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

by Lawrence Durrell

  We set off across the plain with some caution, for the ever-present danger of mines was a constant preoccupation, and no detailed map of existing minefields had been published. Indeed the Italians during the earlier part of the war had mislaid their own defense plans, so that when the Germans moved into Rhodes they were forced to re-mine many areas. Maps of the latter fortunately were in our hands. But there were still large mined areas of the island unaccounted for, and Gideon had more than once been in danger of his life as he was forced to tiptoe on to an apparently “live” field to rescue Homer, his dog, whose curiosity was always leading him into undesirable places. A maze of dry paths led us across the valley, through silvery groves of olives, and pastures richly scented with thyme and myrtle bruised by the hooves of goats. The little cottages here were encircled with walls of hibiscus and oleander, and we stopped once or twice to knock at a strange door and ask if the area was mined. But nobody seemed to be sure. One old lady in a red handkerchief assured us that there were no minefields here, but that the other side of the main road “among the archaics” there was a large field. Gideon groaned. “This incredible talent the Germans have,” he said, “for choosing valuable antiquities as gun sites—such vandalism.” But it is really only Teutonic military logic. What commander could choose a better defensive position than an acropolis?

  We were fortunate in not having to carry provisions, for a message had been sent to Peter, the warden of Phileremo, to expect us; and from what little I knew of Peter’s habits and temperament—he combined the trades of poacher, guide and family man with perfect harmony—what I knew of him led me to expect nothing less than a whole lamb on the spit. I told Gideon so. “Lamb?” he said irritably, “He mustn’t kill lambs. We’ve forbidden that by proclamation.”

  “Wait till you taste it—the sage and garlic, Gideon, the sauce.” Gideon cannot resist licking his lips, but he wags his head reproachfully at the idea and strikes an olive tree in passing with the flat of his hand—as if to chastise the forbidden thought.

  The village of Trianda stands on the level ground at the end of the fine valley which bears it name; the houses stand off the main road which passes through it, for the most part hidden in groves of olive, fig and orange. They are the summer houses of the wealthier Rhodians, and the ambition of every man of men is to have a little house at Trianda where he can sit in the cool shade of his own fig tree during August and September, when Rhodes is hot. It was here, I am reminded, that Lady Hester Stanhope lived during her short and dramatic stay in the island—in one of these small blind-looking Turkish houses with its barred windows and shadowy interior, with its grove of orange and cherry trees shutting out the view of the sea: it was here that she took to trousers—or the Turkish equivalent of trousers.* Here we set our backs to the sea and the village, and our faces to the bulk of Phileremo, the flat-topped mountain which was Ialysos once, and which has offered a first-class defensive site to a hundred armies, Greek, Frankish, Roman, Turkish, German. It is little wonder that no traces of the ancient Acropolis remain. To our right in the valley, as we reach the first upward curve of the road, we see the “archaics” which the old woman spoke of; a series of trenches and parapets cut in the red soil of the valley to form a square.

  How much is archaeology and how much military workings we are unable to gauge until we break the back of the mountain ahead of us, following the sinuous road which now leads through a dense forest of young pine. Here on a shoulder of hill Gideon called a truce to the pace I was setting and we sat for awhile to look down over the valley which now lay spread beneath us, its squares and oblongs of cultivation picked out in russet browns and green until the whole prospect looked like some fine old tweed plaid, much darned. The sun was sinking behind Tilos, and the mountains across the way had become wine-dark and bony. A light wind siphoned up the water in the shallows beyond the town and kicked up spray around a caieque heading south. Trianda drowses among its silver-grey olive trees. Directly beneath we can see the slight tump of excavated ground where the city of Ialysos once stood, and can even discern among its scarred furrows traces of ancient wall.

