Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  ‘Kala einai ta delphinia,’ the captain said when they had gone. ‘Dolphins are good.’

  Sash Windows Opening on the Foam

  Architectural Digest, November 1986

  In March 1964, Paddy and Joan finally signed the contract for the land on which they were to build their house. Their property consisted of a rocky promontory surrounded by olive groves, looking out towards an island in the bay of Messenia. For a while they lived in tents on the site, pacing it out, arguing over enfilades and proportions as the house rose up around them.

  Where a man’s Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also’; and, of course, Lemprière, Fowler, Brewer, Liddell and Scott, Dr Smith, Harrap and Larousse and a battery of atlases, bibles, concordances, Loeb classics, Pléiade editions, Oxford Companions and Cambridge histories; anthologies and books on painting, sculpture, architecture, birds, beasts, fishes trees and stars; for if one is settling in the wilds, a dozen reference shelves is the minimum; and they must be near the dinner table where arguments spring up which have to be settled then or never. This being so, two roles for the chief room in a still unbuilt house were clear from the start.

  Twenty-two years ago, when we were the only strangers in the Mani, it was possible to build a house for very little. But it was a challenge. Our headland jutted between a bay and a small cove and there was nothing on it but olive terraces, thistles, asphodels and an occasional tortoise and here we pitched our tents exactly where the chief room was to be. There was rock for building everywhere; friendly and excellent workmen; the occasional visits of an architect friend from Athens helped us with stresses and strains and we found Niku Kolokatrones, a brilliant master-mason, in the mountain village above, and prudently became relatives by standing god-parents to his small son. Ideas abounded, but it was while it was actually taking shape that we decided how the house should be. In the end, all our mugging up and our drawings and pacings and fiery arguments brought—or so it seemed to us—splendid results.

  In two years the house was standing, and because of the rough-hewn, fast-weathering limestone—all prised out of the Taygetus range in whose foothills we live—it looked like a monastery which had been crumbling there for centuries. A wing shot out over the drop of the terraces, outside staircases went up, and the whole thing was roofed over with faded tiles that we picked up for almost nothing, like carrion crows, after the earthquakes in the central Peloponnese.

  You enter from the east along the gallery through the leaves of a heavy beech door. This is framed in a massive bolection of russet stone that we rashly designed without books: the moulding is a foot wide and the torus rises seven inches from the scotia. (There was no road, and except for heavy items, every stick came by mule; but the six-foot lintel of this doorway took twelve men and a ladder and we were sweating and tottering under it when an artless goatherd under the olives asked where we were taking it. ‘To the sea,’ our god-brother said between his teeth, ‘to chuck it in, just in case it floats.’) When it was up, we were awed by the mad splendour; it went to our heads and set the pace for all the rest. The long wall opposite was pierced by a French window with a heavy stone beam for a lintel, and above this we put an old marble slab from Paros, perforated by an oval holding a star.

  The room’s large fireplace soars tapering to a wide wooden cornice, and the cornice surrounds a wooden ceiling. Both of these are only pine, but twenty years have given them a patina like cypress-wood or cedar. Thirty slim beams divide the ceiling up into an infinity of squares which recede in vistas and, by a stroke of luck, these and the shape of the room are as acoustically right for music as the inside of a violin. The floor is paved with unpolished rectangles of grey-green stone quarried from Mount Pelion and, in the middle, a large intricate star of purple stone bordered with white pulls the whole thing together.

  A divan runs all round the north end of the room. Like the long sofa by the fire, it is covered in white linen woven in Arachova. Widened still more by a ledge along the back, this looks very handsome but it makes the shelves there harder to reach, and the ledges get cluttered with papers, dictionaries, shears and secateurs and books get lost there for weeks. The bookcases with no divan in front rise nine feet from the floor and we have discovered a brilliant way of reaching the upper shelves without steps: an elephant-pole of brass-bound teak made by the Hong Kong Chinese to help minor rajahs to climb into their howdahs: it splits down the middle and half the pole drops away parallel with a heartening bang like grounded arms; the rungs, slotted and hinged in hidden grooves, fall horizontal and up one goes.

