Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Mrs Mourtzinos spooned a couple of onions and potatoes out of the pot, laid them before us and sprinkled them with a pinch of rock salt. ‘When we were a couple of hours off Cerigo,’ Stratis observed, splashing out the ouzo, ‘the wind grew stronger—a real meltemi—a roaring boucadoura!—so we hauled the sails down, and made everything fast. . .’

  There, before the great bronze doors of St Sophia, gigantic in his pontificalia, stood Athenagoras the Oecumenical Patriarch, whom I had seen a few months before in the Phanar; surrounded now with all the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the East, the Holy Synod and all the pomp of Orthodoxy in brocade vestments of scarlet and purple and gold and lilac and sea blue and emerald green: a forest of gold pastoral staves topped with their twin coiling serpents, a hundred yard-long beards cascading beneath a hundred onion-mitres crusted with gems; and, as in the old Greek song about the City’s fall, the great fane rang with sixty clanging bells and four hundred gongs, with a priest for every bell and a deacon for every priest. The procession advanced, and the coruscating penumbra, the flickering jungle of hanging lamps and the bright groves and the undergrowth of candles swallowed them. Marble and porphyry and lapis lazuli soared on all sides, a myriad glimmering haloes indicated the entire mosaic hagiography of the Orient and, high above, suspended as though on a chain from heaven and ribbed to its summit like the concavity of an immense celestial umbrella, floated the golden dome. Through the prostrate swarm of his subjects and the fog of incense the imperial theocrat advanced to the iconostasis. The great basilica rang with the anthem of the Cherubim and as the Emperor stood on the right of the Katholikon and the Patriarch on the left, a voice as though from an archangel’s mouth sounded from the dome, followed by the fanfare of scores of long shafted trumpets, while across Byzantium the heralds proclaimed the Emperor Eustratius, Servant of God, King of Kings, Most August Caesar and Basileus and Autocrator of Constantinople and New Rome. The whole City was shaken by an unending, ear-splitting roar. Entwined in whorls of incense, the pillars turned in their sockets, and tears of felicity ran down the mosaic Virgin’s and the cold ikons’ cheeks . . .

  Leaning forward urgendy, Stratis crossed himself. ‘Holy Virgin and all the Saints!’ he said. ‘I was never in a worse situation! It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, the mast and the rudder were broken, the bung was lost, and the waves were the size of a house. There I was, on all fours in the bilge water, baling for life, in the Straits between the Elaphonisi and Cape Malea! . . .’

  . . . the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clamour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith . . . The rain had turned to hail, the wind had risen to a scream; the boat had broken and sunk and, through the ink-black storm, Stratis was swimming for life towards the thunderous rocks of Laconia . . .

  . . . The bottle was empty . . .

  The schoolmaster’s shadow darkened the doorway. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he said, ‘the caique for Areopolis is just leaving.’ We all rose to our feet, upsetting, in our farewells, a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.

  Supper in the Sky

  from Mani

  The towers of the Mani were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Maniots were rich from piracy. The taller the tower, the more fire-power and damage its owners could inflict on rival clans or vendetta-embroiled neighbours. The Maniots were fierce, proud, and bloodthirsty: when a woman gave birth to a son, the family rejoiced that another ‘gun’ had been born. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Maniots were living more peaceful lives. The inhabitant of this tower was a farmer, whose daughter Vasilio had met Paddy and Joan on the road and invited them to stay.

