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

by Lawrence Durrell

  I am about to go down and get a closer view of the dancing when my attention is distracted by a new development. It is apparently time for the litany to be read at the shrine, for across the dry brown sward from the direction of the trees comes a small straggling procession of villagers, some holding aloft ikons painted on banners. They are headed by the dark figures in clerical robes and tall hats. Ten paces before them walks a small boy, diligently tapping a triangle. The priests are perhaps chanting, for their lips move; but so great is the hum of the crowd that they remain as yet beyond earshot.

  This little procession advances in measured fashion towards the shrine, at the door of which a dense crowd has gathered—like the shapeless clotting of bees at the entrance to a hive. From time to time it is shaken by internal convulsions which throw up the figures of those (either the most curious, or the most in need of the Saint’s magic) who wish to station themselves before the iron grille which marks the entrance to the grotto. But, by the time the priests approach, a pathway clears itself in the dark mass of bodies and a hoarse murmur rises. The doors open and the procession descends; and I am close enough to them now to hear the hollow resonance of voices echoing in the cave, amplified by the hollowness and the presence of water. Candlelight flickers warmly where there was lately nothing but a dark hole; and the sour spiral chanting of the monks begins in a lower key. Question and response, separated by a semitone. Draughts of incense sweep up through the gloom, over the water. A shiver runs through the crowd. Lips move in prayer. Everyone makes the sign of the cross. With a bitter struggle I succeed in elbowing my way as far as the iron grille. From here I can gaze down the steps into the grotto. The incense cloud rising from the water gives one the impression that it has issued, boiling, from the earth. Yet two or three elderly women, clad in white shifts, are standing dispiritedly in it, and beyond them I catch a glimpse of a mongoloid youth being held by two old crones dressed like nuns. They form a strange bedraggled group as they stand thigh-deep in the concrete basin, the candlelight flickering on the whites of their eyes. The chanting goes on punctuated by a series of respectful groans and sighs from the crowd—though whether they express religious emotion or annoyance at the heat I cannot tell.

  I feel a touch on my arm. It is Mills, who has fought his way into the crowd to see the saint at work. “All my patients,” he says in a whisper. “I want to see if the old man can do better than I can.”

  “Materialist,” I whisper back. The immersions have begun within the grotto. The swishing of water almost drowns the chanting of the priests. The mongol is making some semi-articulate protests but the two old nuns have him fast in their talons; all three subside in a scrambling heap in one corner of the bath.

  “I do not know why we are standing here,” says a hoarse voice. “The miracles take place two days after the service, you all know—never on the spot.” I recognize the butcher-poet who once read me his epic in my office. He has a bunch of spring onions in one hand and a propeller in the other; he seems a trifle intoxicated. “At least,” he continues, baring his teeth in a grin, “so the priests would have us believe.” Several people turn their heads and hiss for silence. He eats an onion loudly and puts on an air of scornful skepticism. For villagers today, this attitude (so far from what they really believe or feel) represents, so they think, intellectual emancipation. It has come down to them through the village schoolmaster and lawyer, those heirs to the vague radicalism and agnosticism which is poisoning the whole source of our culture. In the butcher-poet I recognize the kind of skeptic who, while he is busy telling you that God does not exist, nevertheless is the first to cross himself if someone would mention the death of an acquaintance. … And yet, as Mills says, the real trouble with both reason and mumbo-jumbo is that they are equally suspect. They are both fogged mirrors, badly in need of cleaning. But the ignorant man can get nothing from either—not even a reflection of his own stupidity.

  The suppliants have emerged from the pool now, and are drying themselves briskly with towels, their faces still turned in the direction of the altar from which the sounds of prayer still issue, accompanied by great draughts of incense. No miracle appears to have taken place, yet as my butcher-poet says, the effects of the service are often not felt for a day or two afterwards. It is as if the saint needed perhaps time to think things over—to convince himself of the validity of the claims made upon him.

