The captain was pleased, because they bring luck to a ship. He leant contentedly on the blue and white striped tiller flicking his tasselled chaplet of amber beads over and over between his index and middle fingers.
“They are strange fish,” he said. “Some sailors know how to summon them. If they see them swimming in the distance, they shout ‘Vasili!’ in a special way they have. The fish stop dead, standing upright in the water, looking round to see who has called. When the sailor shouts ‘Vasili’ a second time, they join him like lightning. They all have the same name.”
So they are all called Basil. Is there a link missing, a lost anterior fable that connects them with basileus, or King, from which the word derives?
“I’ve never seen it done,” the captain admitted, “but I’ve often heard of it. They have a special way of shouting....”
* * *
The watershed of the Taygetus climbed steadily, and its retreat inland indicated that the Mani was growing wider. It rose in a sierra as desolating as a dirge. Lolling satrap-like among the corn-sacks, we watched the dry ravines succeed each other above the restless jungle of goats’ horns. The captain gave an occasional shift to the tiller and shouted an order and then continued humming to himself.
* * *
Most of these orders and many maritime terms in Greece are of Italian origin, in the same way that so many English sea terms, though to a lesser degree, are Dutch. They are a legacy from the Venetian maritime empire. The same nautical lingua franca holds good, irrespective of nationality, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Red Sea and along the southern Euxine coast as far as the Caucasus. The Greek Laska! is Lascia!—“pay out rope,” or “let loose.” Founda! is “let the anchor drop to the bottom!”
Vira! is “haul in,” with the suggestion of twisting a winch. Ka-rina is keel, bastouni bowsprit, albouro mast; and so on. Time has distorted many of them. I can never hear these orders without a momentary glimpse of a many-oared galleon slave-propelled under a crimson gonfalon charged with the gold lion of St. Mark.
The winds have nearly all changed their names and they too whisper a garbled echo of the long-dissolved Venetian power. The north wind is the Tramountana, though the ancient Boreas, one of the very few of the winds that Odysseus kept tied in a bag, still survives as well. Ostria, the south, in the Latin Auster, though the ancient Notos is still sometimes used. Levante is the east wind and Pounente the west. N.E. is Grego, the Greek wind, S.E. the African Souróko, S.W. the Arabian Garbís, and N.W. the Mäistro, or Mistral. The heart of this wind-rose seems to be somewhere off Sicily, the heart of the Mediterranean in fact. The subdivisions—N.N.E., E.N.E., E.S.E., S.S.E., and so on—are a string of euphonious composite words: Gregotramountána, Gregolevánte, Sourokolevánte, Ostrosoúroko, Ostrogarbí, Pounentogarbí, Pounentomäistro, and Mäistrotramountána. The words Euros—sometimes called Vulturnus by the Latins, the wind that oppressed the banished Ovid in the Tristia—and Zephyros can still be used in the high-flown language to designate the east and the west winds, and the ancient Lips, the south-westerly Libyan wind, survives as Livas. Homer only mentioned the four cardinal winds. The four beastlike winds—Typhon, Echidna, Chimaera and the Harpies[5]—have decamped from the Greek air for good. Mpátis (from embainein, to enter) is a cool breeze coming in from the sea, drawn there at midday by the growing heat of the earth and rocks to fill the void of the rising hot air. Apógeios—quite literally “off shore,” or rather “off land”—is the opposite phenomenon. The liquid sea warms and cools more slowly than the mineral land—like tea and teaspoon—and so between sunset and about ten at night, the track of the morning Mpátis is reversed. It blows for a few night hours until the temperature of earth and sea are equal; then the vagrant airs are still. The ancient Etesian winds which blow through the summer months can be a blessing or a curse: they cool the archipelago but drive caiques off their course or lock them in harbour. They are a Mpátis on a giant scale, a wind that rushes south across the Mediterranean to fill the airless ovens of the Egyptian and African deserts; which repay them, now and then, with a long dragon’s breath of sirocco. This wind is now called the Meltém which philologists derive from the Venetian bel tempo because it only blows in summer. When the Meltémi blows hard the inhabitants of the island of Spetzai called it Trapezókairos—“table weather”—because one gust of it will capsize all the café tables along the harbour. Except that it was too late in the year, this could have been the “tempestuous wind called Euroclydon” that gave St. Paul’s ship such a rough time south of Crete, when the last chapters of The Acts turn into an Odyssey. But “neither sun nor stars in many days appeared,” so it was winter. Euroclydon is called Euraquilo in the Vulgate, a north-easter. It was Notos, the south wind (Auster in St. Jerome’s text), which till then had been blowing so softly. How well I remember, during the war, gazing from caves on Mount Ida to “the island called Clauda” under which they ran so close (it is Klauda or Kauda in the Greek testament, Gavdos in modern Greek). The only Western traveller to describe this islet in recent times is an old friend and brother-in-arms from those peculiar years.[6] Anyone who has tried to land on that coast from a small boat will appreciate the apostle’s difficulties. The Levanter, the strong east wind that blows across the Adriatic, had a deep influence on ancient Greek history. Rather than confront the fierce weather that lay further up the long gulf, Greek emigrants avoided the Adriatic coasts. Following the prevailing wind, they were scattered like grain over southern Italy, Sicily, the coasts of Provence and even southern Spain, and flourishing Greek colonies sprang up there while the coasts north of Epirus and Illyria, so much nearer home, remained practically unknown.