  Of the minefield, however, there is no discernible trace from this range. Westward the torn gun emplacement of Mount Paradiso (an almost exact replica of Phileremo) flares for a moment as the sun picks up fragments of glass and metal to play upon. We shall, I calculate, have about half an hour of light in which to potter about the ruins on the crown of the hill. We turn away from the prospect and climb the long steep road to the summit. The air has become colder, and spicy from the pine forest which surrounds us. From time to time we shout Peter’s name aloud, and the echo of our voices plays back upon us from several sides at once. But there is no answering call. He must be up at the monastery, waiting for us.

  But then his laugh came out of nowhere and startled us. It was as if the trees laughed. Homer barked. We turned about, looking now here, now there, like characters in the Tempest, while Peter’s tittering laughter sped from tree to tree, from rock to rock. Finally he had pity on us, and climbed down from the branches where he had been hiding. Brushing the dust and bark from the battle dress of which he was so proud he came towards us, a short stocky man, with yellowish eyes, a snub nose, and an irresistibly comic expression on his round face. “Did you think I was a kaous? he asked. We shook hands and he expressed himself honored to meet Gideon of whom he had many favors to ask. Together the three of us left the road and followed a narrow turning path to the summit, walking deep in anemones across the shadowy glades and mossy brakes which crown Phileremo. “First,” said Peter, “I shall explain all the archaics to you without any charge, and then we will go to my house where I have a splendid dinner for you.” Gideon grunts.

  “I suppose you have a sheep?” he said in an offhand way, torn between duty and a hunger which Timocreon would have sympathized with.

  “A sheep?” Peter sounds outraged. “For six people, not including my family? I have two sheep.”

  The others are supposed to be coming on to join us later in the evening, and to be bringing blankets and mattresses for Gideon and me.

  There is precious little to explain about Phileremo today; the monastery has been thoroughly bombed, and the image of the Virgin, which was the object of so much veneration in the time of the Crusaders, has long since vanished. Once more, however, we found ourselves walking among shattered field guns and a metal harvest of cannonshells, for Phileremo had been the site of fierce action between Italian and German troops shortly after the fall of Italy. The Italians, though they outnumbered the Germans by six to one, and held the crown of the hill, only lasted out a week of Stuka bombardment. They left behind them mounds of live ammunition and a small pyramid of tin helmets. The little monastery is a ruin. In the garden a few fragments of Byzantine and Hellenic stone lie forlornly about. But the view is incomparable from the little monk’s walk, tree lined and shady, which has been contrived to cross the summit from end to end. From here you can stare down landwards at the gutted aerodrome of Maritsa, now dotted with abandoned aircraft, some wingless, which lie about among the fields like charred moths under a lamp. Beyond that green bowl the hills rise again and lead away to the green spires of Monte Profeta.

  “In old times,” says Peter, “the image of the Panaghia was the patron saint of the island. In moments of trouble it was carried in a solemn procession to Rhodes, and all round the town. Even before the last siege of the Turks they did this, but it had no effect.”

  “Where do you get your information from?” asks Gideon.

  “There is an old monk in the village who told me.”

  “How does he know?”

  “Books,” said Peter, “he has many books. Before, there were many relics in the island, but now none.” He is right there; Torr has preserved a list of them which for sheer variety takes some beating. I quote:

  Chief among the many relics preserved at Rhodes were the right hand of John the Baptist; one of the three bronze crosses made by the Empress
Helena from the basin in which Christ washed the Apostles’ feet; a cross made from the True Cross; a fragment of the Crown of Thorns, which budded yearly on Good Friday; and one of the thirty pieces of silver; wax impressions of which, if made by the priest in Passion Week, were efficacious in peril by sea.

  While Gideon and I went to make a further exploration of the hillside, Peter sat down under a tree to wait for the rest of the party. As we returned we heard voices among the trees. Mills, to the alarm of his wife, was already busy collecting souvenirs from among the cannonshells that littered the paths. Hoyle sat in Sand’s old German car, quizzing the view through his glasses, while Sand himself and E were climbing the staircase to the monastery tower with Peter. After a good deal of ferocious banter from Hoyle and Mills, Gideon was permitted to announce himself more than ready for dinner, and the cavalcade started off down the hill to Peter’s house, Hoyle taking his little rests every fifty yards with the punctuality of a Swiss clock, and Mills singing at the top of his voice.

