by Henry Miller
I went back to my room determined to plunge into that great unknown tract which we call Crete, anciently the kingdom of Minos, son of Zeus, whose birthplace it was. Since the wheel fell apart, before that too no doubt, every foot of the land has been fought over, conquered and reconquered, sold, bartered, pawned, auctioned off, levelled with fire and sword, sacked, plundered, administered over by tyrants and demons, converted by fanatics and zealots, betrayed, ransomed, traduced by the great powers of our day, desolated by civilized and savage hordes alike, desecrated by all and sundry, hounded to death like a wounded animal, reduced to terror and idiocy, left gasping with rage and impotence, shunned by all like a leper and left to expire in its own dung and ashes. Such is the cradle of our civilization as it was when finally relinquished and bequeathed to its miserable, destitute inhabitants. What had been the birthplace of the greatest of the gods, what had been the cradle and the mother and the inspiration of the Hellenic world, was finally annexed and not so long ago made part of Greece. What a cruel travesty! What a malefic destiny! Here the traveller has to hang his head in shame. This is the Ark left high and dry by the receding waters of civilization. This is the necropolis of culture marking the great crossroads. This is the stone that was finally given Greece to swallow. To be followed up a few years later by another even more terrible gift, the return of a great mutilated member which had been flung with fire and blood into the sea.
I fell into a nightmare. I was being gently and endlessly rocked by the omnipotent Zeus in a burning cradle. I was toasted to a crisp and then gently dumped into a sea of blood. I swam ceaselessly amidst dismembered bodies marked with the cross and the crescent. I came at last to a rock-ribbed shore. It was bare and absolutely deserted of man. I wandered to a cave in the side of a mountain. In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended from the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of any living creature. It was larger even than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony, I said aloud, and as I spoke it vanished and a great darkness fell over me. Whereupon I sank down, exhausted, and fell into a sob that reverberated from every part of the cave and finally suffocated me.
I awoke and without consulting the sky I ordered a car for the day. Now there were two things I remembered as I set forth in the sumptuous limousine—one, to remember to ask for Kyrios Alexandros at Phaestos and two, to observe whether, as Monsieur Herriot is reported to have said when he climbed to the precincts of the palace, the sky is really closer to the earth than anywhere else on this globe.
We swung through the dilapidated gate in a cloud of dust, scattering chickens, cats, dogs, turkeys, naked children and hoary vendors of sweets to right and left; we burst at full speed into the drab and dun terrain of gutta percha which closes in on the city like mortar filling a huge crack. There were no wolves, buzzards or poisonous reptiles in sight. There was a sun flooded with lemon and orange which hung ominously over the sultry land in that splashing, dripping radiance which intoxicated Van Gogh. We passed imperceptibly from the quick badlands to a fertile rolling region studded with fields of bright-colored crops; it reminded me of that serene steady smile which our own South gives as you roll through the State of Virginia. It set me dreaming, dreaming of the gentleness and docility of the earth when man caresses it with loving hands. I began to dream more and more in the American idiom. I was crossing the continent again. There were patches of Oklahoma, of the Carolinas, of Tennessee, of Texas and New Mexico. Never a great river, never a railroad, however. But the illusion of vast distances, the reality of great vistas, the sublimity of silence, the revelation of light. On the top of a dizzying crag a tiny shrine in blue and white; in the ravine a cemetery of terrifying boulders. We begin to climb, curving around the edges of precipitous drops; across the gulch the earth bulges up like the knees of a giant covered with corduroy. Here and there a man, a woman, the sower, the reaper, silhouetted against billowy clouds of suds. We climb up beyond the cultivated lands, twisting back and forth like a snake, rising to the heights of contemplation, to the abode of the sage, the eagle, the storm cloud. Huge, frenzied pillars of stone, scarred by wind and lightning, grayed to the color of fright, trembling, top-heavy, balanced like macrocosmic fiends, abut the road. The earth grows wan and weird, defertilized, dehumanized, neither brown nor gray nor beige nor taupe nor ecru, the no color of death reflecting light, sponging up light with its hard, parched shag and shooting it back at us in blinding, rock-flaked splinters that bore into the tenderest tissues of the brain and set it whimpering like a maniac.