Caique sailors are for ever peering at the surface of the sea like joiners studying the grain of a piece of wood to see what ripples or markings the wind makes and murmuring “garbis,” “maïstro,” or “sourokolevánte,” and predicting bonatza, fair weather, or, with gravely shaking heads, phourtoúna, a storm. (In Crete, foul weather is called cheimonas—winter—even if the season is midsummer.) The air in Greece is not merely a negative void between solids; the sea itself, the houses and rocks and trees, on which it presses like a jelly mould, are embedded in it; it is alive and positive and volatile and one is as aware of its contact as if it could have pierced hearts scrawled on it with diamond rings or be grasped in handfuls, tapped for electricity, bottled, used for blasting, set fire to, sliced into sparkling cubes and rhomboids with a pair of shears, be timed with a stop watch, strung with pearls, plucked like a lute string or tolled like a bell, swum in, be set with rungs and climbed like a rope ladder or have saints assumed through it in flaming chariots; as though it could be harangued into faction, or eavesdropped, pounded down with pestle and mortar for cocaine, drunk from a ballet shoe, or spun, woven and worn on solemn feasts; or cut into discs for lenses, minted for currency or blown, with infinite care, into globes. On top of this, all the nautical wind-talk and scrutiny of the elements fills it with innumerable unseen coilings and influences and cross currents and comings and goings. It is no wonder that the Greek word for wind—anemos—should have produced the Latin word anima, for soul; that pneuma[7] and spiritus should mean spirit and breath and wind in both languages. Perhaps it is not strange that the age-old Greek war-cry—the equivalent of St. George!, Montjoy-Saint Denys!, and Santiago!—should be the single word Aera! which means both wind and air.
There is, in fact, more in the air than meets the eye. The element is further complicated by the presence of ta aërika, the spirits of the air. They have cropped up earlier on in these pages. They are less of a problem to present-day sailors than they used to be a few decades ago. But there is a subdivision of the species of daemons, or genii, of the air which has an immediate relevance to sailors. They are known as ta telonia: the customs offices and, by extension, officers. Popular fancy has created a whole hierarchy of hovering excisemen through which the soul has to pass on its way to Paradise or to Hades. Soaring souls are examined by invisible d
ouaniers who scrutinize their psychic luggage for unatoned sins, both deadly and venial. Tradition has degraded them from their severe but benign status to the rank of evil harm-wreaking spirits whom the corpses—or their flying spirits—can placate with a coin that may, alternatively, have been placed in their mouths either to placate Charon or to block, with their metal barrier, the ingress to other evil spirits. Shooting stars, comets and other celestial portents are considered manifestations of ta telonia. These affect—or used to affect—all mortals; but the customs-phenomenon most dangerously and specifically aimed at sailors is St. Elmo’s Fire. This sinister light flickering and shuddering about the mast and the yards of a caique foretells with certainty the onslaught of these baleful air-denizens. Exorcism and incantation used to be effective antidotes, but the surest way of all—like the remedy against the Lamia of the Sea when she appears in the form of a waterspout—is to stick a black-handled knife into the mast, if possible after it has been used for cutting an onion. The reek aroints the air. In ancient times, two such airy manifestations were considered propitious; they were the Gemini, protectors of seamen. A single flame, however, betokened their sister Helen whose fatal beauty wrecked towns and ships and lives.
