Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  We clambered down. Branches of holm-oak overhung the entrance. The floor was a bed of leaves, deep, soft, dead; one staggered, waded, sank in it. Farther back, a steep drop into a dark hole – the inner cave, invisible from the hillside.

  How long, I asked, cautiously inspecting, were they here with Kreipe? Like the number of Herakleion guard-posts passed by the abduction party, this, I suspected, had become a matter not of fact but of legend. Nevertheless Elias replied with absolute certainty. ‘Eight days,’ he said.

  Eight minutes in that musty gloom seemed to me as I scrambled back into the air more than enough.

  There was a short respite. There was even breakfast. At the top of the slope a shepherds’ encampment welcomed us with milk and a huge domed sheep’s cheese. A shame to cut it, we said. But they insisted, and Elias produced bread from his striped shoulder-bag. The bread was not merely hard, it had the consistency of cold lava. Even dipped in the faintly warm sheep’s milk it was rock-like. No matter, I was glad of it, and for a moment I felt optimistic about the whole enterprise. At midday, said one of the shepherds, you will be at the top, at three o’clock you will be at Anoyia.

  Then he destroyed the effect. The weather, he went on, looks like rain. I turned towards the mountain range ahead; clouds darkened the heights.

  ‘It will rain,’ I heard him saying, ‘if the clouds come down you won’t be able to move.’

  For the second time that morning I took fright. Pusillanimously I tried to shift the responsibility. You have a cold, I said to Elias, you mustn’t get wet through – if it is going to rain wouldn’t it be better not to go on? My failure was ignominious.

  ‘You are thinking of me, are you?’ He laughed. ‘We will go on, we will try.’

  From the next few hours I recall a mixture of despair and exhilaration, a walking nightmare shot with gleams of delight. As we climbed out of the wooded hillside and emerged on slopes too high for trees the island stretched its length behind us. To the south-west the curve of the plain at Tymbaki; then gradually the entire south coast, clear, coloured, sunlit as far as the eastern tip. But ahead I saw a huge concave cliff like the back of an amphitheatre. That, I knew, we had to negotiate.

  ‘We have an hour, an hour and a half uphill,’ said Elias consolingly, ‘then it is all downhill.’

  Credulous enough to believe him, I staggered on, zigzagging upwards, gasping for breath. When I was allowed a rest I dropped to the ground without the energy to take off my knapsack. No water, no springs anywhere, only ridge upon ridge. The cliff was behind us now, but in front I saw only the surge of the mountains, like a sea of petrified waves. Yet, in this wilderness, arid, trackless – without a guide one would be irretrievably lost – there were obstinate blossoms: pale dwarf tulips flushed with pink, their petals curling open to show a golden heart; and, its greenish-white trumpet crumpling round the yellow pistil, the tiny arum which grows on Mount Ida.

  Patches of snow on the northward-looking slopes were dripping into reddish-brown pools; Elias filled his water-bottle. The way led through a pass. In the snow-watered level soil yellow heartsease grew; the ground was starred with tiny blue flowers; and pincushions of green thorn had put out blossoms of white and pink. But soon I had no time for botany. We were climbing, toiling diagonally up the naked slope; more and more often I flopped down to get my breath, and I could read restiveness in Elias’s look.

  At last we stood on the ridge. We had come to the lower end of a col which swung up to a crenellated height; we must climb almost to the crag before we could begin the descent. Probably, I reflected, we are near the Idaean cave. But the thought of walking even a few yards out of our way was intolerable, and I refrained from enquiring. Eager for the descent, for that unbroken descent which hours earlier I had been promised, I dragged myself up the incline and looked over the edge.

  At the foot of the crag the ground plunged away to the left in a long, boulder-strewn, near-precipitous drop.

  ‘That’, said Elias, ‘is the way. Now you see why you couldn’t ride a mule.’ And he set off down.

  I could indeed see why no mule, no donkey could take a rider down that cliffside. Without the example of Elias I could hardly have believed the slope negotiable by normal human legs. But there he was, bounding, leaping, almost running down. Gingerly I began to creep after him. The angle seemed to me appalling. I felt with the stick he had lent me, I clung to boulders, I crawled.