This is where I begin to exult. This is something to put beside the devastation of man, something to overmatch his bloodiest depredations. This is nature in a state of dementia, nature having lost its grip, having become the hopeless prey of its own elements. This is the earth beaten, brutalized and humiliated by its own violent treachery. This is one of the spots wherein God abdicated, where He surrendered to the cosmic law of inertia. This is a piece of the Absolute, bald as an eagle’s knob, hideous as the leer of a hyena, impotent as a granite hybrid. Here nature staggered to a halt in a frozen vomit of hate.
We roll down a crisp, crackling mountainside into an immense plain. The uplands are covered with a sheath of stiff shrub like blue and lavender porcupine quills. Here and there bald patches of red clay, streaks of shale, sand dunes, a field of pea green, a lake of waving champagne. We roll through a village which belongs to no time and no place, an accident, a sudden sprout of human activity because someone sometime or other had returned to the scene of the massacre to look for an old photograph amidst the tumbled ruins and had stayed there from force of inertia and staying there had attracted flies and other forms of animate and inanimate life.
Farther on…A lone rectangular habitation sunk deep into the ground. A lone pueblo in the midst of a vacuum. It has a door and two windows. It is built like a box. The shelter of some human being. What kind of being? Who lives there? Why? The American scene is behind. We are now traversing the Mesopotamian hinterland. We are riding over dead cities, over elephant bones, over grass-covered sea bottoms. It is beginning to rain a sudden, quick shower that makes the earth steam. I get out and walk through a lake of mud to examine the ruins of Gortyna. I follow the writing on the wall. It tells of laws which nobody obeys any longer. The only laws which last are the unwritten ones. Man is a lawbreaking animal. A timid one, however.
It is high noon. I want to have my lunch in Phaestos. We push on. The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar. In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here. It is the perpetual dawn of man’s awakening.
We glide through a deer run and the car stops at the edge of a wild park. “Up there,” says the man, pointing to a steep bluff—“Phaestos.” He had said the word. It was like magic. I hesitated. I wanted to prepare myself. “Better take your lunch with you,” said the man. “They may not have any food up there.” I put the shoe box under my arm and slowly, meditatively, reverently began the pilgrimage.
It was one of the few times in my life that I was fully aware of being on the brink of a great experience. And not only aware but grateful, grateful for being alive, grateful for having eyes, for being sound in wind and limb, for having rolled in the gutter, for having gone hungry, for having been humiliated, for having done everything that I did do since at last it had culminated in this moment of bliss.
I crossed a wooden bridge or two in the depth of the glen and paused again in the rich mud which was over my shoe tops to survey the little stretch I had traversed. At the turn of the road I would begin the laborious ascent. I had the fe
eling of being surrounded by deer. I had another strong insistent intuition: that Phaestos was the female stronghold of the Minos family. The historian will smile; he knows better. But in that instant and forever afterwards, regardless of proofs, regardless of logic, Phaestos became the abode of the queens. Every step I climbed corroborated the feeling.
When I had climbed to the level of the bluff I saw a narrow path ahead of me leading to the pavilion which has been erected on the site of the ruins for the convenience of the traveler. Suddenly I espied a man standing at the other end of the path. As I approached he began bowing and salaaming. That must be Kyrios Alexandros, I thought.
“God has sent you,” he said, pointing heavenward and smiling at me as if in ecstasy. Graciously he relieved me of my coat and lunch box, informing me rapturously as he trotted along in front of me what a joy it was to see a human being again. “This war,” he said, wringing his hands and piously raising his eyes in mute imploration, “this war…nobody comes here any more. Alexandros is all alone. Phaestos is dead. Phaestos is forgotten.” He stopped to pick a flower which he handed me. He looked at the flower sadly as if commiserating it on the miserable fate of being left to bloom unnoticed. I had stopped to look backward towards the encircling mountains. Alexandros stood at my side. He waited silently and reverently for me to speak. I couldn’t speak. I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to communicate my feelings with moist eyes. Alexandros gave me the look of a faithful dog; he took the hand which I had placed on his shoulder and bending low he kissed it.
