Several of my neighbours fingered strings of beads, but not in prayer; they spilt them between their fingers at random intervals, as though to scan their boundless leisure; and to my delight, one old man, embowered in a private cloud, was smoking a narghileh. Six feet of red tubing were cunningly coiled, and when he pulled on the amber mouthpiece, charcoal glowed on a damped wad of tobacco leaves from Isfahan and the bubbles, fighting their way through the water with the sound of a mating bull-frog, filled the glass vessel with smoke. A boy with small tongs arranged fresh charcoal. While he did so, the old man pointed towards me and whispered; and the boy came back in a few minutes with a laden tray on a circular table six inches from the ground. Seeing my quandary, a neighbour told me how to begin: first, to drink the small glass of raki; then eat the mouthful of delicious rose-petal jam lying ready spooned on a glass saucer, followed by half a tumbler of water; finally to sip at a dense and scalding thimbleful of coffee slotted in a filigree holder. The ritual should be completed by emptying the tumbler and accepting tobacco, in this case, an aromatic cigarette made by hand on the island. Meanwhile the old men sat in smiling silence, sighing occasionally, with a friendly word to me now and then in what sounded like very broken Rumanian; the doctor had said that their accent and style caused amusement on the shore. Among themselves they spoke Turkish, which I had never heard: astonishing strings of agglutinated syllables with a follow-through of identical vowels and dimly reminiscent of Magyar; all the words are different, but the two tongues are Ugro-Finnic cousins in the Ural-Altaic group of languages. According to the doctor it had either drifted far from the metropolitan vernacular of Constantinople or remained immovably lodged in its ancient mould, like a long-marooned English community still talking the language of Chaucer.
I didn’t know what to do when leaving; an attempt at payment was stopped by a smile and an enigmatic backward tilt of the head. Like everything else, this was the first time I came across the universal negative of the Levant; and, once more, there was that charming inclination, hand on breast.
So these were the last descendants of those victorious nomads from the borders of China! They had conquered most of Asia, and North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, enslaved half Christendom and battered on the gates of Vienna; victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a minaret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground.
Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbled the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredjé—a veil pinned in a straight line above the brow and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes, and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs.
Hunyadi had put up the first defensive walls, but the ramparts all round belonged to the interregnum after Prince Eugene had taken Belgrade and driven the Turks downstream, and the eastern end of the island looked as though it might sink under the weight of his fortifications. The vaults of the gun-galleries and the dank tremendous magazines had fallen in. Fissures split the ramparts and great blocks of masonry, tufted with grass, had broken away and goats tore at the leaves among the debris. A pathway among pear trees and mulberries led to a little cemetery where turbaned headstones leant askew and in one corner lay the tomb of a dervish prince from Bokhara who had ended his life here after wandering the world, ‘poor as a mouse,’ in search of the most beautiful place on earth and the one most sheltered from harm and mishap.
It was getting late. The sun left the minaret, and then the new moon, a little less wraith-like than the night before, appeared on cue in a turquoise sky with a star next to it that might have been pinned there by an Ottoman herald. With equal promptitude, the hodja’s torso emerged on the balcony under the cone of the minaret. Craning into the dusk, he lifted his hands and the high and long-drawn-out summons of the izan floated across the air, each clause wavering and spreading like the rings of sound from pebbles dropped at intervals into a pool of air. I found myself still listening and holding my breath when the message had ended and the hodja must have been half-way down his dark spiral.
Surrounded by pigeons, men were unhasteningly busy at the lustral fountain by the mosque and the row of slippers left by the door was soon lengthened by my gym shoes. Once inside, the Turks spread in a line on a vast carpet, with lowered eyes. There was no decoration except for the mihrab and the mimbar and the black calligraphy of a Koranic verse across the wall. The ritual gestures of preparation were performed in careful and unhurried unison, until, gathering momentum, the row of devotees sank like a wave; then tilted over until their foreheads touched the pile of the carpet, the soles of their feet all suddenly and disarmingly revealed; rocking back, they sat with their hands open in their laps, palms upward; all in dead silence. Every few minutes, the hodja sitting in front of them murmured ‘Allah akbar!’ in a quiet voice, and another long silence followed. In the unornate and hushed concavity, the four isolated syllables sounded indescribably dignified and austere.
A Cave on the Black Sea
First published as ‘A Balkan Welcome,’ Holiday Magazine, May 1965
In December 1934, Paddy was travelling down the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. The goal of his journey, Constantinople, was less than 150 miles away to the south; but somewhere between Varna and Burgas, the path petered out just as night was coming on.
This was Europe’s easternmost rim; but it was hard to remember that the ocean-like sweep that flashed from the cliffs of Bulgaria to the bare horizon was inland water: Tcherno Moré, Kara Su, Mareă Neagră, the Euxine, the Black Sea . . . Constantza, Odessa, Batum, Trebizond, Constantinople . . . The names were intoxicating. Due east, the Caucasus lay; Asia Minor to the south; north, the Danube and Rumania, and north-east, the Ukraine and all the Russias. The chill that crackled in the December air was a hint to a traveller of those limitless impending snows.
