a fuse of clamour across the Deccan, and, reaching Cape Cormorin, leaping the straits, like the magic bridge of Hanuman, to set the roof-tops of Kandy ringing; travelling east to Burma and raising winged mutinies in the Celebes and the Malaccas. There was no problem here. Thanks to swarms of the far-wandering junks of the bird-loving Chinese, shrill calls were soon sounding across the gunfire of Malaya: fumbling for their blowpipes, head-hunters rubbed their eyes in Borneo; Samoans were stretching and yawning on the split bamboo of their stilt-borne floors and hieratic and glittering birds, poised on branches heavy with almond blossom, were swelling their bright throats above the distant triangle of Fujiyama.... And what of the long eastern journey from the Asia Minor? Those solitary cries across the Oxus, those noisy resurrections among the black yurts of the Khirgiz and the Karakalpacks? The contagious din of nomad poultry ringing across steppe and tundra, waking the wiry Mongol fowl and sailing forlornly over the Great Wall of China; turning north to Kamschatka and straining for the Aleutians? What of the shivering, ruffled frustration of the Behring Straits?
Yes, what indeed?
Hearing us talking with some excitement, the moonlit figure of our hostess had appeared at the top of the ladder with another blue enamel half-oka can; and before we were a third of the way down it, we were across: a whale-fishing fleet materialized in the mists, each vessel captained by an eccentric Ahab engaged on a poultry-fancying competition with his colleagues, and it was entirely due to their hardy pets, beating their icicle-weighted wings and calling over the dark sea, that their Athenian message ever reached Alaska and the new world, crossed the Rockies and rang forth across the Hudson Bay towards Baffin Land. Without them, the Mormon roosters of Utah would have slept on; it would never have needed the sudden boost of Rhode Island which was to waft it safely across the mangrove swamps of Louisiana and through the Maya temples and the nightmares of Nicaraguan revolutionaries and across the Panama Canal. Now it spread like a jungle-fire through the southern hemisphere and a strident spark of sound leapt the swift-flowing narrows of Trinidad to ignite the whole Caribbean chain, jolting the rum-sodden slumbers of the Barbadians and touching off, in the throats of sacrificial birds in Haiti that the dark fingers of Voodoo priests were soon to silence, a defiant morituri te salutamus. In the dank unexplored recesses of the Amazonian hinterland, aboriginal and unclassified poultry were sending up shrill and uncouth cries and high in the cold Andean starlight gleaming birds were spreading their wings and filling their breasts on the great tumbled blocks of Inca palaces. The volume of the call was swelling now, sweeping south across the pampas, the Gran Chaco, the Rio Grande; and then dwindling as the two great oceans inexorably closed in, causing the superstitious giants of Patagonia to leap from their rough couches and peer into their wattle hen-coops wild-eyed. Now the dread moment came, the final staging-point and terminus of those great Katsimbalis lungs; the last desperate conflagration of sound in Tierra del Fuego with the ultimate chanticleer calling and calling and calling, unanswered but undaunted, to the maelstroms and the tempests, the hail and the darkness and the battering waves of Cape Horn....
For there was no hope here. It was the end. We thought with sorrow of the silent poles and the huge bereaved antipodes, of the scattered islets and archipelagos that were out of range; of combed heads tucked in sleep under many a speckled wing that no salutation from the Parthenon would ever wake: the beautiful cocks of the Easter and Ellis and the Gilbert islanders, of the Marquesas, the Melanesians and the Trobrianders, of Tristan da Cunha and St. Helena. This gentle melancholy was diffidently interrupted by our hostess: she was going to bed, but if we would like to sit on and enjoy the moonlight, she would leave the street door open, if we would lock up and slip the key under the door. Remembering our early start next day, we rose and asked for the bill. She smiled and said there was nothing to pay. Covert benefactors, the sailors had paid it on the way out and turned us into their guests.
[1] The ancient Boreas.
[2] The Bad Mountains.
[3] The Venetian name for Cythera, still sometimes used.
