Basil paid me a visit not long after lunch, and Charalampi brought along tea as we sat talking. We spent most of the time over my maps, planning out my route in Greece. I have decided to visit the monasteries of Meteora, near Kalambaka, and Basil also advised me to visit Osias Loukas near Delphi, and Daphni near Athens.[27] We went over my past route together too, in which he seemed interested, and passed a few hours pleasantly enough, discussing foreign countries, and comparing their inhabitants, our views being practically the same on most of them. I was sorry when he went. Later on, I went over to the chapel in the cloisters, where a simple vespers was sung, drinking deep of the Russian singing, which I will not hear so often hereafter, things being what they are.
My supper was excellent, the fresh boiled eggs and the borscht being a constant delight, and the un-oily soup a pleasant change. Charalampi has the trick of arranging it in an appetizing way, always with a spotless table napkin, cutlery from which one is not forced to scrape a month’s coagulated slime, and his sweet oranges placed in artistic juxtapositions. The snow seemed to grow stronger and stronger, touching the windowpanes with a muffled patter and, melted by the heat of the room, running down the panes in a hundred little streams which, before Charalampi drew the curtains and lit the lamp, distorted the bleak world outside like a freak mirror at a funfair. I went to bed early, reading the whole of Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, before I finally fell asleep. I am growing fonder and fonder of Byron; I can’t see why our odd nation sets no store by him, to the amazement of Europe.
13th February, Xenophontos
The snow had stopped when I woke this morning, and the sun was trying to shine through banks of grey cloud, which hung threateningly above the greyer sea. A thaw had set in, and everywhere the snow was melting in chill streams that flowed everywhere. After a brief walk outside, I retired again to my warm room, where Charalampi, replacing my empty cup for a full one, hoped that I had had a ‘спокойная ночь’,[28] which I assured him was the case. I worked all the morning, my table and chair drawn close to the stove for warmth, feeling very depressed, partly owing to the weather, partly to the prospect of leaving Russiko, the monastery of all the monasteries of Mount Athos where I have been happiest. I look forward to coming back again, before the world gets many years older. Sadly, I eat my borscht for the last time.
The afternoon was pleasant enough, however, as Basil came over to tea, and we sat long, talking of Virgil, Horace and Catullus. I showed him the little Elzevir Horace that his compatriot, Baron Liphart, gave me a year ago in Munich. He talked of the Englishmen he had met at his monastery, a few of whom I knew – Professor Whittemore, Robert Byron, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, David Talbot Rice and Balfour and Captain Stuart-Hay. The last he advised me to go and see in Athens, as he was a very amusing character, and had been forbidden to come to the Holy Mountain, owing to some clash with the monks of St Gregory. I promised to bear his greetings. When all my things were packed, I said farewell of him and Father Charalampi, who seemed sorry to lose me. I was very sad to bid farewell to Father Basil, as I felt I had made a friend; I promised to bear his salaams to such of his friends as I might happen upon in my travels.
The rocky path from Russiko to Xenophontos was miserable, owing to the melting snow on the lower slopes, and the solid banks of it, ankle deep, higher up. It was of that sort with a brittle, sticky crust, and I have never cursed it more than I did today; it looked firm enough, but gave way at once, with the noise of breaking wood, and my feet sank into the soft snow beneath, sometimes knee deep, and my boots, ruined by a fortnight’s springing gazelle-like from rock to rock, soaked in the damp like a sponge, so when I arrived at Xenophontos, I was a miserable case.