  Outside the shrine the shades of evening have begun to fall. The sun is westering behind the mountains, plunging slowly down into the sea beyond Tilos. The sky is beginning to take, softly, wash by wash, the subdued violet tones of evening which slant across the leaves of the trees, and begin to fill out the shadows of objects with darker volume. A light breeze springs up, scattering the dust raised by the brown feet of the dancers and tilting the smoke which rises from the pyres of roasting flesh. We make our way slowly across the violet slopes, so plump and rosy now from the encroaching night, both of us consumed by conflicting curiosities. The dancing competitions have begun in earnest now. Three hissing carbide lamps fling down a chalky blaze of light upon the brown earth floor where the champion dancers are to compete. A dense crowd has formed a semi-circle, almost engulfing the raised wooden dais upon which we can see the long-suffering face of the Brigadier, flanked by various mayors, dignitaries and churchmen. Other dancing circles have sprung up all over the valley now, but this is the central one; and as we reach it we can hear the heralds shouting aloud the name “Embona,” which raises a great hail of clapping and cheering—for the Embona dancers are reputed to be the finest in Rhodes.

  They plunge out of the shadow of the trees with a queer jigging movement—a long line of brightly dressed girls like circus ponies, tossing their heads. Each holds the girdle of the one before her. The line is led by a tall and graceful young man, clad in a white shirt and in tapering trousers, cut something like our riding breeches, who shuffles a tambourine. The girls wear high boots of calfskin, and their dark blue pleated dresses are picked out with concentric rings of brighter color which throw into relief the white shirts they wear and the vivid looped headscarves. The long line flows out into the arena with this curious loping shuffle to the jingle of the tambourine. Then it halts and dresses itself by the right. The young man steps forward, holding the hand of the endmost dancer and raising the tambourine above his head, pauses, watchful, tense. Then he cuts the air downward with vivid emphasis and the music bursts into life. The dancers drink in two bars before they follow it, each springing forward and backward with the queer seesawing movement of the dance called “the cradle.” It is taken at top speed by these practiced village girls and is something out of the ordinary—though perhaps not the most graceful of the Greek dances I have seen; it has strange elliptical figures which fill in the main structure of its form—a swaying, cradle-like jig, and the formation they adopt is that of a half-moon. This, it is true, gives them a certain mobility and enables the chain to break the measure and flow from side to side of the floor with small shuffling steps, to take up the dance position in a new corner. But always at the head of the line, capering like a satyr and jingling his tambourine, dances the young man in his soft jackboots. The dust, too, has begun to rise in clouds from the hard floor of baked earth, so that the crescent of dancers seen from the shadows beyond the plane trees look like some colored planet whirring on its course, and surrounded by its own dense atmosphere. “Come,” says Mills. “Let’s go and see what old Gideon’s doing. I’ve seen the susta often enough.” But it is easier said than done, for the dark press of faces behind us offer no hope of an easy egress. We are walled in by the bodies of the crowd. The critics follow the dancers with a passionate intentness, some beating time with their heads. The whole dance floor has become one swelling cloud of reddish dust by now in the center of which (their faces preoccupied and remote) ride the dancers, their flower-like bodies carried forward on the music like river narcissus. The warm dust cloud has risen to the height of their top boots, giving them the gho
stly appearance of goddesses being born from the earth itself, and aided only by their struggles, and the unearthly music of the fiddles which torment them. The young dance leader alone raises his feet above the dust cloud, capering and shaking his tambourine, proudly showing his twinkling heels. His goat-like eyes glitter.

  I am reminded, as so often in Greece, that dancing is never a performance so much as a communal rite—the transmission of an enigmatic knowledge which the musician has summoned up from below the earth. It flows outward through the dancing feet which are building the dusty circle, stitch by stitch, like a fabric being woven; step by step like a city being built; and the darker circle outside, the lookers-on, gradually absorb the rhythm which triumphs over them by sheer repetition—being laid down on the consciousness like successive coats of a thrilling color. One can watch the crowd being drawn into such a dance man by man, impelled by something like that gravitational law which decrees that autumn windfalls should plunge towards the center of the earth when they are ripe. The vivid circle of the dancers is the center towards which the audience leans, its blood quickened by the notation of the music—itself (who knows?) a transcription in terms of catgut and wind of pro founder melodies which the musician has quarried from his native disenchantments and the earth.

