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

by Lawrence Durrell

  Dry friction of cicada from the palm tree across the road. Eucalyptus leaves breaking their wrists with a small click as they begin to plane down over the tombstones. The maceration of pebbles by sea water, mingling with the noise of coffee being ground, and the shearing noise of a pot being scoured. An inventory of sounds from a late morning walk.

  Torr has some amusing facts about the little Turkish graveyard which I have come to think of as the garden of Villa Cleobolus. During the Middle Ages it was part of the Grand Master’s garden. “In 1496,” says Torr, “an old ostrich and two young were kept with their wings clipped in a walled enclosure here. They laid their eggs in sand and hatched them by simply looking at them; they fed on iron and steel. There was also a sheep from India and various other strange animals, particularly a hound given to the Grand Master by Sultan Bajazet. It was about the size of a greyhound, mouse colored, with no hair at all except about the mouth, and it had claws like a bird. From this last fact comes the story that the Grand Turk had a bird that every year laid three eggs; and from two of the eggs came birds, but from the third a puppy. It was necessary to remove the puppy as soon as it broke its shell, otherwise the birds pecked it.” Not the shadow of a smile disturbs the dry exposition of the scholarly Englishman who has given us the best historical monograph on the island. But then history for Torr was a serious business. I have not been able to discover whether he visited Rhodes. Perhaps he thought it wiser to stay out of this sunlit landscape whose wine and fruit could only lead a man to laziness, procrastination and even to mendacity. From a commanding position on Exmoor he consulted “every known authority” and pointed a long quivering finger at the bulging rhetoric of the Abbé Cutlet. We are all very much afraid of Torr. Read him and you will see why.

  Rhodes, like the rest of Greece, has clung to its belief in Pan. Elsewhere he is known as the kallikanzaros and those who have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of him have described him as a small edition of the Devil, with horns, hooves and pointed ears complete. The Orthodox Church is partial to the association, and perhaps this accounts for the name he goes under in Rhodes. He is called a Kaous. The word seems to be related with the verb “kao” which means “to burn.” Combustion, after all, is of the nature of devils, and the name suggests fire and brimstone in equal parts. But if you study the habits of the Kaous as recorded in the popular literature another association will come to mind—the creature is “on hot bricks.” He is a troublesome visitor to the village, turning things upside down, making women miscarry and cream turn sour. He is worse still: he is a kidnapper.

  The peasants believe that if a husband and wife sleep together on the 25th of March the child must be born on Christmas Eve—and this child will inevitably turn out to be a Kaous.

  Its habits? It circulates mostly after dark croaking over and over again: “Feathers or lead? Feathers or lead?” People who encounter a Kaous and give the wrong answer find themselves suddenly seized. The Kaous mounts them like a horse and rides them at breakneck pace across country, beating them with a stick. The annoying thing is that of the two possible responses to the question either can prove to be the wrong one, according to how the Kaous feels. A certain Basil of Kremasto was once taken for a ride in this manner. He asserts that the Kaous galloped him all over Anatolia for the space of a night. He arrived at the tavern exhausted at daybreak and was only able to prove the veracity of his tale by producing an apple which he had plucked from an Anatolian orchard in the course of this headlong gallop. Another man, from the village of Siana, was met by a Kaous on a dark road. He did not speak to it but caught it by its long pointed ears. This seemed to render it helpless. He carried it home and burnt a hole in its legs with a branding iron. Out of the wound crawled hundreds of devilish little snakes and the Kaous was healed. It shuddered, came to itself and said: “Deeply I slept, lightly I waken,” and with that it disappeared up the chimney as the first cock crowed.