  The house of Peter the guide lies off the main road some two hundred yards before it breaks up through the pine forest and reaches the crown of the hill. It is built in a cutting sheer against the mountainside. Its forecourt is shaded by an enormous plane tree, while a stream runs thickly out of the side of the hill, so that the air under the great tree is a perpetual mixture of shadow and spray. To the noise of cold running water the children shout and play all day, the seven cages of canaries slowly swing in the arbor under the terrace, while their occupants chirp to the note of the water. To live so close to a powerful stream is as good as living by the sea; the noise of it—black water squirting down upon stone—provides a background, a momentum for one’s life. The air vibrates and wavers round one as if from the hum of a great dynamo. Even when you enter the house, and the noise of the water is stilled, you have, as if within the canals of the middle ear, a deep echo.

  Peter’s house boasted a precarious balcony overlooking the valley—an extremely dangerous-looking wooden arrangement built along the first floor. The feeling of height, the great expanse of country below one, and the fear that at any moment one might fall through those crazy planks of wood into the valley, gave a strange character to that first dinner party in Phileremo. Hoyle said that he felt he was up in a balloon. Peter’s own feeling for metaphor was not far behind Hoyle’s as he added proudly: “Sitting here you know what the bird feels when you hang its cage in a tree.”

  The house abounded in livestock and small black-eyed children. Visitors to the table included a tiny and immaculate lamb, with a coat as soft as moss, and an eye like a live coal. It drank wine from a saucer with the utmost concentration, its chervil ears crumpled upon its flat and woolly skull. Two tortoises walked about with a blameless clockwork air; and Gideon was kept busy buying up cicadas from the smaller children and setting them free. The peasant children have a nasty habit of catching a cicada and tying it to a piece of string. It makes an admirable bull roarer, for if you swing it round and round your head it lets out a dull creaking sort of protest. Needless to say this is a habit which Gideon dislikes intensely, and no sooner does he see a cicada trussed up in this way but he must buy it and set it free. “Let me see,” I remember him saying. “Six children, six cicadas at five lirettas a head … Philanthropy is an expensive game, Hoyle. Don’t have anything to do with it.” But Hoyle, who was carving the lamb with an infectious air of approval, was too occupied to give much thought to this animadversion. “I was afraid,” he said, “it was going to be a leetle bit tough but,” putting a segment in his mouth, “praise be to our Lady of Phileremo, it isn’t.” It wasn’t.

  Lamps had been lit by now and perched on nails. They cast a frail radiance over the balcony so that, seen from the ground floor, where Peter’s wife was still busy cooking a dish of octopus in a metal cauldron, the balcony looked like some lighted ship sailing upon a canal perhaps, or the unruffled waters of some great lake. A comparison I thought poetical enough to express to Mills, who had come down with me to inspect the octopus. “Yes,” he said, standing beside me and gazing up at the scene. “And Gideon is lifting his glass to his mouth with the regularity of a Varsity oarsman, rowing.” Gideon, indeed, had become as ruddy as a lamp himself. He glowed. His monocle was misty with good cheer. The fourth bottle of wine had brought its customary loosening of tongues. The octopus when it appeared looking like a boiled motor tire was greeted with shouts of applause. Gideon proposed a toast to it. The octopus was in no condition to reply to these courtesies. It lay bubbling in a rich red sauce flavored with garlic and peppercorns. Hoyle once more constituted himself taster and repeated “I was afraid it was going to be a leetle bit tough but,” putting a piece of the sucker in his mouth, “praise be it isn’t.” It wasn’t.