Inland, to the north-west, rose the Great Balkan range. At the other end of this brilliant morning I could just see the ice-bright and blue-shadowed snows and, to the south-west, a faint gleam of the Rhodope mountains. Perhaps it was just about here that the migrating storks I had seen pouring over the Stara Planina four months before had struck the Black Sea coast on their way to Africa. The tiers that rolled inland, so arid then underfoot, were feathered now with young grass. The Bulgarian winter had not yet begun and the emerald and moss-bright froth across the russet soil spread a fiction of early spring. The hills were empty. Glimpses of villages soared inland, their chimneys balancing above them veils as thin and blue as un-inhaled tobacco smoke. Slow threads rose swaying and expanding from distant bonfires, as though Mohicans were signalling. The hillsides uncoiled red scrolls of plough; beehives, muffled for the coming winter, stood in cataleptic kraals; and only the far-sounding bells told that the flocks were grazing their way across Bulgaria at a glacier’s pace. Magpies fidgeted about the landscape and an unstable confetti of gulls whitened the grass and the furrows.
When the track dipped steeply into a coomb, streams curled to the sea over a crescent of sand and the ravines that twisted inland were filled with bare, silver walnut trees and the spidery winter distaffs of poplars. Hundreds of hooded crows were
settled along the boughs and a clap of the hands would shed them deafeningly into the sky as the branches sprang free, sending them up the valley in a drift of soot for a league or two; then back they swung to plunge the spinneys into raucous mourning again. Some people say that these birds—suddenly ominous by their numbers—live for more than a hundred years; a number of these might have pecked at the dead in the Crimean War; a few Methuselahs could even have flown south across the Ukraine after following the Grande Armée from Moscow.
In an inlet, close to the sand’s edge, an old man was smoking a narghileh on the doorstep of a hut beside a little boat beached among the rushes. His high-cheeked face was a benign skeleton leaf of wrinkles. In faulty Bulgarian on both sides, we talked of the coldness of the day and the brightness of the sun. He was an old Tartar fisherman, the only human being I saw all day.
For, as the miles mounted up, the scene grew emptier until rising woods concealed the interior. Trees sank to the sea’s edge and the path curled across tilted glades full of white and red anemones. The smell of herbs filled the air. Myrtle, bay and arbutus—dark green leaves crowded with berries as big and scarlet as strawberries—sank seaward. Blue-black ilexes jutted among them, their roots looped in plaited arches like the roots of trees in Japanese paintings.
Downhill, at the end of plunging tunnels of evergreen, the European continent disintegrated in tufted spikes and islets standing in green water as translucent as glass, darkened, as it receded, to the blue of a peacock’s neck as it fled away to the skyline. Creases slight as a breath on silk stirred the almost still water just enough to ring these spikes with a bracelet of white. Headlands followed each other in a south-westerly recession of plumed capes dwindling at last to dim threads that could belong equally to the sea or the sky.
In the late afternoon, sunbeams filled the tilted clearings and struck the tree boles and the leaves with layers of wintry gold. Rafts of light hung in the leaves, fell through the woods in spokes and broke up the loop of shadow over the water with windows of radiance. The solitude and the hush were complete. A promise of the Aegean and the Greek islands roved the cold Bulgarian air, sending a hint of their spell across the Propontis and the Bosporus to the shores of this huge barbarian sea.
A trio of cormorants had flown across the Tartar’s cove and I had seen their craned necks, beaks swivelling like periscopes, sticking out of the water farther south. On the rocks a dozen were standing now with wings heraldically half-open, as though hung out to dry. I followed a path downhill towards them, but they took flight in an urgent wedge over the water, which was now patterned with streaks of zinc and lilac. The track grew thinner; by dusk all trace of it had vanished and I found myself climbing through undergrowth and rocks: leaping from slab to slab, dodging pools, bestriding fissures and ledges, hoping for a gap that might lead uphill again. When it was dark I went on by torchlight, negotiating the water and the steeper confusion of boulders, determined to turn back if it grew worse.
Then I lost my footing on a ledge and skidded, with a screech of hobnails, down a slant like a barn roof. A drop and a jolt threw me waist-deep into a pool. Jarred and shaken, with a gash on my forehead and a torn thumb, I climbed out, shuddering with cold. At the bottom of the other end of the pool, about two fathoms down, the torch was sending a yellow shaft through sea anemones and weed and a flickering concourse of fish. I wondered 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 light? I was shaking and my teeth were chattering. The sun had only just set: waiting till dawn meant twelve or thirteen hours in the freezing dark.