  Manoli the linotypist has been at it again. He has dropped into the habit of inserting small advertisements in the Greek newspaper for his friends. I do not know what they pay him for it, but it must be less than the space rates we charge for such items. This evening I was interested to see the advertisement of one Tsirimokos, Cartomancer, Geomancer and Coffeemancer (as he described himself) offering reduced rates for fortune-telling from some obscure address in the old town. Enquiry into this item and others equally odd produced consternation at the office where my Greek editor had faithfully read final proof upon the copy before sending it down to the printing room. Manoli had cleared himself a small corner of type by subediting an article on St. Paul by the Vicar of Rhodes, and had proceeded to lino his advertisements and find room for them in the bed. We have a painful interview. Thrusting aside the basket of pomegranates which he brings with him as a peace offering I wave the paper under his nose and ask for explanations. “I was only helping my friends,” he says with an air of ridiculous contrition, his eyes filling with tears. “Well, you must pay the full space rates from your next months salary. We can’t have the paper tampered with after it is made up. What will the Brigadier say?” The Brigadier is the latest dragon. We have diligently built up his personal myth to such a point that we are quite afraid of him ourselves. The printers believe that he breathes fire, and lives on a diet of nails and broken glass like one of the Rhodian dragons of the Middle Ages. “You won’t tell the Brigadier,” says Manoli, his sense of logic overcoming his contrition all of a sudden, “How can you? Such a mistake would reflect on you as much as on me! After all you are responsible for the paper. You should see it isn’t tampered with.” I try to kick him downstairs but he is too quick for me. He returns to his linotype with a swagger. After every row with Manoli I know that we shall have twenty-four hours’ first-class work from him, and this knowledge is useful. If we have to make up a special number for a feast day or for some special calendar date I always pick a quarrel with him the night before, in order to feel sure that he is docile and tractable when the heavy burden of an extra two pages is added to his daily task. The Levant demands a very special diplomatic approach of its own to human problems.

  There is one special convention mirrored in the newspaper which is pleasing. A patient too poor to pay his doctor’s fees after an illness will invariably put an advertisement in the daily paper reading as follows: “I, George Chorakis, feel in honor bound to thank Dr. Gongorides publicly for his skill in curing me during my recent dangerous illness.” It is both good advertising and good manners. Sometimes, of course, an unscrupulous doctor will use this method of congratulating himself publicly on a series of purely imaginary cures—but never in a small community like this, where he would be found out very soon.

  The first autumn rains came belatedly; this warm green rain does not belong to the beginnings of winter. The Pleiades have gone below ground, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Hoyle tells me that they are seven in number, but that we only see six because one, Sterope, hides her face on account of a misfortune that befell her; others say that her name was Electra, and she hides because of her grief at the fall of Troy. Gideon rejects their etymology from the verb “plein” meaning “to sail.” They were obviously called in ancient times, he says, which means a flock of pigeons; and to do him justice they are known as “the birds”* in demotic Greek even today. A New Year festival connected with and determined by the rising of the seven seems to have been a widespread custom in ancient times.

  The rain cares for none of this erudition. It sweeps down among the tombstones with a dull threshing sound, blows open the window at my elbow and splashes me with its warmth. It rattles like sparrow shot in the old well, now choked with autumn leaves. The sky has become soft, melting—as if this were a premonition of spring and not of winter. But we shall have frost to follow, says the calendar, after this momentary exuberance is over and the hollow drumming of water in the runnels and drainpipes has stopped. Sadness of the year’s ending. Autumn is lengthening into winter slowly but surely. As yet there is no
snow on the mountains across the channel, though the air is faintly spiced with cold. In another week we shall have to forsake the baobab tree for dinner and go indoors. “It won’t be too soon for me,” says Hoyle, who feels the cold. “I call this embalmer’s weather.” The grapes are over and the empty vineyards have turned the color of burnt chestnuts.

  Once or twice we walk out to the thermal springs of Calithea where Gideon drinks pint after pint of the sulphurous water trickling from the rock, and falls into a vein of sentimental reminiscence about Baden and Vichy in the days before the war. Hoyle is suffering from hernia, and Mills proposes to perform a minor operation on him when the weather gets colder. “I shall have to poke a hole in your middle and let some of the sawdust out, Hoyle,” he says. Hoyle hates the idea. “Can’t I die in peace?” he says testily. “What would happen if you didn’t operate?” Mills sighs and swallows his wine. “You would soon be going about with that tummy of yours on a tray. How would you like to hold up a tray all day?”

  “I should have a servant to hold the tray,” says Hoyle with dignity.

  The Rhodes we talk about so much—the marvel among cities of the ancient world—what remains of it? Nothing. Today, after lunch we walked, the four of us, up the gentle slopes of Monte Smith, past the little lighthouse where the Indians are quartered, and along the broad and lovely road which leads to Trianda. Beneath us the blue carpet of sea stretched away to Anatolia where, say the peasants, you may still see the claw marks of marauding dragons graven in the mountains; stretched sinuously along the capes and faults of Marmarice to where, in the northern corners, the first faint silhouette of islands rose; like stepping stones, pointing to Cos.

