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A trio of cormorants or shags had flown along over the water earlier in the day. I saw them later swimming in one of the combes, craned necks and swivelling beaks suggesting the periscopes of submarines. Now a dozen of them were standing scattered on the rocks ahead, their wings half open in their limp and quasi-heraldic pose. I took a path branching downhill and following the coast nearer the water to see them closer. They took wing all together and flapped off in an urgent wedge over the water, which was streaked with zinc and lilac.
After a mile or so I was picking my way along a track which was becoming rockier at every pace. By the time it was dusk, all trace of it had vanished and I found myself alternately wriggling through the undergrowth and scrambling over the rocks and sometimes both simultaneously. The going seemed slightly better over the rocks, so I advanced jumping from slab to slab, circumventing pools, bestriding fissures and climbing up damp ledges and down irregular causeways, hoping for a break in the rocks and the vegetation that might lead uphill again. Soon it was quite dark, except for a blazing mass of stars, which were little help in this confusion of boulders and water. I remembered a torch in one of the pockets of my rucksack, and continued with its strong beam, picking my way over the steepening rocks, determined, if it grew any worse, to turn back. Advancing, immediately after this decision, I found myself slipping on a steep, scaly ledge, then sliding down a slant like a barn roof. Then came a drop and a jolting bang that landed me in a pool up to my waist. When I had got out, I found myself sitting, jarred and shaken with a cut on my forehead and a split thumbnail, on the edge of a still deeper pool, shuddering with the sudden icy cold. I could tell that the pool was deeper because about twenty-five feet down lay my torch, burrowing a brilliant tunnel of light through sea anemones and weeds and a flickering concourse of fish. Behind me soared black walls of rock, and in front the same dark, rocky-looking upheaval running out to sea and leading, it must be, to the cape I had seen before night fell. I thought dazedly of what would have happened if, in my rucksack and overcoat and heavy boots, I had followed the torch into the depths. Should I take off my heavy stuff and dive for the drowned torch? I was already shaking all over and my teeth were chattering; it was out of the question. Should I wait there till it was light? The sun had only just set: it would have meant sitting on this rock for twelve or thirteen hours in the freezing night under these brilliant and useless stars. Fortunately I could just discern my stick, floating and recoverable on the shallower part of the pool. In case, by a wild chance, there were somebody on this deserted coast, I decided to shout. But what? I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, the Bulgarian for Help. All I could think of was a formal cry of ‘Good evening!’ ‘Dobro vetcher!’ I shouted again and again, but, as I expected, with no reply, except a returning vetcher! from the rock face.
The only thing was to go on. With a reluctant Hylas gaze at the lost light and the glittering mob of fish five fathoms down, now jerking, jostling and going mad round this fallen portent, I began to fumble my way forward, tapping the rocks with my stick, feeling my way along the landward wall of rock: sliding, crawling on all fours, climbing up ledges draped with popping and slippery ribbons of bladderwrack, filled with dread of what lay the other side, wading waist-deep and afraid that a sudden chasm should open; stopping on a rock every now and again to send up my reiterated cry of desperate affability. I was close to despair. The only hope was not to think at all beyond the range of my groping fingers.
The stars were no help. They faintly indicated large masses in dim silhouette, but by contrast seemed to leave immediate detail in even denser obscurity than if a bank of clouds had hung between them and the sea. But after an eternity of this slithering and pawing advance, a few constellations appeared in front where all had been black before, indicating that I was reaching the cape and, after another unending period, rounding it. Inland, the end of the stars meant that the mainland was blocking them out. There was no other hint, nothing to say whether the height was miles inland or close at hand, or whether it was a steep cliff or gentle slope: a huge black nothing. I shoved on, preferring recklessly to wade now; the water, oddly, was not so cold as the night air; but when I began crawling up the rocks again, my clothes turned to a plate armour of ice and lead. Within a few minutes of each other, both my bootlaces broke as though by collusion, and my boots turned at once into buckets that dragged like anchors underwater and into squelching and retarding fetters up and down those leaning blades of rock. I felt so beaten and exhausted and hopeless that I lay down on a ledge of basalt, getting my breath back with fleeting visions of brief entries in daily papers recording youth’s or student’s mishap on Black Sea, but no foul play suspected; until the cold warned me that if I didn’t go on, I would give up the ghost. After another cycle in hell, lowering my half-unshod foot on to what I thought was the surface of a pool, I found the solidity of sand and the grate of pebbles underfoot. Another pace confirmed it: I was on the shore of an inlet. Rounding a black buttress of cliff, I saw, a little way up the beach, a ragged rectangular line of light, queerly surrounded by many other bright cracks and chinks through which light leaked. I sloshed across the pebbles, pulled open an improvised door, uttered through rattling teeth the last dobro vetcher of the day and walked into the other side.