  Many things in Greece have remained unchanged since the time of the Odyssey and perhaps the most striking of these is the hospitality shown to strangers; the more remote and mountainous the region, the less this has altered. Arrival at a village or farmstead is much the same as that of Telemachus at the palaces of Nestor at Pylos and of Menelaus at Sparta—so near, as the crow flies, to Vatheia—or of Odysseus himself, led by the king’s daughter to the hall of Alcinöus. No better description exists of a stranger’s sojourn at a Greek herdsman’s fold than that of Odysseus when he stepped disguised into the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus in Ithaca. There is still the same unquestioning acceptance, the attention to the stranger’s needs before even finding out his name: the daughter of the house pouring water over his hands and offering him a clean towel, the table laid first and then brought in, the solicitous plying of wine and food, the exchange of identities and autobiographies; the spreading of bedclothes in the best part of the house—the coolest or warmest according to the season—the entreaties to stay as long as the stranger wishes, and, finally, at his departure, the bestowal of gifts, even if these are only a pocketful of walnuts or apples, a carnation or a bunch of basil; and the care with which he is directed on his way, accompanied some distance, and wished godspeed.

  In the Odyssey, the newcomer often strikes a banquet in progress, and very often a stranger in Greece today will find himself led to an honourable place at a long table of villagers celebrating a wedding, a baptism, a betrothal or a name-day and his plate and glass are filled and refilled as though by magic. Often, by a little chapel (dedicated to the prophet Elijah, the Assumption or the Transfiguration on a mountain top, or, outside some built-up cave, to a Chryssospiliotissa—a Virgin of the Golden Grotto—or St Anthony of the Desert), he will find the rocks and the grass starred with recumbent pilgrims honouring a pious anniversary with singing and dancing, their baskets open and napkins of food spread out under the branches, the wine flowing freely from gourds and demijohns; and here, as at the village festivals, the traveller is grasped by horny hands, a place is made smooth for him on the cut brushwood, a glass put between his fingers and a slice of roast lamb offered on a fork or a broad leaf. This general hospitality on feast days is less remarkable than the individual care of strangers at all seasons. It is the dislocation of an entire household at a moment’s notice that arouses astonishment. All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by a kindness so unfeigned that it invests the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.

  Tonight, however, there was a change in the accustomed Homeric ritual. After drinking ouzo in the walled yard at the tower’s foot, Vasilio’s father said, ‘It’s a hot night. Let’s eat in the cool.’ He took a lantern and led the way into the tower. We followed him up the steep ladders through storey after storey until, breathless with climbing, we were on a flat roof about eight yards square surrounded by a low parapet. Chairs appeared from below and Vasilio took a coil of rope and paid it into the night; hauling it up the sixty-foot drop after an exchange of shouts, with a round tin table tied to the end. She took out and spread a clean white tablecloth and put the lantern in the centre, installing a circle of gold in the moonlight. Our faces, which were soon gathered round a roast lamb which I hoped we had not met before, were lit up by an irrelevant glow of gold which changed to the moonlit pallor of silver while jaw-bones and eye sockets were stressed with shadow if anyone leaned out of the lantern’s range. The rope, to the end of which a huge basket had now been tied, was lowered into the dark again and again for more wine and food.

  The night was still. As our tower-top was the highest in Vatheia, the others were invisible and we might have been dining in mid-air on a magic carpet floating across dim folds in the mountains. Standing up, the other tower-tops came into sight, all of them empty and clear under the enormous moon. Not a light showed, and the only sounds were the shrill drilling note of two crickets, a nightingale and a faint chorus of
frogs, hinting of water somewhere in the dry sierra. I tried to imagine how this little group, dining formally round a solitary golden star of lamplight on this little hovering quadrilateral, would look to a passing bird. I asked our host if they often had meals up here: ‘Only when we feel like it,’ he answered.

  He had been talking of the winter, and the familiar theme of the Mani wind. ‘It makes a noise that could deafen you, when the tramontana blows through these towers,’ he said; and all at once, in the silence and the hot moonlight, I had a vision of that lamentable blast screaming past the shutters, of maelstroms of hail and snow coiling through those perpendiculars. ‘And when there’s a thunderstorm, you think the world has come to an end with all the noise and the lightning! That’s when the young think of marrying, to have company in bed to keep them warm . . .’