“You are a good man,” he said. “God sent you to me, to share my loneliness, Alexandros is very happy, very happy. Come,” and he took me by the hand and led me round to the front of the pavilion. He did it as if he were about to confer on me the greatest gift that man can give to man. “I give you the earth and all the blessings it contains,” said that mute, eloquent look in his eyes. I looked. I said—“God, it’s incredible!” I turned my eyes away. It was too much, too much to try to accept at once.
Alexandros had gone inside for a moment, leaving me to pace slowly back and forth on the piazza of the pavilion surveying the grandeur of the scene. I felt slightly demented, like some of the great monarchs of the past who had devoted their lives to the enhancement of art and culture. I no longer felt the need of enrichment; I had reached the apogee, I wanted to give, to give prodigally and indiscriminately of all I possessed.
Alexandros appeared with a rag, a shoe brush and a big rusty knife; he got down on his knees and began manicuring my shoes. I was not in the least embarrassed. I thought to myself let him do as he likes, it gives him pleasure. I wondered vaguely what I might do myself to make men realize what great happiness lies in store for all of us. I sent out a benediction in every direction—to old and young, to the neglected savages in the forgotten parts of the earth, to wild as well as domesticated animals, to the birds of the air, to creeping things, to trees and plants and flowers, to rocks and lakes and mountains. This is the first day of my life, said I to myself, that I have included everybody and everything on this earth in one thought. I bless the world, every inch of it, every living atom, and it is all alive, breathing like myself, and conscious through and through.
Alexandros brought out a table and spread it. He suggested that I walk about the grounds and inspect the ruins. I listened to him as in a trance. Yes, I suppose I ought to stroll about and take it all in. That’s what one usually does. I descended the broad steps of the levelled palace and glanced here and there automatically. I hadn’t the faintest desire to snoop about examining lintels, urns, pottery, children’s toys, votive cells and such like. Below me, stretching away like an infinite magic carpet, lay the plain of Messara, girdled by a majestic chain of mountain ranges. From this sublime, serene height it has all the appearance of the Garden of Eden. At the very gates of Paradise the descendants of Zeus halted here on their way to eternity to cast a last look earthward and saw with the eyes of innocents that the earth is indeed what they had always dreamed it to be: a place of beauty and joy and peace. In his heart man is angelic; in his heart man is united with the whole world. Phaestos contains all the elements of the heart; it is feminine through and through. Everything that man has achieved would be lost were it not for this final stage of contrition which is here incarnated in the abode of the heavenly queens.
I walked about the grounds, taking in the vista from every angle. I described a circle within the enfolding circle of hills. Above me the great vault, roofless, thrown open to infinity. Monsieur Herriot was right and wrong at the same time. One is nearer to the sky, but one is also farther away than ever from that which lies beyond. To reach the sky is nothing—child’s play—from this supreme earthly mansion, but to reach beyond, to grasp if only for an instant the radiance and the splendor of that luminous realm in which the light of the heavens is but a faint and sickly gleam is impossible. Here the most sublime thoughts are nullified, stopped in their winged flight by an ever-deepening halo whose effulgence stills the very processes of thought. At its best thought is but speculation, a pastime such as the machine enjoys when it sparks. God has thought everything out in advance. We have nothing to solve: it has all been solved for us. We have but to melt, to dissolve, to swim in the solution. We are soluble fish and the world is an aquarium.
Alexandros was beckoning to me. Lunch was ready. I saw that he had set the table for me alone. I insisted that he set a place for himself. I had difficulty persuading him to do so. I had to put my arm around him, point to the sky, sweep the horizon, include everything in one large gesture before I could induce him to consent to share the meal with me. He opened a bottle of black wine, a heady, molten wine that situated us immediately in the center of the universe with a few olives, some ham and cheese. Alexandros was begging me to stay a few days. He got out the guest book to show me when the last visitor had arrived. The last visitor was a drunken American apparently who had thought it a good joke to sign the Duke of Windsor’s name to the register, adding “Oolala, what a night!” I glanced quickly over the signatures and discovered to my astonishment the name of an old friend of mine. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like crossing it out. I asked Alexandros if many Americans came to Phaestos. He said yes and from the glow in his eyes I gathered that they left liberal tips. I gathered that they liked the wine too.