A dozen fire-lit faces looked up in surprise and consternation from their cross-legged supper on the ground as though an enemy agent had just landed, or a sea monster or a drowned man’s ghost had crossed their threshold.
Ten minutes later, changed into gym shoes and canvas trousers, two shirts and several layers of jersey, all miraculously dry, with a sheepskin shepherd’s cloak, and my fur kalpack, justified at last, rammed over my ears, I was crouched on a stool in front of a blaze of stacked thorns that reached the height of a bonfire, with three or four slugs of slivo burning inside me, sipping a second glass of tea brewed from some mountain herbs, two inches deep in sugar, and still shuddering. One of the denizens of the place had washed the blood away and rubbed stinging slivo over my hands and face and feet; another had plied a towel from my rucksack. Recovered from the first shock of this bleeding, chalk-white, bedraggled and sodden apparition, they had leapt to my help like Bernardine monks. It took me some time to focus and segregate the figures moving about in the firelight and the shadows and the smoke of this strange concavity.
They were a wild-looking lot. Six of them were dressed in the customary heavy, homespun earth-brown or dark blue, but so patched and tattered that it was hard to distinguish the parent colour, and shod in the usual crusted apparatus of swaddles and thongs and canoe-tipped rawhide moccasins, one of which looked as if it had been abraded for several decades. Knives were stuck into their voluminous scarlet sashes, and they were hatted like me, in battered and threadbare busbies that had moulted most of their fur. An old man with a tangled white beard seemed to be the dominating figure. A second group of four wore more ordinary clothes, though equally patched and worn, and blue jerseys pocked with holes. Ancient sailors’ caps with once-shiny peaks were askew on their matted hair. They all of them looked exactly what they were; shepherds and seamen. One of the sailors, who must have been about forty, had only one hand and a star tattooed on the back of the other. His comrades were a few years older than me.
The extraordinary place all round us, which at first had seemed little beyond a fire-lit hollow, was a large cave. It arched high overhead but did not go very deep into the cliff side. Much of the outer wall was formed by natural standing blades of rock; boulders and a rough, mortarless masonry of stones filled the gaps, branches and planks completed it, and flattened tins stamped with the name Socony-Vacuum in Cyrillic letters. The flames picked out the springing fans of shrub high on the rock face, with clusters of stalactites, and summoned loose gear out of the shadows that told of the cave’s dual function: a rowing boat on its side, oars, rudders, fishing lamps, long-shafted fishing spears topped by barbed spikes like eight-toothed metal combs, anchors, geometric fi
sh-pots, creels, bait-buckets, corks, gourds and loops of net. A small primitive anvil was clawed on to an embedded tree stump.
On the other side of the fire a significant change of paraphernalia set in: cheese baskets on planks, leaning crooks and a dangling grove of heavy orbs – cheese poured liquid into goatskin bags, hairs innermost, the white drops pitter-patting from the bottom. A large cauldron of whey simmered over a second fire. Now and then the old man with the beard leant over it and stirred and skimmed. Lastly, across the dark reaches at the further end of this vast chamber, ran a breast-high barrier of bleached stones and furze. From the gloom behind it came a sudden cracked and derisive cachinnation that shook me out of the torpor of my own woes. In answer to my question the old man picked a burning brand from under the cauldron and held it up: the brief oval of his flame revealed a thicket of spiral-bladed horns and the imperial beards and the matted black-and-white striped pelts of fifty goats. A flourish of the torch kindled the momentary flash of a hundred oblong-pupilled eyes, another wave of falsetto jeering, a clicking of horns and the notes of a few heavy bronze bells. A black patina of smoke and soot gave a polish to the bosses and spikes of the cave. The rocks that leapt from the floor were used as irregular tables or backs to lean against for the floor-dwelling population. Half a dozen dogs wandered about this grotto or slept. A big white one, lying with lolling tongue and his forepaws expectantly crossed, surveyed the scene through feloniously close-set eyes, one of them surrounded by a black ring. The sand and pebbles underlay a thick trodden layer of goats’ pellets and fish scales, and the precinct reeked of goats, fish, curds, cheese, tar, brine, sweat and woodsmoke: an abode harmoniously shared by Polyphemus and Sinbad.