Xenophontos makes the impression of a large ecclesiastical group of rambling farm buildings. It is right down on the sea shore, within a yard or two of the water’s edge, and its lack of rock-girt grandeur, such as one sees in many of the other monasteries, gives it a normal workaday look. The eaves are low, and there are none of those stacks of balconies which are seen on the other monasteries. A little caravan of asses, laden with firewood, was clattering about the yard, and a few ragged fowl were pecking jerkily among the wet cobbles. The arhondaris, a sad, dark-bearded figure, led me to my room down one of the longest, gloomiest passages I’ve ever seen. The windows overlooked the waves which broke a few yards below, and there was a Turkish cushioned window-seat running across the wall, the usual white-columned plaster stove, and an ill-fitting door which admitted a chilling draught. Above the windows hung a picture of Joachim III, Patriarch of Constantinople, an energetic old man with a streaky beard, his bosom hung with ribbons, crosses and archiepiscopal insignia the size of jam tarts, and his black frock crusted with stars and orders.
I put in an appearance at vespers, where the church is light and whitewashed and hung with a profusion of ikons, many of them very beautiful, especially one in the southern transept, of two saintly warriors in the thorax, lorica and greaves of classical soldiers, the depth and richness of colours in the red-golden armour and halo being delicious. The two mosaics spoken so highly of in The Station are really remarkable too, for feeling and execution. The service however was tame after Russiko: the usual antiphony of two solo voices, their cues being given by a deacon who crosses from one side of the nave to the other, bearing the psalter and placing it on a high table, usually of Turkish or Arabian inlay. He sings each verse through rapidly, the monk slowly and elaborately, the deacon starting the next verse before he has finished. It has an oddly harmonious effect.
The arhondaris did his work as guest-master as if it were an unpleasant infliction, and each little service that Charalampi had done so promptly and with such a good grace was done with the expression of a martyr, making me feel extraordinarily uncomfortable. Seeing me shivering in my overcoat, he asked me lugubriously if I wanted a fire, and on my reluctantly admitting that it would not be unwelcome, he went about it, his head bloody but unbowed.
After supper, as I was busy writing by the fire, two epitropes paid me a visit and I jumped up and gave them chairs. It seemed a sort of official visitation, and commonplaces were exchanged for a long time, and when these were exhausted a long and embarrassing silence ensued. I tried to bolster up the failing conversation by showing them drawings, writings, trying to get them interested in maps and routes, but everything failed at last, and helpless I sat down, and let the swamping silence envelop everything. To break it, at intervals, I ejaculated ‘hey ho!’ or ‘ἡ ζωὴ καλὴ εἶναι’, ‘life is good’, trying to coin the sort of platitudes that one emits in England at such times. That failing, I pretended to relapse into a brown study, gazing abstractedly into the flames but really in an agony of embarrassment. At last, after I don’t know how long, one of the epitropes heaved a sigh and said ‘λοιπό!’ and the two greybeards rustled to their feet, wished me goodnight, and left me to continue my interrupted work. This word ‘λοιπό!’ is very useful, the equivalent of ‘well’ in English, ‘eh, bien’ in French, ‘also’ in German, ‘haidi’ in Bulgarian.
Since their departure I have been writing, feeling depressed at my leaving Russiko and regretting Father Basil. I think my depression has rather jaundiced my outlook tonight against perfectly ordinary and reasonable beings.
14th February, Dochiarion
Luncheon was awful today, uneatable vegetables soaked in oil, which looked too much like that in which the wicks burn before the ikons to be palatable, so I flung it to the wild waves, and lunched off bread and wine, and white cheese. The arhondaris seems quite a nice chap, and I got a wrong impression of his melancholy last night, mistaking it for surliness. I got off fairly early, avoiding a second intrusion by the epitropes whom I saw coming down the passage, so I bade a hasty goodbye en passant, instead of the alternative agonizing hour in my cell.