I believe the wine was called mavrodaphne. If not it should have been because it is a beautiful black word and describes the wine perfectly. It slips down like molten glass, firing the veins with a heavy red fluid which expands the heart and the mind. One is heavy and light at the same time; one feels as nimble as the antelope and yet powerless to move. The tongue comes unloosed from its mooring, the palate thickens pleasurably, the hands describe thick, loose gestures such as one would love to obtain with a fat, soft pencil. One would like to depict everything in sanguine or Pompeiian red with splashes of charcoal and lamp black. Objects become enlarged and blurred, the colors more true and vivid, as they do for the myopic person when he removes his glasses. But above all it makes the heart glow.
I sat and talked with Alexandros in the deaf and dumb language of the heart. In a few minutes I would have to go. I was not unhappy about it; there are experiences so wonderful, so unique, that the thought of prolonging them seems like the basest form of ingratitude. If I were not to go now then I should stay forever, turn my back on the world, renounce everything.
I took a last stroll about the grounds. The sun had disappeared, the clouds were piling up; the brightly carpeted plain of Messara was streaked with heavy patches of shadow and sulphurous gleams of light under the leaden sky. The mountains drew nearer, became massive and ominous in their changing depths of blue. A moment ago the world had seemed ethereal, dream-like, a shifting, evanescent panorama; suddenly it had gathered substance and weight, the shimmering contours massed themselves in orchestral formation, the eagles swooped out of their eyries and hung in the sky like sultry messengers of the gods.
I said good-bye
to Alexandros who was now in tears. I turned hastily and started forward along the narrow path which skirts the edge of the cliff. A few paces and Alexandros was behind me; he had quickly gathered a little bouquet of flowers which he pressed upon me. We saluted again. Alexandros remained there, waving to me as I looked back from time to time. I came to the sharp declivity down which I had to wind and twist to the glen. I took a last look back. Alexandros was still there, a tiny speck now, but still waving his arms. The sky had become more menacing; soon everything would be drowned in one vast downpour. I wondered on the way down when I would see it again, if ever. I felt somewhat saddened to think that no one had been with me to share the stupendous gift; it was almost too much to bestow on one lone mortal. It was for that reason perhaps that I had left with Alexandros a princely gratuity—not out of generosity, as he probably assumed, but out of a feeling of guilt. If no one had been there I should still have left something.
Just as I got into the car it began to rain, lightly at first, then more and more heavily. By the time we reached the badlands the earth was a swirling sheet of water; what had been sun-baked clay, sand, barren soil, waste land, was now a series of floating terraces criss-crossed by tawny, turbulent cascades, by rivers flowing in every direction, racing towards the huge steaming sink charged with sullen deposits of earth, broken branches, boulders, shale, ore, wildflowers, dead insects, lizards, wheelbarrows, ponies, dogs, cats, outhouses, yellow ears of corn, birds’ nests, everything which had not the mind nor the feet nor the roots to resist. On the other side of the mountain, in the same torrential downpour, we passed men and women with umbrellas over their heads seated on diminutive beasts leisurely picking their way down the mountainside. Silent, grave figures moving at a snail’s pace, like determined pilgrims on their way to a holy shrine. The huge twisted sentinels of rock piled one on top of another like the giddy monuments of matchboxes which Picasso keeps on his mantelpiece had become huge gnarled mushrooms dripping with black pigment. In the furious rain their tilted, toppling forms seemed even more dangerous and menacing than before. Now and then a great mesa rose up, a mass of delicately veined rock supporting a tiny white sanctuary with a blue roof. If it were not Crete I could have imagined myself to be in some weird demonic stretch of Mongolia, some forbidden pass guarded by evil spirits which lie in wait for the unsuspecting traveler and drive him mad with their three-legged mustangs and henna-colored corpses that stand like frozen semaphores in the bleak, moonlit night.