  But at the south-facing end, everything changes. A central opening runs across three-quarters of it and the coffered soffit, the same height as the other lintels, is supported at both ends by a disengaged hexagonal pillar. You go through, and down a step, into something which, throughout the Levant, is called a hayáti. This winter chamber lighted by scores of panes can become a cavern of shade in summer, and perfect for an afternoon snooze, by drawing curtains of mattress-ticking, with the stripes running horizontal. In winter, rugs cover the wooden floor of this miniature Hardwick (but secret plans are afoot for a Cosmati floor with roundels of porphyry and serpentine edged with bands of black-and-white zig-zag looped together in interlocking figures of eight; perhaps next year). The flagstones of the big room are covered in winter too; near the fire, by flokkáti rugs of shaggy goats’ hair from Epirus; and kilims from Konia, Smyrna and Ak-Shehir, with light-hearted flower and geometric patterns of blue, green, white, ochre and orange, strew the rest of the room and make it rather like an emir’s tent.

  Writing-tables to the left of the French window and behind the sofa, and occasional things here and there like faded William Morris armchairs, strike an English note. The fireplace wall to the east has been left free for pictures: two large Japanese seventeenth-century paintings of young goshawks jessed in blue and crimson; Jamaica foliage by Lucian Freud; some Craxton goats; a semi-geometric roofscape and a design of plants by Nico Ghika; three small Edward Lear Cretan scenes; and a Robin Ironside of a recumbent statue waking up in a museum. A Javanese bust of Shiva Mahadeva and odd fragments of sculpture are scattered about the divan ledge, and, on a slab, two marble legs stand there beside a marble tree-stump which the vanished god or shepherd must have leant on; they were dug up near Palestrina at the same time as the headless Cybele in a niche in the gallery.

  A visiting friend unsettlingly hinted that a Victorian mahogany dining-table was not up to the rest; so, years later, we ruinously exorcized this complex with an inlaid marble table made by Dame Freya Stark’s marmorista in Venice. Based on a tondo in the chancel of S. Anastasio in Mantua, white flames of Udine stone radiate from the centre of a design of subtle grey carsico and rosso di Verona. When it arrived, lugging the triple plinth of Istrian stone down from the road and then trundling the heavy circular top through the trees was as bad as the earlier struggles with the lintel. But the friend was right. Here it is, beautiful and immovable for ever, and when set about with glasses and candles, it turns the humblest meal—even oil and lentils—into a feast. The east door, then, looks out on a row of arches; the north windows, on to a green thought in a green shade—cypresses and olive trees, that is, and clipped rosemary hedges; and to the south, charmed magic sash-windows opening on the foam of, first, descending tree-tops, and then the sea. But the axis of the room—and thus of the whole house—is planned so the west windows, winter and summer, catch the sunset till the last gasp.

  The terrace outside is a continuation of the room: you go down two semicircular steps from the French window to an expanse of terracotta tiles (successfully fired in a local kiln after many attempts), about half the width (paced out last year) of the Place Fiirstemberg. The olives here are girded by stone seats and surrounded by rings of pebble-mosaic—garlands, waves, wreaths and cables—and, beyond a low fountain with Seljuk affinities, the terrace ends in a sort of exedra-like outdoor hayáti near the cliff’s edge: you go
down two more steps to a geometric pebble-pattern rectangle with a big stone table for dinner in summer—once a marble balcony and bought for a fiver from a housebreaker in Tripoli. There are solemn clumps of cypresses on either side of this, and looking from the drawing-room, one’s eye shoots on between them, over the cove, past a theatrically placed island and a sequence of dragon-capes and then across the Messenian Gulf to where the mountains of the Morea rumble away to the north.