The way from Xenophontos to Dochiarion was pleasant and leisurely, in spite of the melting sun, which turned the pathway into a rivulet. The two monasteries are sc
arcely an hour apart, and the going is easy all the way. Dochiarion soon came in sight, reminding me somehow of an Italian scene, with the cypresses and yew trees, the gently sloping cobbles, a tiled lych-gate shelter built over the way and the pathway approaching the deep gates through orange trees. The gates are a broad, mounting tunnel, the porter’s room built in the wall’s thickness up a few steps. He was a genial Pan-like little fellow, who handed me a thimbleful of raki as soon as he set eyes on me, then led me along the steeply slanting courtyard to a walled flight of whitewashed steps, and then wooden-banistered stairs on to a terrace overlooking the well of the courtyard and the chapel and the irregular, chimney-peopled roofs of the lower parts of the monastery. The arhondaris was chopping wood in the sun, his gown tied about his knees and his sleeves rolled back, displaying muscular hairy forearms. He resembled an early ascetic, with his spreading fan of fine silver beard, hollow eyes, and lined face. He vouchsafed a smile to me, and led me to my room, a big white one, facing the sea and the south, so that the afternoon sun poured in. It had the first open fireplace I have seen on the peninsula so far, and after my host had tendered me his guest’s ratification of welcome, he kindled a great fire there, piling up logs of enormous girth and soon making the chilly room as warm as toast.
The sun was still shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky, reflected in the tranquil Aegean and flung back by the gleaming snow, so I sat on the stone seat running along the parapet, and made a sketch of the leaded roof of the church, the irregular tiled roofs below, with their groves of slender white chimneys. The charm of Dochiarion, for me one of the most appealing of the monasteries, is the hill on which it is built, so that the roofs sloped down and down under my eyes, seawards, the tall cypresses jutting over the walls, and with the foreshortened monks, peasants and beasts of burden in the steep courtyard below, under the church’s shadow, suggesting some peaceful little town of Arthurian legend.
Vespers in the church amazed me by the shirtsleeves atmosphere, none of the monks seeming to take it at all seriously, the young beardless novice who took the service grinning like a chimpanzee at one of his comrades; there was a constant undertone of whispering between two of his epitropes, and the priest who came round to cense the congregation (using a strange, jangling, chainless hand-thurible) had the air of a retired publican coming out to water his roses on a summer evening. As if to complete the evening, a greenfinch flitted in at one of the windows, and for the rest of the office flew round and round the church, sometimes up into the central cupola, where a frescoed Christ the All-Powerful blessed mankind, the thumb and fourth finger of his right hand joined in benediction; sometimes the greenfinch perched opposite a host of saints and martyrs, the serried ranks of their haloes diminishing in the distance, and interlapping as neatly as fish scales. The eyes of everyone followed it round and round the roof, twittering and chirping, pointing and drawing it to each other’s attention. At last the service ended, and as the congregation trooped out, one of the brothers walked round with a fan of turkey’s feathers, extinguishing the candles with one sweep of his hand.
The sunset over the sea was lovely, as the globe of the sun was purified to one of those clearly defined orange balloons that in winter set so prettily over the Serpentine. I sat on the window-seat, thinking of home until it was quite dark, the room being lit with the leaping flames of my open hearth. I was sitting, looking meditatively and contentedly into its glowing depths, when a horrible little man came in, sat himself talkatively down beside me, soon abandoning his stereotyped bombardment of questions for his own life story. He pulled a medicine bottle filled with raki from his pocket, took a gurgling swig at it, and sighing contentedly proffered it to me. Affected at length by my slightly churlish unresponsiveness, he took himself off, and left me to my own devices, which were to sit quite happily and alone in the twilight. I think one of the greatest blessings of this life is its solitude.
It is very late now, and I supped long ago off rice and sardines, and sat before this glorious fire, drinking my red wine for a while, and feeling like some mediaeval traveller alone in his chamber over a bottle of sack or mead – Denys in The Cloister and the Hearth, for instance.
Outside now, the moon and stars are shining brightly on the snowy roofs, and making a silver track across the inky sea. I do so wonder what everyone is doing at home now.
15th February, Konstamonitou
The guest-master made up my bed on the broad Turkish divan running round the room, and after turning down the lamp I lay a long time in the flickering firelight, listening to the hissing of the damp logs and watching the sap bubble from them. At length sleep came, and it is morning. I basked a delicious hour or two in the southward-facing window, level with my cheek as I lay. Outside the world was sunny and inviting, the Aegean flashing back the sun’s rays, and beyond the roofs, chimney-pots, leaded cupolas and cypresses below, the coast of the peninsula curving away into the misty distance.