They had been finishing supper. The remainder of the lentils was ladled out and handed me in a tin plate, while one of the fishermen poured oil in the frying pan, laid a couple of fish across it, and in due course plucked them out sizzling by their tails and laid them where the lentils had been. I had thought I was beyond eating; but these delicious fish were demolished in no time. What were they called? ‘Skoumbri,’ the fishermen said; ‘no, no!’ cried the others: ‘shumria!’ (It was mackerel.) There was some friendly teasing about this: the shepherds were Bulgars, the fishermen Greeks. One of them apologized, saying that they had, alas, finished all the slivo and the wine. I remembered and fished out Gatcho’s parting present: two bottles of raki from Tirnovo, one of them safe in Nadejda’s wooden flask, the other mercifully intact as well. In spite of an occasional shudder and a rattle of teeth, I began, as the food and drink piled up inside, to feel marvellous. The circulating raki ignited a mood of nautico-pastoral wassail, and by the time the second bottle was broached all these wind-battered and weather-chipped faces were singing Bulgarian songs, some of which I had heard before and one that I knew. I had noticed something hanging on a peg which I had taken to be a goatskin bag for milking ewes. It was a bagpipe; but its owner, the old bearded man, said he thought it was broken. When he inflated it, the drone through the horn trumpet died away in a loud groan. This death rattle called forth an answering dirge-like wail from the white dog with the black monocle, briskly silenced by a backhanded cuff. A crease in the parchment bag had split. I managed to mend it, to everyone’s laughing approval, with a strip of adhesive tape.
As the drone swelled, one of the younger fishermen began a burlesque Turkish belly-dance – I think called the kütchek – learnt, he said, in Tzarigrad, Constantinople. It was very convincing, even to the loud crack that accompanied a particularly spasmodic wrench of haunch and midriff, produced by the parting of the two interlocked forefingers of either hand as they were held, with joined palms, above his head. The comic effect of this dance was all the greater owing to the husky and piratical appearance of Dimitri, the dancer. ‘He needs a charchaff,’ one of the shepherds cried, and bound a cheese cloth round the lower part of Dimitri’s face and across the bridge of his nose like a yashmak. The rolling of his smoke-reddened eyes above this veil turned him to a mixture of virago, houri and the Widow Twankey.
Meanwhile Costa, another sailor, was preparing a further elaboration in the shadows. Knotting a length of cable into a loose ring, he slipped it round his legs just above the knee, then, holding his thighs wide, he twisted it hand over hand till only a loop remained into which he stuck a thick log of wood two feet long, held in position by the twisted cable like the arm of a roman catapult. When he advanced into the firelight with the same rotating motion as Dimitri, the log swung in circles, suggesting a Priapus in repose, a sight which evoked an outburst of uninhibited laughter from us all. A mock pursuit of the veiled Dimitri began, the sudden widening of Costa’s thighs tightening the cable and swinging the log into the horizontal, then letting it fall again rhythmically. Further widening of the thighs raised the log into an ithyphallic stance, and to keep it at this angle entailed moving by leaps, a gait which was half that of a grasshopper, half of a predatory pasha bent on rape. He plucked one of the shepherd’s knives from its sheath and clenched it between his teeth. The bagpipe howled louder and louder, and the spectators clapped in time to the beat. Dimitri gyrated in even more uncouthly skittish postures. Sweat stood out on Costa’s brow with the effort of maintaining the seesaw motion of the log. The flames threw ribald shadows monstrously enlarged and distorted across the wall of the cave. Finally, in a sustained and culminating blast of bag-piping, with his legs splayed in the knees-bend position, he circled his writhing partner in a sequence of gyrating leaps, allowing the log to thump the floor after each bound before hoisting it once more to its soaring perpendicular. At last, with a long scream, the hoarse and panting pibroch finished, subsiding at the end with the wail of a slaughtered ox; the dancer collapsed melodramatically, laughing and out of breath. His partner Dimitri broke off too, tore down his yashmak and strolled to where Costa was recovering. Then with an offhand ‘You won’t need this any more’, he plucked the log from where it lay in its loosened harness and pitched it into the flaming thorns where it sent up a shower of sparks, and Costa let out an ear-splitting howl of pretended pain. This last touch brought the house down. The raki went round again. The place was an uproar of laughter and shouted toasts.