  The room and its offshoots sound grander than they are; but from the stern Mitford test—‘All nice rooms are a bit shabby’—the place comes out with flying colours; time, wear, and four-footed fellow inmates—born downholsterers and interior desecrators—have put the place out of all danger. Luckily, decent proportions (worked out in our tents from Vitruvius and Palladio) and rough building materials, have the knack of swallowing up disorder and incongruity. Occasionally a far-wandering hen that would be hopelessly out of place in a smarter room, stalks jerkily indoors, peers round, stalks out again and everything seems normal. Last month a white goat entered from the terrace, followed by six more in single file; they trooped across the floor looking as much at home as Jamshyd’s lions and lizards, then out into the gallery, down twenty steps and into the landscape again without the goats or the house seeming in any way out of countenance.

  But the great advantage of a long room is that different things can go on without impinging: reading, music, letter-writing, talk by the fire, eyelids closing in the hayáti, ‘a wildcat snooze’: or chess at one end of the room and friends’ children on the floor with tiddlywinks at the other. Every seventh of November, which is the Feast of SS. Michael and Gabriel—and also my name-day (Mihali, in Greek)—the room fills a special role. The Archangels have a minute chapel three groves away and after the yearly Mass, a swarm of friends from the village, sometimes fifty or sixty, led by the bearded vicar, come in for a long chat and drinks and mézé. Thanks to the divans—suddenly packed with venerable figures in black coifs—the room can hold them all without too much of a squash and in spite of the immobility of the table, there is space in the middle for dancing; and when, later on, the complicated steps of the syrtos and the kalamantiano, accompanied by clapping and singing, begin to weave their nimble circles round the central star, the room seems to have come into its own at last.

  People

  The Polymath

  from A Time of Gifts

  The Polymath was one of those scholars whose knowledge was such that he could talk about history in the broadest possible sweeps, and in the minutest detail His meeting with Paddy, beside the Austrian Danube early in 1934, was fortuitous. Paddy was full of questions and the Polymath must have enjoyed teaching such an enthusiastic student.

  After supper and filling in my diary in the front room of the inn in Persenbeug—I think I must have been staying there on the charitable-burgomaster principle—I started to sketch the innkeeper’s daughter Maria while she busied herself over a basket of darning. I was talking to her about my visit to St Florian: either it had been the wrong time for sightseers or a day when the Abbey was officially shut. The janitor was adamant. I told him it was my only chance—I had come all the way across Europe to see the Abbey; and at last, when I must have sounded on the brink of tears, he had begun to melt. He had handed me over to the friendly Canon in the end, who showed me all. Maria laughed. So did a man at the next table who lowered the Neue Freie Presse, and looked over his spectacles. He was a tall and scholarly-looking figure with a long amusing face and large blue eyes. He was dressed in leather breeches and a loden-jacket, and a big dark dog with Breughel tendencies called Dick lay quietly beside his chair. ‘You did the right thing,’ he said. ‘In Germany you would only have got in by shouting.’ Maria and two watermen, the only other people in the Gastzimmer, laughed and agreed. [. . .]

  [In my new acquaintance] I had chanced on a gold mine. ‘Enquire Within About Everything’: flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology—he was a richer source than any castle library. His English, mastered from governesses with his brothers, was wide in range, flawless in its idiom and polished by many sojourns in England. He was full of stories about the inhabitants of Danubian castles, of which he was one, as I had more or less gathered from the others’ style in addressing him: his lair was a battered Schloss near Eferding, and it was the empty heronry I had noticed there which had first excited him when he was a boy about the fauna of the river. He had a delightful Bohemian, scholar-gipsy touch.