In case there were someone on this empty-seeming 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 the formal cry of ‘Good evening’—‘Dobar vecher!’ I shouted for a few minutes but with no reply. My stick was floating on the shallower part of the pool, so I retrieved it. With a reluctant look at the lost torch and the glittering mob of fish now going mad round that fallen portent, I began to fumble my way forward, tapping and feeling a way along the rocks: sliding, crawling on all fours, climbing ledges slippery with bladder-wrack, wading up to my armpits and sounding ahead with the stick for fear of a sudden drop. Now and again I sent up my cry of inappropriate affability. Stars dimly indicated distant masses in silhouette. After a long slithering advance, a few constellations, appearing in front where all had been black before, indicated that I was reaching the cape.
I crept on, preferring to wade now; the water was less cold than the night air. When I crawled on the rocks, the air embedded me in icy plate-armour. Within a few minutes of each other, as though by collusion, both my bootlaces broke; the boots became loose, dragging anchors under water and heavy fetters up and down the blades of rock. Breathless and exhausted, I lay on a ledge until spurred on by the cold. At last, lowering my half-shod foot on to what I thought was the surface of a pool, I felt the solidity of sand and the grate of pebbles. Another pace confirmed it; I was on the shore of an inlet. Round a buttress of cliff a little way up the beach, a faint rectangle of light, surrounded by scattered chinks, leaked astonishingly into the darkness. I crossed the pebbles and I pulled open an improvised door, uttering a last dobar vecher into the measureless cavern beyond. A dozen firelit faces looked up in surprise and consternation from their cross-legged supper, as though a sea monster or a drowned man’s ghost had come in.
Ten minutes later, in gym shoes, canvas trousers, two shirts, several layers of jersey and a shepherd’s hirsute cloak, with three or four slugs of slivovitz burning inside me, sipping a second glass of tea brewed from mountain herbs and two inches deep in sugar, I was crouched in front of a blaze of thorns stacked as high as a bonfire. I was still shuddering. One of the inhabitants of the place had washed the blood off my face and feet, another had plied a towel. Recovered from their surprise at the apparition of this sodden and bleeding spectre, they had leaped to my help like Bernardine monks.
It took some time to focus and segregate the figures moving about in the firelight and the smoky shadows. They were wild-looking men. Six were dressed in the customary earth-brown or dark blue homespun; patched, tattered, cross-gartered with thongs over their felt-swaddled shanks and shod in canoe-tipped cowhide moccasins. Knives were stuck in their wide red sashes and, like me, they were hatted in flat-topped sheepskin kalpaks that had moulted most of their fur. An old man with a tangled white beard seemed to be the leader of this group. Four others, equally torn and tattered, wore blue jerseys and seamen’s peaked caps set askew. Shepherds and seamen, in fact. The oldest of the sailors had only one hand, with a star tattooed on the back of it.
Gradually the surrounding firelit hollow resolved itself into a long cave, arching high overhead but not burrowing very deep. Blades of rock formed much of the outer wall, unmortared masonry filled the gaps, and branches and planks and flattened petrol tins stamped with Sokony-Vacuum in Cyrillic characters, completed it. The flames picked out fans of shrub springing from the rock and a high cluster of stalactites; they also summoned from the shadows a scattering of gear which told of the cave’s double function: a boat tilted on its side, oars, rudders, huge carbide lamps, long-shafted fishing spears, tall multi-pronged tridents with barbed spikes like eight-toothed combs, anchors, geometric fishing traps, creels, bait baskets, corks, gourd floats, wedges, coils, drooping russet festoons of net and links of rusty chain. A small anvil topped an embedded tree stump.
The other side of the fire displayed a set of conflicting clues: wicker cheese baskets on planks, a leaning sheaf of crooks and a grove of white, hanging globes—cheese that had been poured liquid into dripping goatskin bags, hairy side innermost. A cauldron of whey simmered over a second fire, and the stooping Cyclopean greybeard stirred and skimmed. Across the dark reaches at the far end ran a breast-high wall of bleached stones and furze, and the mystery of an abrupt and derisive cachinnation beyond.
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br /> The old man took a brand from beneath the cauldron and flourished it with a possessive smile. The lasso of radiance that his flame looped into the murk lit up a thicket of spiralling and bladed horns and the imperial beards and matted black-and-white pelts of fifty goats; a wave of the torch kindled a hundred oblong-pupilled eyes, provoking another falsetto jeer, a click of horns and the notes of a few heavy bells. A patina of smoke and soot polished the walls of the cave. Jags of mineral were tables or sideboards for these troglodytes. Half a dozen dogs slept or foraged around; a reclining white mongrel with hanging tongue and forepaws crossed observed the scene through close-set eyes, the left one of which was surrounded by a black ring. The sand and the pebbles underlay a trodden crust of goats’ pellets and fish scales, and the cavern reeked of fish, goats, curds, cheese, tar, brine, sweat and wood-smoke. It was an abode harmoniously shared by Polyphemus and Sinbad.
Words of Mercury Page 4