Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  We splashed through the narrow warrens of the port and emerged at last on the quayside where the caieque lay, its crew stuck fast, it seemed, in attitude of complete apathy, awaiting us. The captain hung from a rope, leaning his body out at an angle, staring down at the water. The boy and the man sat, submerged in themselves at the tiller, their splayed bare feet among the twists of rope. They shook themselves as we whistled.

  She was called “Forgetfulness,” a powerful little caieque built to the shallow-bosomed shape which the fisher folk call “Racers” because they are judged speedier than the normal deep-hulled models. The sea-raiding people had put a tank engine in her which gave her about twelve knots. You felt the power at once as she fanned away from the stone quay and out into the harbor, edging towards the black buoys which, the captain said, marked minefields. Huddled in our coats we watched the black, uninviting headland of rock paying out past us like a rapidly diminishing rope, drawing us nearer to the proper sea. Across the waters, from the direction of Turkey, the light had broken through in one place; a drop of red had leaked between the interstices of sea and sky, and was running round the rim of the horizon like the knife that slips along the rim of the oyster to let the light in with it. The red mingled with the black and turned it purple; the meniscus of the sea copied the tone, strengthened it, turned it green, and an edge of the sun shone for a second across the waste of waters and islands, hideous, like a head with one eye. Then the darkness again and the steady throb of the engines. The boy was posted at the prow. He strained through the mist and guided the helmsman with shouts and gestures.

  “So we’ll get to Patmos after all,” said E, unpacking the sandwiches and the little bottle of cognac.

  Patmos, I thought, was more an idea than a place, more a symbol than an Island.

  Yet to the boy crouching at the prow, his eyes fixed upon the mist-darkened territory ahead, it had no doubt become a name like any other, marking only a brief stony point in an oft-repeated routine, distinguished at the most by a special tavern where the wine was resinous or a house where the conversation seemed the better for a beautiful elder daughter. From time to time as he peered, he saw the shapes of islands come up on us like battleships, and with a brief wild cry—as of some trapped seabird—shook his arm to right or left, guiding us to the safety of the deeper channel. A few yards away the wet fangs of rock would emerge and slide back into their unearthly vagueness, and the note of the propeller deepen in the deeper sounding as the vellum of a drum when the player alters its tensity. Once the mist drew back for an instant and we saw, tinkling upon a scrubby headland, a swarm of sheep like gold bugs, loitering among arbutus, while on a rock commanding the prospect stood a motionless hooded figure like a janitor. Their bells were softly dumbed out in the mist, losing volume but not their richness.

  The sun had somehow swindled us and climbed into heaven without once shining directly upon the water. Through a cloud surface with a thick yellow nap like a carpet it allowed its beams to diffuse themselves over everything with a dense coppery hue, turning the water to lead beneath us. It increased our range of sight, however, and with it our speed. From where he sat at the tiller the captain made a chopping motion with his hand to indicate, in Greek fashion, the fact that we were making better time. The boy came aft and sat for a while to make conversation. Points of water glistened in his beard and hair. “Patmos,” he said, “you will like it. All foreigners like it. They have good fruit and water.” Then raising himself the better to cup his hands about a box of English matches as he lit a cigarette he added, with a touch of medieval wonder: “And there is a telephone. The Abbot speaks to it everyday.”

  “Have you ever used it?” I asked him.

  “I? What for?”

  The sense of blindness had now given place to a sense of headache. The atmosphere had become warmer, but the clouds still lay between us and the sun, which burned with a bilious humid intensity upon the sea. The last of the islands that lined the corridor between Leros and Patmos like ancestral totems, was kicking in our wake. Presently we should see our objective through the trembling curtain of the mist.

  The captain handed over the tiller and came forward to the prow; hanging outwards he stared long and intently towards the vaporized horizon, and then came aft to consult a watch—not without a touch of pride, for it looked like German booty. We had been going two hours.

  “In the channel it is often rough,” said the old man. “Praise God, it is all right. But tonight there will be more storm.”

  We informed him that we had determined to return to Leros that night, and he nodded once or twice in a protective manner as he puffed his cigarette. “And if you can’t,” he said, “there is no need to worry. There is the telephone.”

  Our attention was caught by a cry from the boy who had returned to the prow. Away to the northward the mist had shifted and beyond it, gleaming in a single pencil of sunlight was a white cape—lifted like the wing of an albatross upon the very place where sky and sea met. For an instant this snowy apparition paused, and then the beam moved slowly along the mass to pick out a turret, a battlement, the cupola of a chapel. “The monastery,” said the captain. “Patmos.”

  We stood for a long time now watching the lights playing upon the island, now touching up a dazzling pane of glass in the monastery, now extinguishing the whole seascape to the tones of a black and white drawing. The sun was trying to find a way through the clouds.

  “In another half hour,” said the old captain, as if he were trying to instill patience into himself. “In another half hour we shall be there.”

  “Come,” said E, “we should eat now.”