The way lay downhill, under the deep arch of the monastery gates, and past two orange trees, laden with heavy, golden fruit against a background of pointed leaves like glittering green sword blades. I soon found myself on the beach, the path running over the pebbles, and the foam of the breaking waves never more than a few yards off. Arriving later up the hillside, among the cultivated ledges of land, terraced one above the other and shaded by groves of olive trees, I found a taciturn Albanian sitting on a rock, looking out to sea with the sorrows of Prometheus on his brow. Turning his sad eyes on me to tell me the way, he pointed uphill with his staff, past a field where two grimed charcoal burners were busy round their glowing pyres. This road, climbing steadily and gently, was shaded all the way, and owing to the increasingly rugged and uninhabited aspect of the country, it seemed I had been misdirected, or had missed the right path. So before going further, I decided to wait until a passer-by could redirect me; I amused myself meanwhile by rolling snowballs down the slope, watching them grow bigger and bigger until they broke against a tree, and pressing hard snow in a knob at the end of my stick, so that by twisting it in softer snow I could collect huge unwieldy ammonites. Someone rounded the bend in the road as I was doing this, and I felt very guilty, somehow. After finding the right way, I slunk off feeling his eyes riveted on my back, as if he had found me manufacturing bombs instead of snowballs.
Konstamonitou, reached soon after, lies in a cup of the mountains, and has a forlorn and neglected air. I waited quite a while in the courtyard, and at last a doddering greybeard came and took me to the arhondaris, a jovial man with opulent beard and glowing cheeks. He gave me a pleasant little cell with the divans down both sides so broad that only a yard and a half’s space was between them; another open fire too, which was soon full of blazing logs, my boots dripping greasy pools of melted snow on the bricks before it.
A French-speaking monk was produced, a meek young Father Paul, with black beard and hair, and melancholy eyes; he was intelligent however, speaking good French and a little German. After a few minutes’ conversation he asked me if I believed in miracles, and receiving a non-committal reply, he launched into a long lecture about them, and the strict humbleness and poverty which his coenobite monastery enforced on its monks. He led me down to vespers as soon as we heard the clanging wooden beam in the yard, and leading me from ikon to ikon, told me their histories. Coming to an old one of St Stephen, which the Turks had once tried to burn, he pointed to it as proof of his homily of an hour before. At one point during the service, the monks left their stalls, and started a succession of crossings and obeisances, bending and touching the floor repeatedly with both hands. I naturally remained stationary, for fear of dropping some brick, but an old monk came up, and with fury in his eye muttered ‘ἒξω! ἒξω!’[29] to make me do likewise. Father Paul arrived in time, telling him I was a heretic and knew no better.
The rigours of their life seemed to have told on most of the monks, as a more decrepit, broken-looking group of men it would be hard to find, drooping in their stalls
, their gaunt frames draped with tattered and rotting robes, and a misery and apathy in their sunken eyes that is indescribable.
After vespers, Father Paul – it seems odd to call him Father, when he is only a few years older than me – led me into the refectory where all the monks were seated at long trestle tables down one side of the chamber. The abbot, an imposing, full-bearded man, with his black staff of office by his side, exchanged bows gravely with me, and Paul took me to sit at the table. After a long grace, we sat down, all the monks still draped in their veils, and set about vegetables and sardines, raw and swimming in yellow oil, with the stone-hard loaves and the metal jug of wine next to our places. Not a word was said all the meal, as one of the brothers read from the Bible in a singsong voice, the monks frequently laying down their forks to cross themselves. Finally, he came on his knees and kissed the abbot’s hand, who gave him a ceremonial crust of bread. Then we all stood up for a grace after the meal, and processed from the refectory, the abbot leading, his staff carried like a fasces in the crook of his arm.
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