Seamen peer into the sky at night not only to steer by the stars but to prognosticate the future from the tilt of the crescent or decrescent moon. “Orthio to phengári,” they say, “xaploménos o kapetánios’: if the moon is upright, the captain can lie down. If the incomplete moon is lying on its back, the captain stands to the helm; it foretells phourtoúna: “Xaploméno to phengári,” in fact, “orthios o kapetánios.” They are great ones for steering by their fingers—holding up a hand at arm’s length to measure off one, two, or three fingers’ breadth from a cape or a rock and moving the rudder accordingly. I once heard an old ocean-going sailor describing, only half in fun, between puffs at his narghileh, how to sail from the Piraeus to London entirely in such terms. “When you get to Cape Malea,” he said, “aim three fingers to port of Matapan, a finger to starboard south of Sicily, two to port at Cape Spaptiventi in Sardinia, one to starboard at Gibraltar, three at Cape St. Vincent, two at Finisterre, two more at Ushant...why a baby could do it... Then four to port at Margate, follow the Thames upstream, drop anchor at Tower Bridge, then go ashore and order a beef-steak. Na!...”
We rounded a small cape. A valley full of scarcely believable green trees appeared and a mile or so up the mountain, a towered village. A busy little port sheltered half a dozen caiques. “We’ve arrived,” the captain said. “Kotronas,” he announced and then, pointing uphill at the towers, “Phlomochori.” Alongside the mole a few minutes later we heard his voice cry “founda!” and down went the anchor with a clatter and a splash.
[1] Alas, he died last year, a sad loss to his friends everywhere.
[2] I have heard, on equally uncertain authority, that the Turks have a superstition about storks and never shoot them. They are now jealously preserved in Greece, but apparently it was not always so. Many thousands of storks spend the spring and summer in Greece, but none of them nest south of a line running south of Epirus and Thessaly from the Ambracian Gulf to the Gulf of Volo. This was roughly the Greek-Turkish frontier until the first Balkan War in 1912, when the Greeks captured and retained all of northern Greece which is now the storks’ chief habitat. It must have been about then that the laws protecting them came in. Storks have proverbially long memories, but (if this story is true) I hope they will let bygones be bygones and return to their old haunts in Roumeli and the Peloponnese; old prints show that they were common in Turkish-occupied Athens at the beginning of the last century. They are unknown there now. Their nests and their graceful flight ennoble the humblest village. A strange example of traditional fear among migrating birds comes into Alan Moorhead’s Gallipoli. A vast column of duck and other birds flew over the Dardanelles at a moment of total deadlock in 1916. Exasperated by inaction, the two entrenched armies opened upon them with all they had. It was a massacre and the birds avoided the baleful straits for many years after.
[3] See Norman Douglas, Siren Lands, and Lord Kinross’s Europa Minor.
[4] This happened in Batsí Bay, off the western shore of the island.
[5] The harpies have settled in the two desert islets of the Strophades. I shall have much to say of these bird-winds in another book. See the Æneid, bk. III.
[6] See The Stronghold, by Xan Fielding (Secker and Warburg).
[7] The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola can be exactly paraphrased as Pneumatic Drill.
18. SHORT SUMMER NIGHTS
THE DEEP Mani had stopped. This cove, half an hour on foot south of Kotronas, was dominated by a huge fig tree. The cliffs closed to a steep stream-bed thick with oleanders. Two more fig trees grew like polished silver candelabra from a small rocky island composed of a dozen massive and wavy strata snapped off and tilted to an oblique angle, which lay in the position of a star between the crescent horns of the bay about a furlong from the shore. We had swum there half an hour ago and clambered up its steep wall, treading the hot and sweet-smelling herbs on its overgrown summit; then dived in again to swim into a sea-cave whose filtered light turned us a deep green. The water, sliding in and out of it, plopped with a hollow and lulling resonance a few yards away. All of this, with the golden sand and the polished pebbles I could feel against my shoulder blades, belonged to a more familiar Greece. Like one of the seals off Cythera, I was lying half in and half out of the sea, my ears full of water noises and the rise and fall of a million cicadas, letting the sun’s horses and chariot wheels ride over me roughshod; leaving my eyelids just ajar so that the lashes split the sunlight into dozens of straight, wire-thin and mile-long rainbows that lengthened and expanded into more dazzling sheaves with every millimetre I lowered them. I had only to close them completely for orange, magenta, grass-green and violet suns to glow against the dark shutter and change into luminous latchkeys and sieves and reef-knots and bowler hats and lopsided harps and tulips and tuning forks against magnificently clashing backgrounds of electric blue and burnt sienna and mushroom and daffodil coloured velvet. Equally, I had only to open them suddenly and gaze accusingly and painfully at the real sun for it to turn jet black and oscillate and put forth petals like a marguerite and revolve at high speed, exactly as it does in Ghika’s pictures; then shut them again and watch the contents of a junkshop collide, expand, shrink and change shape and turn inside-out again in the secret camera obscura behind my eyelid and fall asleep with feelings of supreme voluptuousness and idle omnipotence.