  Beneath us on the landward side stood the old stadium and the temple, now much-restored by the misguided Italians. In this green and sleepy hollow an old shepherd kept his flock of sheep, standing under the great oak tree which crowns the amphitheater. Descending the terraces slowly Sand points out all that remains of the ancient city—a few outcrops of stone-carved tombs on the crown of the promontory: and turning his finger like a compass completes the half-circle at Simbulli and Rodini. Yet the ground is still choked with red pottery and the delicate handles of lamps and oil jars. Gideon everywhere turns them up with his stick and we wash the clay from them in the ditches, trying to assemble the fragments again, but in vain.

  Down on the mossy turf of the stadium the sheep browse and tinkle, looking like so many gold and silver insects in the sunlight, while their keeper comes slowly towards us to pass the time of day. He is an old man, with a deeply wrinkled face, and black sloe-shaped eyes which seem to have had all the good humor worn out of them. He speaks the Rhodian Greek with its clipped singsong accent and pastoral vocabulary. Sitting around him in the grass, smoking and talking, we hear the history of the last few years, of the privations endured under the Germans, and of the ugly reprisals exacted from the Italian forces which tried to rebel after the fall of Italy.

  Below us in the great amphitheater where once the white city of Hippodamus lay, with its sacred groves and temples, its dazzling statuary and teeming dockyards, the Crusader town lours, with its gross bastions and keeps shining through the evening mist, topped by the minarets and the turning windmills of the Turkish quarter.

  How far all this is from its Greek setting, from the main current of its landscape tradition—this old swar thy peasant and his sheep on the green hill; the reclining figures of his daughters by the old well, raiding a fragrant violet bed, and for their daily meal unwrap ping from a dirty piece of paper a dozen sour olives. Against this backcloth the towers and buttresses of the Knights rise into the sky, dark with the premonitions of an alien age, of alien ways. Yet the patient landscape has almost succeeded in domesticating the gothic north; it has sent wave after wave of tangerine trees to assault the dark stone cliffs of the castle. It has choked the moat with almond and peach blossom. It has coated the stern ravelins with the iridescent sheen of moss kept moist from some invisible spring seeping through the stones.…

  After a series of protracted and labored evolutions Gideon has at last found himself a suitable house to live in; as it is large enough for them both, he has persuaded Hoyle to join him in the bachelor venture of sharing house until the spring, when their wives will arrive in Rhodes. The Villa Mondolfo lies some way from the town on the Trianda road, and for the whole of the last four days the two of them have been away there, spending a long weekend wrestling with the domestic problems which face them. This afternoon I received a note from Gideon with a characteristic postscript in Hoyle’s minute handwriting:

  The days of bargaining are over. I am rather sorry. We sat on a slab of marble outside the front door for nearly six hours, drinking excellent wine under a fine mulberry. The present caretakers run the adjacent farm. Their livestock swarm in our courtyard. A turret of blue pigeons make their warbling nargileh-like sound. Partridges reared in coops are as tame as the hens which scribble everywhere. Our host is out of Hesiod—a portrait done bristly on pigskin. Reddish pigment face, pig snout, somewhat plethoric—but with wonderful curling hair like the waves in a statue. This isn’t very good English. His wife is more pug than pig, but lovely and very fat. Two small children: one voice dactyl, one voice spondee. But apart from this fifty pear trees, seventy apple, ten plum, ten fig, and two hundred rows of wine.… My dear boy, a property of size.

  Hoyle has moved in with Croker and a shelf of Latin classics. Can you see how we are going to live? Royally, nobly. We have bought a lot of wood and today, in the first soft providential autumn rain (like catkins), we set up a crackling fire. Stone floors full of nice echoes. You call in a friend to supper; shout to the wife to roast some kidney beans and lay out some figs and perhaps a bit of hare or partridge; the children are sent to bed; you call in the old man from the field—for he cannot strip vines any more in the rainy dusk. He comes, wrinkling up his eyes to the fire, his dusty old cheek printed with raindrops; he takes up a glass of wine in that cavernous hand. Presently we dine with fruit, salads and chestnuts from our own land.… The red Kalavarda wine is strong and coarse.… I must leave room for Hoyle who wants to add a word. Come and visit us.