  ‘Come faster!’ he shouted from far below. Knees weak with the downhill strain, I picked my ant-like way. ‘Don’t be afraid, let yourself go!’ I dropped to all fours; life was reduced to the necessity of getting down that unspeakable slope. When I came to the end my knees were trembling uncontrollably.

  But it was still not the end.

  The descent led to a dry ravine. First on one side, then on the other I tottered on down; the cliff reared at our backs, sharp stones slipped underfoot.

  ‘Nidha!’ cried Elias, encouraging. ‘There it is!’

  I looked where he pointed. Remote, the huge plain, green, beatifically flat, stretched below, the plain Tom Dunbabin had seen from, perhaps, the very spine of Ida we had crossed.

  ‘There! See the little white chapel!’

  I shall never reach it, I thought. And on again, over the brow of a hill, on along a goat-track; on down a slope following the curve of the plain. Would I like to drink? I gulped snow-water from Elias’s water-bottle. Then on again, past a friendly shepherd’s hut, on through spiny scrub, on with legs torn and scratched, interminably on. No, I shall just fall down where I am, I said to myself when Elias called me. We had reached the chapel, and that was enough. But somehow I dragged myself over to find him standing by a rough gravemark. It was, I saw, a relic of the war. I did not copy the inscription. Later, I thought; I am too tired now. But at least, looking at the grave in that mountainous solitude, I was reminded that there are worse things than being tired after a walk.

  ‘Here is the spring,’ said Elias, ‘come and eat.’

  Hard-boiled eggs, salt cheese, hard bread, oranges – our lunch would have been a feast for those who passed that way between 1941 and 1945. Elias had been one of them – a runner in the war, carrying messages over Ida. Every week he had crossed from Nithavris to Nidha where we were now sitting, or from Nidha to Anoyia where we were now bound. He had not made the trip since 1944, but he remembered the way well enough. Once, he said, one Easter he had crossed four times in a week and finished with a bullet-wound in his hand.

  It was three o’clock when we sat down to eat. The shepherds above the cave at Nithavris, he pointed out, had said we should be at Anoyia at three. How much farther? Four hours: we must hurry lest night overtook us. A drink first? We were sitting by a round stone bowl which caught the spring water and channelled it into a cattle-trough. I took a long swig from the bowl. Then I noticed round the rim numbers of black worm-like creatures. Were they perhaps leeches? They live in the water, said Elias. Yes, I said, I can see that, but what are they?

  ‘We call them’ (I recognised the root of the word which has given us dipsomaniac) ‘dipsítes because they live in the water.’

  No time to be fussy. I had another drink.

  At 3.45 we set off again. Relieved that my legs had not given out altogether, I was feeling better, though not well enough to go back to the gravemark and copy the inscription. I was even torn, when we came to a shepherds’ encampment on the plain and Elias asked if we could hire a donkey or a mule, between on the one hand exhaustion and the desire to ride and on the other vanity and the desire to be able to say I had walked the whole way. There was anyhow no animal available, and rejecting what from Elias’s black looks I suspected was a ribald invitation to stay the night we hurried on, across the plain, up the slopes on the far side, on to fairly level ground with late asphodels still in flower, even on to a recognisable track running round a valley. We saw an old man on the path.

  ‘How far to Anoyia?’

  ‘You are nearly there.’
/>   A few minutes later we met a solitary shepherd.

  ‘How far to Anoyia?’

  ‘The rate you are going’ (looking at me) ‘seven hours.’

  I had flattered myself that I was keeping up a fair pace. Cretans, though, have other standards, and with the fear of being benighted I put on a feeble spurt. The going was not so rough now, and the late afternoon air was refreshing. I grew over-confident. And you were afraid, I said to Elias, that we might have to spend the night on the mountain! He turned on me angrily.

  ‘Of course I was afraid. If the clouds come down on Ida you can’t see where you are, you can’t see a thing in front of you, you just have to sit where you are and wait!’

  But seeing me properly dashed at this he added, ‘Soon we shall have a good road, a carriage road.’