Plying my forefinger like a strigil to wipe the salty sweat off my face, I felt it rasp against three days’ unmown stubble. Greeks loathe shaving themselves and peasants only really go in for it once a week, on Saturday, when the barber shops are suddenly crammed. I am only too prone, when wandering about like this, to let it rip as well, growing steadily more raffish and ragged in appearance, burnt black by the sun, as caked with salt as a smoke stack and reeking every night more asphyxiatingly of garlic,
comme un encensoir oublié
qui fume à travers la nuit,
till conscience suddenly goads me into an empty barber’s shop on an off day—any of six, in fact. There is no doubt about it: unless you are used to it, this hispid state looks hideous. Perhaps this permanent pard-like stubble and the prevalence of moustaches among Greek peasants has something to do with foreigners’ disappointment at the un-Praxitelean aspect of modern Greeks. There are, as a matter of fact, quite a lot knocking about with regular classical features, fair hair and blue eyes; even, rather surprisingly to me, suggestions of that melting of the forehead into the bridge of the nose which I suspect was as much of a convention as the imaginary lateral roll of muscle or fat over the tips of the pelvis. These statues were composite sublimations and, superb as they are, as much an idealization as, mutatis mutandis, a fashion plate. The sculptures that can be set down as portraits are, as a rule, perfectly normal and contemporary in aspect; some, as in
the case of Socrates, agreeably ugly. But the whole approach, the arbitrary singling out of one century from its provenance and sequel, the failure to regard history as a continuum, is wrong, and to this faulty attitude, on a wider scale, most Western misconceptions about Greece are due. What of the archaic smile—and scowl? The dark-rimmed, incendiary, omniscient blankness of Minoan eyes, Hellenistic softness and complacency, the almond-shaped eyes of Fayoum, the disembodied, staring aloofness of ikons, the dark, hunted, or menacing look of Christ Pantocrator at Daphni, the arrogant, waxen Phanariots of Liotard, the whiskered and fiery-eyed klephts of the broadsheets, the sailors and mangas of Tsarouchi? They are all there.
The ancient, like the modern Greeks, were always—as are the English and, with a few usually rather tedious exceptions, most other peoples—a composite race. The process was afoot long before the Periclean age, and it continued afterwards. No one knows exactly where the first Greeks arrived from; Sir John Myers, at the end of his several volumes of Who Were the Greeks?, is inconclusive, as, through lack of data, he is bound to be. It is pathetic and idiotic to attempt to stem this traffic in 450 B.C. and to damn the modern Greeks by comparison. It is about as sensible as a Greek in London expecting to be surrounded by ancient Britons or Elizabethans, or deploring a busload of our contemporaries because not one of the passengers is like a druid or a Saxon swineherd out of Ivanhoe, or Sir Philip Sidney. What are we? Saxon wall paintings, Bayeux tapestry figures, medieval illuminations and recumbent effigies on tombs, Holbeins, Hilliards, Van Dycks, Lelys, Gainsboroughs, Leightons, Rossettis, Sargents, Laszlos?—Bacons or Annigonis? The answer, I suppose, is all of them. The most striking and revealing thing about Greek faces—especially Greek peasant faces—is the eyes. The whole of Greek history seems to be coiled up behind them. They are a mixture of experience, a rather sad wisdom, and innocence. They are at the same time melancholy and deep-gazing, alert and ready for thrusting from their sockets with anger or for kindling with amusement, collusion, or laughter; above all, they are filled with a wide, phenomenal, uncircumspect candour. Many of the ugliest faces are illuminated by them and they make beautiful ones inexpressibly moving. If the Greek landscape had eyes they would be exactly these and I have often toyed with the vision of such an eye, a solitary one several acres in extent, gazing cyclopically and compellingly from under a thick half-mile of curved black eyebrow from the barren side of a mountain or from the sky.
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