  He was on his way back from an antiquarian visit to Ybbs, the little town immediately across the river. His goal there had been the carved tomb of Hans, Knight of Ybbs: ‘A figure,’ he said, ‘of knock-out elegance!’ He showed me a snapshot the parish priest had given him. (It was so striking that I crossed the river to see it next day. The Knight, standing in high relief in a rectangle which is deeply incised with gothic lettering, was carved in 1358. Falling in battle in the same decade as Crécy and Poitiers, he was an exact contemporary of du Guesclin and the Black Prince: at the very pinnacle, that is, of the age of chivalry. [. . .]

  At the mention of the Ritter von Ybbs, I asked him the exact meaning of von. He explained how a ‘Ritter von’ and an ‘Edler von’—Knight, or Nobleman, ‘of’ somewhere—were originally feudal landowners holding a fief, and usually an eponymous one, in knight’s fee. Later it simply became the lowest rank in the scale of titles. Its fiendish aura in England, due to the military bent of Prussian junkers, is absent in Austria where a milder, squire-ish feeling hovers about the prefix. This was the cue for an excursus on central European aristocracy, conducted with great brio and the detachment of a zoologist. I had got the hang of it on broad lines; but what about those figures who had intrigued me in Germany: landgraves, margraves, wildgraves and Rhinegraves? Who was the Margravine of Bayreuth and Anspach? The answers led him to a lightning disquisition on the Holy Roman Empire and how the tremendous tide had pervaded and haunted Europe from Charlemagne to the Napoleonic Wars. The roles of the Electors—the princes and prelates who chose the Emperors until the Crown became an unofficial Habsburg heirloom, when they ratified it still—were at last made clear. Between his election and accession, I learnt, a prospective Emperor was styled King of the Romans. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘there was an English one, King John’s son, Richard of Cornwall! And his sister Isabella married the Emperor Frederick II, the stupor mundi! But Richard never succeeded, poor fellow—as you know’—a tacit, all-purpose nod seemed the best response here—‘he died of grief when his son Henry of Almain was murdered by Guy de Montfort at Viterbo in revenge for his father’s barbarous death at the battle of Evesham. Dante writes about it . . .’ By this time I had stopped being surprised at anything. He explained the mediatization of lesser sovereign states when the Empire was dissolved; and from here, at a dizzy pace, he branched into the history of the Teutonic Knights, the Polish szlachta and their elective kings, the Moldowallachian hospodars and the great boyars of Rumania. He paid brief tribute to the prolific loins of Rurik and the princely progeny they scattered across the Russias, and the Grand Princes of Kiev and Novgorod, the Khans of Krim Tartary and the Kagans of the Mongol Hordes. If nothing had interrupted, we would have reached the Great Wall of China and flown across the sea to the Samurai world.* But something recalled us nearer home: to the ancient, almost Brahminic Austrian rules of eligibility and the stifling Spanish ceremony of the Court which had survived from the times of Charles V. He was critical of the failures of the nobility at crucial moments, but he was attached to it nevertheless. The proliferation of central European titles came under mild fire. ‘It’s much better in England, where all but one reverts to Mister in the end. Look at me and my brothers! All handle and no jug.’ Would he have liked titles to be done away with? ‘No, no!’ he said, rather contradictorily. ‘They should be preserved at all costs—the world is getting quite dull enough. And they are not really multiplying—history and ecology are against them. Think of the Oryx! Think of the Auckland Island Merganser
! The Great Auk! The Dodo!’ His face was divided by a grin: ‘You ought to see some of my aunts and uncles.’ But a moment later his brow was clouded by concern. ‘Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power-dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They’ll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East—they would never come back! Never, never, never!’ He looked so depressed that I changed the subject by asking him about the Germanic tribes that had once lived here—the Marcomanni and the Quadi—I couldn’t get their odd names out of my head. ‘What?’ He cheered up at once. Those long-haired Wotan-worshippers, who peered for centuries between the tree-boles, while the legionaries drilled and formed tortoise on the other bank? His eyes kindled, and I drank in more about the Völkerwanderungen in a quarter of an hour than I could have gleaned in a week with the most massive historical atlases. [. . .]