  But while we have been watching, the darkness has fallen in earnest; westward the pines still describe themselves against the sky, but very faintly. To those lucky couples who lie about on the grassy slopes it must seem as if they were looking up at the heavens from the bottom of an inkwell, so deep is the blue darkness, yet striped here and there like a leopard’s skin with the sulphurous patches of yellow fire from the great bundles of dry gorse and twigs which have now been set alight all along the circumference of this sunken valley. We walk across that dark hinterland, Mills and I, stopping from time to time to watch other teams of dancers in action, some dancing in the eerie light of lanterns, some by these crackling furnaces of thorn and light brush. Everywhere the light scoops out rosy pools in which the dancers swim, as if in an element lighter than air, while the pink puffs of dust which flow upwards seem as light as foam beneath their feet. And everywhere the thumping of the drums only underlines the sullen vibrations of the earth itself under so many moving feet. Everywhere outside lie pastures of ink, where movement is small, individual, owing nothing to the group hypnosis of these dancing circles. Candles flicker in the bushes where the peasant families are making their arrangements for the night; some of the children, after being put to bed, have escaped again into the magical darkness to join some rapt circle of dance critics. Their mothers’ plaintive voices can be heard calling “Spiro!… Pavlos!… where are you?”

  Once we blunder into an untethered mule, and once Mills trips over a prostrate body which groans and curses in accents jocund with garlic and mastika. The light is better in the long main street of the boom-town, which by now resembles an oriental bazaar lit by pressure lamps which have the same ghastly brilliance as old-fashioned gas lighting. Here, Mehmet is busy haranguing people from a stall covered with carded embroidery. Business is still brisk, but it is chiefly the old people who are still busy arguing, assessing and buying goods. The young have been drawn off by the dancing. Christ is busy before a pastry cook’s stall, buying some sweet cakes for his old mother who is sitting at a table on the slope peering into the gloom eagerly with those cataract-covered eyes which somehow look abnormally keen and clear-sighted.

  On one of the dance floors Sergeant Croker is in action, dancing with a comical stiffness, but with faultless accuracy, cheered on by an appreciative crowd. I have heard that he is engaged to a Greek girl now and has learned the language passably well. His fellow dancers are a queer mixture; some are tradesmen from Rhodes town, and some villagers from one of the remoter villages. Croker’s cap has fallen off. Prolonged shouts and cheers. “I’ve never seen old Croker dance,” says Mills with admiration. “He must be as tight as a drum.” It is true that as the Sergeant swings round into the light one notices a distinct glassiness of expression, but this may be accounted for by the intricacy of the evolutions he is performing. They need some concentration. Hoyle suddenly appears at my elbow, gnome-like, panting, delighted. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he says. “This crowd is rather far gone. Isn’t Croker wonderful? When he went on to dance people began to jeer and shout at him. All of a sudden a Herculean figure bounded into the ring—Gigantes. He took Croker’s arm and they danced together for a while, and of course the jeers changed to cheers for the General. Don’t you think that was a graceful and delightful thing to do—typically Gigantesque?” Croker is by now having his full meed of cheers. He looks as if he could go on until morning. The General, by showing him public favor, has endeared him to everyone. “Where the devil is Gideon?” says Mills irritably. Hoyle has lost track of him. “He said he was going to get his fortune told. Which means that he was going to hunt for a good wine.”

  So we turn our steps towards the cafes under the trees, and it is not long before we run Gideon to earth in one of them. There is not very much light up here, but our friends seem to know where we are; within a few minutes of our arrival little gifts of food begin to arrive for us. They are handed to the waiter in the darkness outside and he places them before us, whispering in our ears the names of the donors as he does so. Mehmet sends us a platter of black olives and some paprika which has been steeped in vinegar—a favorite appetizer of Hoyle’s. Christ sends us a noggin of black wine and some white roses, while Manoli unexpectedly appears in person bearing a wooden bowl piled with crystallized fruit and green apples. “What a country,” says Gideon. “One only has to look hungry, to sit around for a while, and people just send you things.”