  At six o’clock I ventured to ask how much farther it was – an hour? He smiled sardonically. ‘I am afraid it is farther than that.’ We were dropping down into a ravine; between the cliffs the evening shadows were gloomy. But when the valley widened we were in sunlight again and following a wide grassy track. There were trees, there were fields with people working; after the naked wilderness the sense of human life once more. Elias called to a young man and made a final attempt to get a donkey for me. In vain; and anyway by now I meant to finish on foot, though I could not resist reminding him of the promised carriage road.

  ‘She doesn’t like the path,’ he said to the young man; and they laughed. This path is all right, I said irritably.

  I ought to have known better. At the top of a rise the grass turned to sharp rock and boulders where the feet balanced precariously.

  ‘There is Anoyia,’ said Elias, pointing to scattered lights far below.

  And at that moment the sun set. It was in blue and purple summer twilight burnished by a moon mercifully at the full that we began the last descent, steep, rocky, beset with jagged shifting stones. It was by night and moonlight that at last we reached the outskirts of the village through which Kreipe fifteen years earlier had been led by his captors.

  We had left Nithavris just after five in the morning, we had begun to walk just after six. When after what seemed hours of trudging village streets we went in to a café in Anoyia and ordered a drink it was half-past nine at night. Stupefied I sat while talk went on over my head. Who is she? She is a journalist … she understands Greek … she is very tired. Once, offered a newspaper with a cartoon showing a two-headed British lion, one tongue licking Khrushchev, the other licking Uncle Sam, I roused myself. The British, I said furiously, were right, right to try for peace in the world; hadn’t the Cretans seen enough of war? Then, too tired for even the friendliest inquisition, I sank back into silence while Elias went to seek hospitality from a cousin in the local police. He came back with the news that the cousin was away. But he had found a room.

  The hotel was of the most unassuming. But it was clean, it was welcome. We sat at a bare table and opened our bundles of food. ‘I am hungry,’ he said, though by now he had a streaming, roaring cold. I could eat nothing but an orange. And he too was tired. Do you know, he asked, why I am tired? To me it seemed natural enough, but I tried a few guesses. Because you have been carrying my air-bag all day? Because you have carried my coat as well? Because you have a bad cold?

  ‘You remember,’ he said, ‘what the shepherds told us this morning? We ought to have been here at three this afternoon, and we got here at half-past nine. I am tired because we walked so slowly.’

  The bedroom had a tin basin to wash in and three beds; a man’s jacket was hanging over the back of the nearest one. I took the farthest, removed my skirt and blouse and put on pyjamas over what was left. I could see Elias sitting modestly on the far side of the middle bed and taking off his coat and waistcoat before he turned down the lamp. Presently in the sleepy dark I heard quiet footsteps. It was the third visitor, the one with the jacket, coming in and going to bed.

  No more than a minute later, as it seemed, Elias was waking me. It was a quarter to five: time to get up and catch the bus to Herakleion.

  iv

  Elias had been out of luck with mechanical objects. Not only was his clock broken; his cigarette lighter had let him down, and as on our walk we paused for a few minutes in the dwindling afternoon he had jabbed again and again with his thumb, struck no spark, kindled no flame and at last thrown the thing furiously across a gorge brimming with shadow. I did not think of replacing his clock, but irrationally, though of course he had been paid for acting as guide, I felt responsible for the lighter. I sent him a new one from Athens. Then I put his name out of my mind until a year later, in the summer of 1960, I was back in Crete.

  I knew I should not have enough time to go to Nithavris that year. I hoped, though, to get as far as Yerakari and Ano Meros; meanwhile I had an errand. The monastery at Arkadhi, about fifteen miles to the south-east of Rethymnon, is celebrated for its role in the Cretan struggle for liberty. Here during the uprising of 1866 (the date is commemorated in Herakleion’s 1866 Street) a force of revolutionaries collected. They were surrounded and outnumbered. But with the active support of the Abbot and the monks they refused to surrender. The story says that the Abbot himself, in a move which slaughtered both defenders and besiegers, gave the order to blow up the powder magazine.

  The name of Arkadhi was to be a symbol of Cretan independence. Like many Greek monasteries the place was a centre of resistance in the 1941–45 period, and there had been a plan to set up on its walls a plaque with the names of both the Cretans and the British who had fought against the Occupation. As a result of the Cyprus situation the plan had been dropped. But Paddy Leigh Fermor, when I asked him for advice about Crete, suggested that I might go to Arkhadi and see whether, since relations with the British were improving, the idea of the plaque might not now become a reality.