  We had neither of us had much appetite before, but now with the still straits before us and the island in sight, we turned with real hunger to the cognac and the sandwiches. The boy boiled a kettle of water and I saw with some surprise that the whole crew had developed the habit of drinking British Army Tea, brewed sweet and strong—surely the most disgusting drink ever invented. This was a legacy of the sea-raiding days no doubt, as was the expertness of wrist with which the captain opened a tin of bully beef.

  We finished eating just as the caieque fanned into the little harbor of Patmos, free from cloud at that moment, and blazing like a diamond among the hillocks.

  “Welcome,” cried the figures on the quay as we tied up, and at once we felt grateful to be back in the traditional type of Greek island after the rather spurious Italianate atmosphere of Rhodes. They were all there in that little whitewashed port; you could see at a glance the representatives of the six or seven types which have furnished Greek islands since the beginning of history. The old sea captain with his knotted hands and shaggy whiskers, the village schoolmaster in his dignity and European clothes, the mad boy who plays the violin outside the tavern door—the island poet whose wits, says tradition, have been turned by the Nereids. Their clear eyes and lovely brown skins proclaimed them islanders, born in this clear blue air; and the pleasure and warmth with which they cried “Welcome”—and uttered among themselves the sacred word “Strangers”—proved them as Greek as one could wish. We declined in rapid succession, a donkey, a bunch of flowers, and a conversation about how old we were, where we had come from, and what our business was. The tavernkeeper swept us a disappointed bow from the door of the tavern in the shadowy interior of which the familiar Homeric group sat ’round a table playing cards. We walked through the narrow main street between the smiling faces of the women, past the old date palm tree—last of many palms which earned for Patmos the name of Palmosa among the Venetians—and addressed ourselves to the bare hill whose brown rocks were still wet with the rain and noisy with overflowing torrents.

  Before us, balanced against a cloud, stood the monastery, its odd arrangement of machicolated turrets and belfries reminding one of a medieval castle—such as one only sees in Russian films. The great gate stood open. One expected to see a troop of Tartar horsemen swing out of it suddenly, waving their lances and hide bucklers, u
ttering shrill cries; but nothing passed through the door save some small children singing an island song in tiny cracked voices, perfectly reproduced by the blue atmosphere despite the distance.

  Halfway up we met a shepherd, sitting on the stone parapet crook in hand, talking to his daughter, and occasionally uttering barbaric whoops at his flock. We sat down and rested beside him, for the going was steep and hard. In exchange for the piece of bread he shyly offered us we took his photograph, while he showed a hospitable annoyance with the Patmos weather for not favoring our visit more conclusively. The ominous wrack of cloud still stretched away to the east and west of the island; while everything lay, enchanted by sunlight, in an oasis of midsummer. Even the bees in the little white hives by the monastery were duped by it.

  “Are they expecting you?” asked the shepherd.

  “We telephoned to the Abbot.”

  “Then you will eat well,” he said comfortingly; the monastery lay about a quarter of an hour off, along the great sill of red-brown stone. The smaller monastery of St. John, where the Apocalypse was written, lay beneath us with its cave of the illumination and musty banners. The three ruined windmills glimmered on the ultimate crags.

  “We’ll be going,” I said.

  “God be with you,” he responded, reluctantly, for conversation with strangers is a rare pleasure among islanders who have known each other from childhood. “God be with you,” repeated his daughter, enchanted by her own grown-upness.

  We entered the great gate and found ourselves immediately in a warren of cobbled streets, each just wide enough for the passage of a loaded mule, and thrown down upon each other in a sort of labyrinth. We followed them up stairways, down alleys, round corners, doubling back upon ourselves at different levels until we found the great door of the monastery. It also stood ajar. From every nook now the prospect began to shine out, the brilliant bay and the further seas, set in the green and grey.

  In the courtyard the hush was intense. The faces on the painted wooden screens glowed softly. Then from the gloom of the chapel came the thin scribbling noise of Byzantine Greek, lifted in prayer. Another voice began a humming twanging response. “There’s a service going on,” said E. Several voices now attacked the silence as if heard through a comb and paper. The faint chink of censers, the faintest whiff of incense leaked out of the darkness. I eased the heavy pack off my back and coughed twice. Immediately a servant came out of the recess under the staircase and told me my name, showing no surprise when I did not disagree. “At once,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “at once.” He sprang into the dark chapel like a diver into a pool and reemerged holding the Abbot by the hand. We began our greetings, seasoning them with apologies for the interruption. The Abbot smiled in his beard and waved the latter away. “Come,” he cried with a spontaneous good nature, “we have nearly finished. Come with us.” And led us by the hand into the little darkness where by now the very anna livia plurabelle of a service was going on.

  They looked for all the world like benign tree bears which had burrowed into the trunk of an old tree for honey. The deacon was humming and yawing from a musclebound byzantine evangel which he held against his chest. The Abbot subsided into his place, and we each fitted ourselves into those uncomfortable pews where you hang by the elbows like a bat. It was an admirable introduction, for while the utterances and responses rose and fell in the darkness, I was able to rest and let my eyes wander over the rich altar screen with its ornaments and paintings. The only light came in through a foggy piece of glass in the dome. The darkness was restful, and I found myself inclined to doze, as the monks trotted backwards and forwards to various points of the darkness, shouting and twanging out of various books, or swinging the censers and spinning round upon themselves with predetermined smartness. One had a sense of infinite remoteness—these voices rising, it seemed, from the bottom of the sea, muffled by the mushroom-shaped dome of the monastery, muffled by the darkness, by the dense gloom.