Egged on by the others after a while, Panayi, the fourth of the fishermen, extracted a long, wrapped object from the boat. The removal of the cloth, when he rejoined us on the floor, exposed an instrument halfway between a lute and a mandolin, with an inlaid sounding-board; the gleaming shell of its bowl was ribbed with ivory and ebony; but the unusual length and slenderness of the neck, slanting from his cross-legged lap as he screwed the pegs into tune and plucked the seven wire strings with a hen’s quill for a plectrum, gave it the air of a court musician’s instrument from a Persian painting: an incongruously delicate and polished thing in our rough-hewn den. When it was in tune, the player showered minims and crotchets into the grotto in a long and elaborate pattern and a succession of jangling chords in different keys, and, after a pause, launched into a regular tune with a slow, heavily stressed and almost lurching rhythm that slid insidiously into the bloodstream until even the musician himself, stooping over the strings or gazing straight ahead, seemed to be mesmerized by the spell of his own music. He was a tall, muscular, battered man of about thirty with large grey eyes. After a few bars, he and the older man began to sing. It sounded like a deep-voiced lament, with many telling pauses and repetitions, and at moments it was purposely grating and strained and full of oriental undulations. The older man accentuated the beat by slapping the drum-like side of a gourd float, steadying it with the stump of one hand and striking it with the star-backed palm of the other.
Before long Dimitri and Costa were on their feet again, involved in an intricate dance very unlike the cheerful and bawdy stampings they had just improvised. The dancers were side by side, linked at a stiff arm’s length by a hand on each other’s shoulder, their unsmiling faces hanging forward chin on breast like those of hanged men. Nothing could be less carefree or orgiastic than the perverse
mood of the steps, the premeditated hornpipe, then an abrupt halt. This was broken by movements as slight as the bending and straightening of the knee; the feet, flat on the ground with heels together, opened at an angle then closed and opened again. The right feet were then lifted and slowly swung backwards and forwards. A left-foot jump brought their torsos seesawing in a right angle to balance a simultaneous kick on the ground behind them with their right. Then the dancers swept forward for an accelerated pace or two, braked and halted with their right legs lifted, knees to heels sweeping parallel to the ground in slow scything movements, and falling again. Their hands smote beneath them in a double clap, then they were almost on their knees, hands on shoulders again, gliding off sideways, then rolling forward once more at their smooth and unnaturally timed pace. The softness, the hypnotic-seeming control and union, the abrupt surging, the recoveries and the arms falling loose for an identical pirouette before joining again, the fastidious shelving of stereotype – what on earth had all this sophistication to do with Balkan or peasant simplicity? Then there was the planned anticlimax, compensated by a drilled outburst when, in any other dance, all would have been decrescendo and subsidence. The sudden asperity and vigour and speed were muzzled and hushed in mid-swoop, like the flash of steel unsheathed halfway up the blade, then allowed to slide back with a soft subsiding click of hilt on scabbard. The subtle and complex beauty of this peculiar dancing in relation to all the dancing I had seen in recent months, and coming hotfoot on the straightforward bumpkin fun of the first performance, was as much of a surprise as would be finding unheralded in a collection of folk verse a long metaphysical poem in a highly elaborate metre and stuffed with conceits, tropes, assonances, internal rhymes and abstruse allusions. I think it was just as new to the shepherds as it was to me.
The Broken Road Page 25