  Mills slipped down to the car and brought up his guitar. The wooden house proved an extraordinary soundbox, mellowing the note of the strings, and making it louder, more resonant and authoritative. Voices too had a curious ebbing volume over that blue valley with its darkened border of sea. We sang for the most part the traditional Greek folksongs, tasting once more their extraordinary purity of line, and the marriage of words and music in dance measure which is their supreme quality. Later Peter felt emboldened enough to sing us some of his Anatolian songs, with their sharp quarter tones and strange lapses from key to key. In order to achieve this kind of singing you must put your head back and let the voice become pliant, soft, almost undirected. Peter’s voice bubbled in his throat like rosewater in the bowl of a nargileh as he followed the windings of these old melodies with their intricate cross-references of rhythm and accent. It is the singing of a bird, apparently haphazard and undisciplined, but demanding far greater voice control than European singing does. The songs, too, though they resembled those of Crete and of Macedonia, had a hint of something else in them—the flavor of Arabia, of Persia. Their melancholy was not wild and savage as the Greek mountain melancholy is: it was softer, more quaintly flavored.

  Gideon by now was asleep with his head upon the table. Hoyle, whose capacity was normally a minim of wine per meal, had poured himself a whole glass and was sunk, I could see, in his own memories of the East, the songs he had heard in Beirut and Damascus before the last war. E sat with her black eyes fixed upon the singer’s face following every supple turning, every sour change of tone and key. By her side Chloe petted the lamb and tried to interest it in a slice of octopus. Mills and Sand were cracking walnuts in the palms of their hands, expressing an over-exaggerated solicitude whenever the noise seemed to border upon rudeness to Peter. But the singer himself was lost. He held the guitar lightly between his knees, his blunt fingers folded about it with the repose that comes from long familiarity: and as I hold this picture for a moment in my mind I see him singing with his black eyes fixed on the darkness of the valley below us, his sleeves rolled back, his collar open, and the sound of his voice wobbling in his throat like a second pulse.

  From there to the roaring of cars, the loud good-nights, and the yellow swathes of headlight cutting the pines, and diminishing with the noise of engines in the valley—from there the transition is immediate. Yet it must have been late. We were left with the roaring of the mountain spring and first whoop of owls. We settled down to sleep in flea bags on the balcony, Gideon and I. “We must be up at cock crow,” he cried once, indistinctly, in the voice of one leading a charge against hopeless odds—and then fell asleep with his head buried upon his arm. I blew out the lights and lay for a long time, listening to the wind stirring the pines, and the faint noise of cars crossing the valley below us. The children were long since in bed, and only Peter sat upon the deserted balcony, drinking a last glass of mastika before turning in.

  On the landward side of Phileremo, no doubt, the early moon had risen above the horizon and set. Meanwhile without ceasing the stream flowed on from the heart of the mountain, its water ringing steadily upon the stone still of the fountain before it disappeared among the mosses and cresses of its underground trac
k again. But already our ears had become so accustomed to it that we should not have recognized the silence that might follow if it should suddenly stop.

  It was already dawn when I awoke. Gideon had rolled out of his flea bag and was lying on his back snoring like a clockwork toy, his face smoothed out and juvenile, the round circle of his eye scored out by his eyeglass gleaming white as a scar.

  In order to reach the privy at the back of the house one had to pass through a ground floor room whose furniture would have delighted a surrealist. There, standing upon the earthen floor, without any attempt at premeditated arrangement, I saw a sewing machine, several Louis Quinze pieces, a Sheraton sideboard, desk, a typewriter, and a very handsome grand piano. The piano had been whitewashed. The reason for this accumulation of treasures is a simple one; during the period of acute starvation in Rhodes the peasants refused to trade their vegetables for money because they were afraid of fluctuations in value, or even of the Italian liretta being recalled in exchange for some valueless occupation currency. They would accept articles of value, however, in exchange for vegetables; so it was that one saw caravans of carts setting off from the town every morning for the interior loaded with furniture, pictures, typewriters, plate, linen, etc. In the remote villages these objects were freely exchanged, and now the peasant houses are crammed with them. And the whitewashed piano? Peter’s explanation has a certain nobility about it. “Of course we whitewashed it,” he said, “You know as well as I do that black is the color of mourning. We did not wish to attract a death to the house. So we painted the piano white.”