  Presently the service came to an end; facing the altar one of the deacons lifted his mouth and blew out a candle; and at once we were among friends. Six large priests, with luxurious curling beards and expressive hands. “Praise be to God,” the Abbot said, “at last some English we can talk to.” Later he doubtless revised his opinion of my lame Greek. But E chimed in, and under her interest and delight everybody came alight, falling naturally into that generous full-bodied loquacious amiability which is so truly Greek, as we streamed out once more into the courtyard to have the painted wood screens explained to us, and the intricacies of the corridors exhibited. In a little dark magazine behind the altar we were shown the treasures of the monastery—richly embroidered copes and stoles, a dozen different kinds of pyx, diamond-studded bindings for books.

  By now the weariness of our journey was upon us, and we asked leave to rest; but this was not to be. There was the whole rambling architecture of the place to see; and then there was the fatal bait of the camera which I carried slung from my shoulder. I could see several pairs of dark eyes fixed meditatively upon it, and several pairs of dark hands beginning with an anticipatory combing out of beards, the adjustment of black stovepipe hats. Presently we should have to take everyone’s picture.

  The monastery of St. John was itself as much a treasure as any of its heavily priced treasures in silk or ivory or vellum; it was a wilderness of chimneys, cupolas, belfries, turrets and dazzling white walks. Connecting battlements complement each other so you can walk from the eastern side where the island lies and study the shapes of other islands, faint as a wash drawing on the smooth surface of the sky. Leros, Icaria, Amorgos, Samos. The clouds had turned them down like wicks, but there they lay stubbornly insisting on their identity against the darkness of the horizon. “Bad weather,” said the Abbot, learning that we intended to start back that afternoon. “You should have stayed for a month with us.” This gave him a chance to show us the commodious quarters for guests, eight lovely whitewashed rooms, with angle windows looking out on to the sea. I would have liked to stay for the rest of my life, but did not wish to seem fulsome in expressing so a thought which must have sprung to so many minds. “Are you not lonely?” said E to the Abbot. The old man repeated the word once or twice, looking from one to the other of us, holding it, as it were, so far away from himself as possible, the better to see the concept which it represented. He did not answer directly. A few drops of rain fell loudly on the terrace. The rent in the cloudscape was rapidly closing once more. Below us the harbor with its viridian borders and the pearly tones of the hill beyond, began to dissolve and fade, as the thunder opened up in the west. He led us into the library and showed us the famous manuscripts, writhing painted bestiaries and ancient scripts, pressing our shrinking fingers to the thick vellum to feel its weight and quality. When we had exhausted these treasures he allowed us to photograph him leaning in the narrow windowsill, conscious of the elegance of his beard and beautiful hands. Outside a rain of thistles had begun to descend blotting out all perspectives, and turning the whole monastery in a moment from dazzling white to soaking neutral grey. The rain stood for a moment in great drops on the lips of the bell and then ran down to the courtyard, seeking the already swollen gutters. “We shall never get away tonight,” I muttered.

  In the refectory, whose windows were lit by yellow stabs of lightning, we watched the storm slowly wheeling the clouds into formation. The islands had vanished. Strange maneuvers were going on in the dark sky beyond which the sun still shone. We ran from window to window calling to each other to look. Through holes in the cloud long shafts of yellow light played down on the leaden sea like searchlights, circling slowly, or running the whole length of the horizon before going out. Such tense needles of light as one saw piercing the gloom of those old oil engravings to the shilling Bible, on which the dove descended as upon a scaling ladder.

  An old woman had laid out supper for three, and presently the Abbot joined us to pour out the heavy red wine into the glasses and serve us portions of the d
elicious chicken with lemon rice. He seemed obscurely troubled and looked up nervously as each heartbeat of lightning lit up his bearded face. For a while we attempted a desultory conversation which could compete with the storm. Drops of water climbed down the windows. Somewhere a shutter banged again.

  “It was you who telephoned?” asked the old man.

  “Yes, from Leros. Major F’s servant spoke to you.”

  He nodded twice with something like impatience and ate another mouthful of chicken. “So many people ring up and say they are coming,” he said. “Some do. Others never seem to arrive.” He issued some impatient orders over his shoulder to the aged woman and began to tell us of the war. The monastery was forced to play the role of philanthropic neutral to three nations. A smile lit up his face as he told us how three separate units, Italian, German and English, had been sheltering in the monastery at the same time. “Two of the three might have shot us,” he said. “What could we do? An Italian signal section on the top floor, a wounded German officer whose life I saved in the granary, and six British commandos in the cellar which was their HQ”

  It had been as difficult and dangerous a time as any he cared to remember. Naturally they were pro-British—but a monastery is a monastery. “We could not leave the German to die outside on the hill. As for the Italians.…” He shrugged his shoulders.