  Hoyle’s postscript says:

  Gideon must be mad. We could live like that a year from now. At present we are living on Spam, sleeping on camp beds, and are tormented by fleas and bugs. Horrible mess.

  * A few peasant remedies are given in an appendix.

  * He did. The inspection was a great success, and the sangfroid of the host pigs was much admired by his inspector, who was, it transpired, himself a teetotaler.

  ** I have completed his draft and hope one day to publish this witty and improper novel in England.

  * Midas: Hereditary title of the kings of Phrygia.

  *

  The Three Lost Cities

  TTHE FUNCTION OF history in all this is a small but precise one: as in some renaissance painting where the hermit occupies the foreground, seated in his drab ochre-colored cell, but where, over his shoulder, set like a jewel in the rock, his only window gives on to a limitless panorama of smiling country, exact and glittering in its perspectives, symbol of the enamel landscape on which he has turned his back. So here I would like our own idle history of conversations to open like a sally port, and throw into relief the many-colored background of the island’s own history. Only in this way can one nourish the other, so that the landscape may be evoked from both, before the eyes of a reader who is not free to touch the living grass of Cameirus with his own hands, or to feel the waves of sunlight beating upon the rocks of Lindos. What, now, of the three ancient cities which once dominated the politics and government of the island before the foundation of Rhodes, the capital? Of Ialysos alas! little remains, but their situation has preserved the two others, while the hundred or so miles of modern motor road which encircles the island places them within easy reach of the present capital, their child. They lie, too, at roughly the same distance from the tip of Rhodes, one upon the northern
shore, the other upon the southern. While they are easily reached by road, however, that is not the best way to see them.

  I am thinking now of that fine August afternoon when Gideon and I set out on foot to explore the ancient cities, fortified by the knowledge that a long weekend lay before us. Our plan of march was an ingenious one, for we had arranged that Hoyle and Mills should run out by car and meet us at the end of each day’s march to share the pleasures of camping out. Time and distance did not permit us to walk the whole way, so we planned to walk to Cameirus in two stages and thence to travel by car over the eastern end of the island to Lindos where we would spend our last night.

  Leaving the town we chose the upper road because, if I remember rightly, there was some site whose location Gideon wanted to identify among the rock tombs which cluster round the nape of Monte Smith; but the sun was hot, and the steep hill was enough to set him puffing and blowing by the time we reached the crest overlooking Rhodes. Below us the sea sat perfectly still, cold as jelly; the old grey fort, its walls stitched and cobbled, resembled the pelt of an aged elephant. Neohori (Newtown) by contrast glittered softly in its plaster walls and red roofs. (At one time, says an ancient writer, it was known to the vulgar as Keratohori or Cuckoldville owing to the questionable morals of its inhabitants.) We sat for a while in one of those little rock tombs where the temperature of the stone, as Gideon observed, made one think that the occupant had just left: it for a stroll by the sea; and then, shouldering our packs, climbed up past the last villas and the dismantled battery where dark-skinned Indians lay about in the grass chattering, and took the high road which runs over the crown of the hill and along the glittering cliffs. It was cool here and windy. Westward along the shingle beaches around Trianda the sea was laying down its successive washes of prussian blue and violet, and thinning them out as they touched sand to green and citrons and the innocent yellows you can see on the ripening skins of tangerines. Here, too, we sat to get our breath and to watch, directly below us, the traffic moving along the main road. Mills emerged suddenly at the wheel of his car, bowling along to some urgent appointment, trailing a puff of dust behind him like a cherub’s cloud, and skillfully negotiating the long caravans of mules moving in the opposite direction, carrying produce for the Rhodes market. Here too, then, my companion’s attention was taken up for a while with the professional appraisal of some sheep. Since his appointment as agricultural officer, he had developed a ridiculously proprietary air whenever any livestock came within his field of vision. “Now, that’s a fine cow,” he would say, or “There. How’s that for a sheep? Fattened up by the Gideon method.” So now, while I sat under a pine tree and drank some wine, he took himself off to discuss a flock of sheep with a ragged shepherd boy who was guarding them. He came back looking rather gloomy and took a savage pull at the wine bottle. “Their bowels are out of order,” he said at last. “I hope to God it’s not contagious enteritis.”