  My trip turned out to be one of the fruitless errands common in Greek travel. The people you want to find have gone to visit their families in another village; they are seeing to property on the other side of the mountains; they are occupied with the marriage of a daughter – anyhow like Elias’s cousin at Anoyia they are away, and why shouldn’t they be? In this case not only the Abbot of Arkadhi was away. His second in command was away, all the dignitaries were away attending some distant ecclesiastical ceremony; only the monks were there, and I could hardly ask to see them. A boy of about eighteen came out into the deserted courtyard; he was helping while he waited to get a job, he would show me round. I looked at the church with its fine facade; at the historical relics – arms used by the monks in the famous defence; at a building like a dovecot with steps up and a circular pit in the middle – crouching, I peered down to see, piled up, what I was told were the bones of the heroic suicides.

  In a shady court there was a plaque. The flame of liberty, said the inscription, the sacrifices for freedom – but they were sacrifices a century ago; no plaque for the fighters of 1941–45. Dejected, for I began to wonder if the damage to Anglo-Greek relations was worse than I had imagined, I took back the letter of introduction which Micky had written for me and got into the car which had brought me up from Rethymnon.

  The failure of my errand left me with time enough, if I spent the night in Rethymnon, to go to the Amari villages. I found a hotel. Potted palms in the entrance, nobody in the office; at last a girl showed me to a modest room. In Greek we chatted, in Greek we conducted the negotiations, in Greek I filled in the usual visitors’ form. She looked at it.

  ‘Do you speak Greek?’ she asked.

  It is a question which has been put to me often enough after a long talk in what I know is elementary but I flatter myself is comprehensible Greek. But I still find it disconcerting.

  My driver, I was glad to note, did not ask it when after a lunch of over-oiled fish I said I wanted to go to Yerakari. The road had been improved since my bus ride to the village, and we bowled along briskly until we were held up by a lorry. It had been used for work on the surface, it had broken down and now
was stuck out at right angles. Beyond it a car full of German tourists waited; a pile of stones prevented anything from passing in either direction. My driver put his car into low gear and tried pushing. The lorry, heavily loaded, was immovable. Nothing could be done until another lorry was fetched. Fuming, we all waited. I offered a cigarette to a man working on the road. Where was I going? To Yerakari, I said; last year I was at Nithavris, I walked over Mount Ida with somebody called Elias Voskakis.

  ‘But I know him! I am Voskakis too, George Voskakis, we are related.’ Again Tom Dunbabin’s name was my passport. Tom? Of course he knew Tom. Why, he himself had worked with the British in the war, he had helped with a wireless set hidden in the hills above the Amari valley. And he told me the story of Tom in the disguise of a Cretan shepherd walking unrecognised past a German archaeologist who had once been a colleague. Philadem? Certainly, George Voskakis said, he knew Philadem. Then he mentioned another name, Monty; yes, he said, Monty Woodhouse. And I thought of Tom’s laconic account of a first solitary landing in Crete: ‘A few hasty words with Monty, who left in the ship which brought me, and I was left in my new kingdom.’

  By the time the road was cleared I felt more hopeful about Anglo-Greek relations. And in Yerakari all my doubts vanished.

  The village was sleepy in the afternoon sun. But under the presidency of George Akoumianakis some kind of prosperity was returning – the new church almost finished, a new road built to Ano Meros. I asked first for Tom’s schoolmaster friend Kokonas, and a little girl was found to lead me to his house. Smiling, his wife received me. ‘You look much better than last time,’ she said, and remembering how ill I had felt then I could well believe it. Her husband was sent for. A year earlier he had been polite; now I was startled by the warmth of his welcome. When I reached the Akoumianakis household I was overwhelmed. On my first visit they had been formally kind. This time I might have been a long-lost, close member of the family. No doubt the cooling of tempers in Cyprus helped. But behind the change there was something else – the historic attitude to the stranger. It is always hospitable. But it is especially responsive to the extended hand.