10. THE ENTRANCE TO HADES
WE BOARDED Panayioti’s little caique, the St. Nicholas, just before dawn broke. Four black-shawled women and a ragged priest clustered in the stern and, at the embarkation of the latter, Panayiotis with a wink made the privy gesture of spitting to avert the Eye and the evil fortune which is supposed to dog the footsteps of priests, especially on a ship.[1] Up came the anchor and the women’s sleeves fluttered in repeated signs of the cross before they resorted to their yellow pomanders. An old man and a boy were beside us in the bows. Both the man’s hands had been blown off illegally dynamiting fish and one of the stumps was fitted, in lieu of a hook, with an adjustable clamp to hold a cigarette which he lit with a match held in his teeth and struck on a box tucked under his armpit. (These mutilations are common on all Greek coasts.) The water was so clear and smooth that for long fathoms one could follow each detail of the weeds and pebbles and rocks. The sharp-eyed boy, lying precariously prone along the bowsprit and gazing down, spotted and named the fish as they flickered by: “A shoal of marides,” he would cry, or “there goes a gopa,” and once, with a shout and a downward gesture with his fist as though he were lunging with a trident, “A big synagrida! Oh, the cuckold! Na!” thereafter resuming his rapt scrutiny as motionless as a figure-head.
Except for the throb of the engine, all was silent. The bows made a crease like a long soft fold of silk over the stillness of the water. The wrinkled rocks of the shore were repeated upside down in a looking-glass, the emerging spikes turning into symmetrical lozenges invisibly conjoined along the water’s edge. Every now and then a faint shaft of wind coming from nowhere would blur the smooth surface with a sudden fan of ruffles, and then all would be smooth again, and the boat and its passengers afloat in a blue dimensionless dream.
Dawn had already broken. But we were sailing south-east and the sombre watershed of the Kakovouni, falling in a staircase of rock to the isthmus that linked it to the last upheaval of Matapan, lay between us and the sun. Resting in notches of this palisade the climbing lances of sunlight were sloping forward and falling level and growing longer and brighter; as the sun’s edge cleared the skyline they dipped and expanded down these western slopes in a score of mile-long geometrical shafts, doubling in brightness where two or three of them overlapped, dimming when an intervening hilltop blocked their golden advance with a sudden blue hypotenuse of shadow. Dawn and sunset civilize and rationalize these blank expanses of grey mountains, reducing systemless chaos to sense and running the mountains into each other with a fluid swing, quickening them with rhythm and sinuosity. Laying soft shadows along their flanks, dawn turns the ashen slag to champagne-colour and apricot and lilac and unfolds the dark branching torrent beds and pins them espalierwise across the ranges until they shrink and vanish under the climbing sun, waiting for d
usk once more to expand and subdue them.
Now the olive terraces were succeeding each other in stroke after stroke of shade while the ledges they buttressed were thin curling bands of light. The towers of Alika moved towards us overhead and the ruin-crested cliff of Kyparissos; Moudanistica serrated its high pass with shadows; then Tzoukhalia and the tall spike of Vatheia entirely crowned with towers. On half a dozen heights a hundred sombre towers, each cluster thrust aloft on a coil of terraces, sailed up into the morning to break the parallel slanting rays of the sun, every campanile shedding a long blade of shadow along the sun’s advance.
As the caique sailed further east, village after village turned its sunlit walls to us. They seemed to be suspended in the air to glow and flash there like the lustres of chandeliers. A headland rose and hid them and as we sailed past the little gulf of Marmari the sun was already high in the limitless Greek sky: a sky which is higher and lighter and which surrounds one closer and stretches further into space than anywhere else in the world. It is neither daunting not belittling but hospitable and welcoming to man and as much his element as the earth; as though a mere error in gravity pins him to the rocks or the ship’s deck and prevents him from being assumed into infinity.
* * *
At Marmari the Mani is little more than a mile across. The mountains sink to a saddle, the concave coasts lace it into a wasp waist, then it rises and swells again for a last rocky league or two, the coasts falling almost sheer. We drew alongside a narrow ledge and the passengers leaped nimbly ashore, grasping adzes and sacks to chop the rock-face for lime, leaving us to sail on down the deserted lee of the peninsula. Turning a sa-lient, we came upon a solitary fisherman casting his nets. They were buoyed every yard or so with a hollow gourd. These grow in the shape of globes that narrow at the top and then expand swelling once more in a graceful neck which again contracts to the exact diameter, when the stalk is snipped off, for a cork. Scooping out the seeds they clean them by pouring in gravel which they shake till all is smooth inside; then they are left to dry in the sun. This induces the hue of baked clay, making them light as feathers and hard as wood until they look like perfect and elaborate pottery: convenient wine flasks for a journey, and, here afloat, resembling prisons for Arabian djinns. Both bulwarks of his boat were equipped with pairs of twin uprights of wood ending in two prongs in which his long tridents lay. These forked rests for fish spears were painted blood red like those mysterious horns, which, with double-headed axes, are the dominating motif of Minoan palaces. A wave and a shout, and another bulge of rock had hidden him. A few minutes further south, in the centre of another little bay, a dark cave yawned over the water. Panayioti cut down the speed of the caique.
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