  The table was cleared and lowered swinging into the gulf and blankets and pillows, glasses and pitchers of drinking water laid out for the guests. ‘I’ll put this on the trap door,’ he said, picking up an iron cannon ball from the parapet and cupping it in his palm like an orb, ‘in case the wind should blow up and slam it shut. It’s all they are good for now.’

  We sauntered to the end of the village before going to bed. Beyond the cactuses a few miles to the south, a long row of twinkling lights, sailing westward under an upright pale pillar of smoke, suddenly slid out of the lee of Cape Matapan. It must have been an enormous liner lit up for a gala night. Could we hear the sound of music? One could almost imagine it. ‘Megálo,’ said our host, ‘Big’; truthfully enough. It disappeared behind the leaf of a prickly pear and emerged a minute later. I wondered where it was coming from. Beirut? Alexandria? Bombay? Colombo? Hong Kong? I thought of the passengers in tropical mess-jackets and low dresses and comic paper hats, the brandy revolving in balloon glasses, cigar smoke ascending, shipboard romances ripening, cliques cohering and splintering, plans forming and couples pairing off for the sights of Naples and trips to Vesuvius; of the gallant ship’s doctor, of the life and soul of the party, of the ship’s bore and the ship’s vamp. Perhaps they were wearing false noses fitted with burlesque moustaches and large cardboard spectacles? To what tunes were they dancing, and were streamers being thrown? I remembered once, sailing past the southern Peloponnese and Calabria, leaning across the bulwarks as many of the passengers must have been leaning at that moment and wondering what happened in those wild and secret looking mountains to the north. ‘Look,’ perhaps they were saying, ‘there’s a light up there! How lonely it must be . . .’

  The lights grew smaller as the liner followed the same path as many a Phoenician galley and many a quinquereme; heading northward in the invisible groove of Harald Hardraada’s ships, sailing shield-hung and dragon-prowed from the Byzantine splendour of Mickelgard for grey-northern fjords at the world’s furthest edge. At last it shrank to a faint glow and was swallowed up by an immense obliterating cactus.

  There was much, it occurred to me next day, to be said for towerdwelling, especially in summer. Eating and sleeping on the roof while the lanes below hoard the stagnant air, one catches every passing shred of wind. One sleeps in the sky surrounded by stars and with the moon almost within arm’s reach. Dawn breaks early, and, by chasing the sleeper down the ladder out of the sunlight, solves the daily martyrdom of getting up; and the Bastille-thick walls cool the rooms with a freshness that grows with each descending storey as the layers of ceiling accumulate overhead: six gradations of temperature from the crucifying blaze of the roof to the arctic chill of the excavated cellar. And towers ensure the rare and inestimable boon, that nonexistent commodity of Greek village life, privacy. The turmoil of domestic life, insulated by the absorbent vacua of the intervening chambers, swirls and bubbles fifty feet below. Who is going to climb all those belfry ladders? (Alas, no physical barrier can daunt the thirst for company; but for the moment all was quiet.) There was another negative benefit of the Mani, and one which it had taken some time to appreciate: not since Areopolis had there been a single wireless set; nothing but that delightful horned gramophone in Yeroliména. [. . .] In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set . . . But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails. The only sound at the moment, as I sat over my long neglected diary among piles of sacks, was Vasilio half singing and half humming to herself in the room below.

  She had demanded, the night before, all the washing which had accumulated since Sparta, and I had seen her foreshortened torso thumping and rinsing before daybreak in a stone trough in the yard and later spreading the laundry to dry on boulders and cactus branches. Now with this soft singing the delicious childhood smell of ironing floated up through the trap door. A floor further down her mother was weaving at her great loom which sent forth a muted and regular click-clack of treadles.

  Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces. Through another gap our host’s second daughter, wide hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow—the first cow I had seen in the Mani—all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves. The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a golden mist.

  The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence through wreaths of laurel. Another picture showed King Constantine’s entry into reconquered Salonika at the end of the first Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut out from the cover of Romantzo and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script, Long live Uncle Truman was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there for ever.