  After a while we are joined by Sand and the Baron Baedeker, who converge upon us from opposite directions. Sand is his usual taciturn self, but the Baron is a man transformed; he has a very weak head, and has been given a glass of wine by one of his clients. He will normally only speak English when his courage is at meridian. Now he refuses to speak anything else. “Ah, if I had flesh,” he keeps repeating. “If I had flesh I could take a picture of you all… piff.” It is too dark, alas, for his camera, though he climbs his stepladder rather unsteadily and peers at us through a finder lens once, just to be sure. His grave and gentle face bears an expression of unwonted animation. He accepts a small glass of wine with a simper and says to Hoyle: “I have my circumcision in Turkish town tomorrow—you wish to see?”

  We are well into the second can of retsina when a messenger comes panting into the circle of light with a message from the General. We are urgently bidden to the village banquet which is being given in honor of the representatives of Greece by the mayor and aldermen of Soroni. Gideon and Hoyle gaze at one another with some misgiving, for a banquet means toasts and probably speeches; however, if Gigantes has sent for them, go they must. For my part I am loth to be tied down by any one entertainment on a night like this; I prefer to remain free to wander. And Mills makes some excuse which must be truthful, for he gets up and disappears into the darkness.

  After parting from the others, and wandering round for a while, I stumble upon a little group of figures whose immobility in the midst of all that noise and movement is almost shocking. I am drawn by something like a sense of impending danger towards the little construction of reeds and plane leaves—a makeshift shelter—inside which, posed as if for the crude Nativity of some medieval painter crouches a group of peasants. A horn lantern with one feeble candle alight in it stands upon the ground, throwing its waxen light upon a half-circle of faces whose blank uncomprehending anguish, devoid of recognition, seems trained downwards, as if eternally fixed, upon the figure of a small child lying upon a dirty peasant blanket which is drawn back over his knees. He is dressed in a shirt of vivid whiteness open at the throat, and he gazes out beyond the circle of faces at the sky with some of that gentle vagueness which the human face wears at the approach of death. At the fringes of that puddle of sallow li
ght crouch the patient sleeping forms of goats and a rough-coated sheepdog. To the left a kneeling woman with her bright scarf drawn across her face and her head bent. But dominating the foreground is a figure I recognize, clad in much-patched blue trousers and a dark open jacket which is barred across the chest by the heavy woolen vest of the fisherman. It is the other Manoli—the old sailor whom I visit everyday on my way to work. Those toil-swollen fingers are resting on his knees as if to spare his rheumatic joints some of the strain of kneeling on the hard ground. I say that I recognize him, but the truth is that the figure I know to be his, bears to the Manoli I know the resemblance of a plaster effigy.

  His features seem to have been stripped of all meaning—the gesture, mobility, or repose, which alone give an accidental significance to the inert structure of flesh and bone, and which carry on them the index of the human personality, its masks. He crouches there like a figure stamped on some old leaden seal; and while my own startled senses clearly interpret his physical attitude as one of pain and misgiving, to someone else casually passing, he might seem to be like a man who has just been deafened by an explosion which has scattered the wholesome of human expressions by which his face might register some idea of its magnitude. The very earth seems deaf around the little group, fixed in the attitudes of a forgotten tableau around the flickering lantern. As I come nearer I understand the meaning of this graven immobility. They are holding their breath for the child, trying to stare out of countenance the death that they can see on his face; which rises noiselessly within him like a column of water rising in a well. A little circle of villagers have closed in about the actors, forming a web of human heads, a circle of compassionate helpless witnesses. All are silent. The whole scene has the veridic fixity of an old master—though the figures breathe, and though one recognizes the brush which has so thoughtfully, so masterfully painted them in as the brush of pain itself. Some of the men have the faces of those whom shock has somewhat sobered; one holds a mattress, one a bottle of wine, and even these objects so lisdessly held in hands whose very pose suggests the uselessness of all action, seem somehow lost to common context. They are like the wreckage left behind after an invasion of the senses by all the armies of the unknown.