  Delphinia

  from Mani

  The Aphrodite, from Cythera, was a well-trimmed caique which took Paddy and Joan up the eastern coast of the Mani, from Kypriano to Kotronas. They shared the space on board with several passengers and their livestock, which included chickens, pigs, a flock of goats, and a female donkey with her foal. They had not been long at sea before the dolphins appeared.

  Soon the delighted cry of ‘Delphinia!’ went up: a school of dolphins was gambolling half a mile further out to sea. They seemed to have spotted us at the same moment, for in a second half a dozen were tearing their way towards us, all surfacing in the same parabola and plunging together as though they were in some invisible harness. Soon they were careering alongside and round the bows and under the bowsprit, glittering mussel-blue on top, fading at the sides throught gun-metal dune-like markings to pure white, streamlined and gleaming from their elegant beaks to the clean-cut flukes of their tails. They were beautiful abstractions of speed, energy, power and ecstasy leaping out of the water and plunging and spiralling and vanishing like swift shadows, each soon to materialize again and sail into the air in another great loop so fast that they seemed to draw the sea after them and shake it off in mid-air, to plunge forward again tearing two great frothing bow-waves with their beaks; diving down again, falling behind and criss-crossing under the keel and deviating and returning. Som
etimes they flung themselves out of the sea with the insane abandon, in reverse, of a suicide from a skyscraper; up, up, until they hung poised in mid-air shaking in a muscular convulsion from beak to tail as though resolved to abandon their element for ever. But gravity, as though hauling on an oblique fishing-line, dragged them forward and down again into their rifled and bubbling green tunnels. The headlong speed through the water filled the air with a noise of rending and searing. Each leap into the air called forth a chorus of gasps, each plunge a sigh.

  These creatures bring a blessing with them. No day in which they have played a part is like other days. I first saw them at dusk, many years ago, on the way to Mount Athos. A whole troop appeared alongside the steamer, racing her and keeping us company for three-quarters of an hour. Slowly it grew darker and as night fell the phosphorescent water turned them into fishes of pale fire. White-hot flames whirled from them. When they leapt from the water they shook off a million fiery diamonds, and when they plunged, it was a fall of comets spinning down fathom after fathom—league upon league of dark sky, it seemed—in whirling incandescent vortices, always to rise again; till at last, streaming down all together as though the heavens were falling and each trailing a ribbon of blazing and feathery wake they became a far-away constellation on the sea’s floor. They suddenly turned and vanished, dying away along the abyss like ghosts. Again, four years ago, when I was sailing in a yacht with six friends through the Outer Cyclades in the late afternoon of a long and dreamlike day, there was another visitation. The music from the deck floated over the water and the first champagne cork had fired its sighting-shot over the side. The steep flank of Sikinos, tinkling with goat bells and a-flutter with birds, rose up to starboard, and, close to port, the sheer cliffs of nereid-haunted Pholegandros. Islands enclosed the still sea like a lake at the end of the world. A few bars of unlikely midsummer cloud lay across the west. All at once the sun’s rim appeared blood-red under the lowest bar, hemming the clouds with gold wire and sending a Japanese flag of widening sunbeams alternating with expanding spokes of deeper sky into the air for miles and spreading rose petals and sulphur green across this silk lake. Then, some distance off, a dolphin sailed into the air, summoned from the depths, perhaps, by the strains of Water Music, then another and yet another, until a small company were flying and diving and chasing each other and hovering in mid-air in static semicircles, gambolling and curvetting and almost playing leapfrog, trying to stand on tip-toe, pirouetting and jumping over the sinking sun. All we could hear was an occasional splash, and so smooth was the water that one could see spreading rings when they swooped below the surface. The sea became a meadow and these antics like the last game of children on a lawn before going to bed. Leaning spellbound over the bulwarks and in the rigging we watched them in silence. All at once, on a sudden decision, they vanished; just as they vanish from the side of the Aphrodite in this chapter, off the stern and shadowless rocks of the Mani.