Nikephoros is a maker of lyras, like his father and grandfather before him, seeking out asfendos trees on the slopes of Psiloritis to make the boat-shaped bellies of the instruments. He shows us a couple of his lyras, each with a bull of Minos poker-worked into the back. The instruments shine with a dull lustre that enhances every knot and whorl of the asfendos wood. It’s produced by applying enopnevma me to propoli, a mixture of raki-like spirit and the sealant that bees use to construct their waxy combs. So says Nikephoros, pouring a dark red drop onto the lyra from a tiny bottle. It is just one of dozens of cures, potions and healing plants that he brings out for our instruction over the next couple of hours, as Patricia questions and takes notes. The healer is a bit of a showman, too, delighting his audience by striking sparks from a piece of granite with a flint and setting fire to a chunk of mikita, tinder fungus.
Aretousa, a humorous woman with eyes as bright as her husband’s, brings a basket of herb-baked paximadia and dishes of soft misithra cheese, beans and olives. The wine and raki bottles are uncorked. Nikephoros drinks his raki from a tiny screw-top jar. Soon the lyra is tuned and played, and the table in the long, narrow front room becomes littered with flower stems, crushed leaves, bunches of herbs, olive stones, shot glasses, lyra bows and bits of scribbled-on paper. The air smells of warm bread, strong spirits, beeswax, herbs and burnt mikita, a savour that we carry round with us for the rest of the day.
Late that evening Lambros takes off for Rethymnon, leaving the imprint of his stubbly cheeks on mine. I feel quite bereft for a few minutes. Then the Kalogeros lyra-player Kosti turns up at the taverna. Free from all constraints, he lets himself rip. Mantinades pour out of his mouth. Long extracts from Kornaros’s epic 17th-century heroic poem Erotokritos are accompanied by the wildest of clashing, scurrying, screeching lyra. Kosti’s head pushes forward, his mouth extended into an abstracted ‘O’, eyes alternately shut, rolled ecstatically ceiling-wards, or fixed unnervingly on and at the same time beyond each of his listeners in turn. It’s a breathtaking display of unbridled musical ferocity. Kosti plays until the dawn is almost on us, and only goes away when the wine runs out.
Next morning I say goodbye to Patricia and Doug, and eat my final breakfast in Lotus Land – another palikare-style one of dictamos tea and special spicy paximadia – under Maria’s tearful gaze. I give her a big hug and kiss. ‘Farewell, Lady Maria. I am so grateful for all your kindnesses.’ ‘No, no, Lord Christopher, the pleasure has been entirely ours. May you go to the good! May God travel with you!’
I take a quick look at the map, trying to make a rough calculation of distances. I reckon I have covered some 170 miles, give or take. Maybe 130 to go? 150? In my current state of mind and body, after a fortnight of lazy hedonism, I really couldn’t give a monkey’s. I shoulder the pack (how awkward and heavy that feels after two weeks’ respite!), give the figwood katsouna a preparatory twirl, and walk out of Thronos. At the top of the rise under Katsonissi I take a last look back at the little huddle of white houses at the head of the valley. A couple of strides and it all passes out of view.
To Sfakia: A Rock and a Hard Place
(Thronos to Chora Sfakion)
‘He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.’
Psalm 91
The pack was beginning to oppress me in a serious way. Somehow the weight seemed wrong. I stopped by a bulbous old olive tree on the outskirts of Gerakari and took it off to investigate. My big plastic water bottle had mysteriously gained a twin. I unscrewed the top of the newcomer and sniffed. Ah! Kostas Raki’s finest and best – two litres thereof. Maria Papoutsakis must have quietly slipped it in among my possessions this morning, a not-so-little memento of Thronos. I re-shouldered the pack and went on. Weight, shmeight.
Along the mountain road beyond Gerakari I stopped at a little kafenion for a glass of lemonade. The owner, a big slow-moving woman, was shelling broad beans into a bowl at a table outside. Are you from Germany? Where are you going? Where have you come from? The heavy local accent and clipped-off phrases struck oddly on my ear after my fortnight among friends and English-speakers. I was going to have to get used once more to being the stranger, the odd man out.
‘You look very hot and sweaty,’ remarked the woman with concern. I was feeling hot and sweaty, yes. The bloody pack, raki and all, was bowing me down. The old sins of commission – too much of Lambros’s wine last night; too much of everything nice but naughty, in fact, during the interval in Thronos. Well, I was heading away from all that now. I kicked a rush-bottomed chair to the table, sat down and helped my hostess finish her bean shelling. My reward: a good double handful of the long green pods, for later consumption with a lick of salt and a snifter of Château Kostas.
The mountain road led upwards for mile upon mile. In spring a walker tastes the Cretan countryside – the abundant birdsong, the scent and colours of the wild flowers, the tingle of clear spring water on the palate, the rippling grasses – with a pleasure that has vanished from the over-farmed and polluted land of Britain. In the rocky uplands between the hills of Mavro Soros and Mouri I caught and hugged to myself the kind of ecstasy which inspired all those generations of folk songs that began: ‘As I roved out one May morning, to view the valleys and the sweet flowers of spring …’
At the western edge of the plateau the road dipped in a series of loops and contortions into the lower country around the big regional town of Spili. Paved alleyways and mazy lanes took me down under the huge cliff that rises at the back of the town, depositing me at last in the main square by a gorgeous Venetian fountain – nineteen lion heads all in a row, their snarling mouths gushing water from the hills. The Green Hotel proved to have a room, and a balcony for drying my clothes. The taverna I chose for my evening meal had a problem with its wood-burning grill, but Mr Stratidakis the owner, nothing daunted, fetched his wife’s hair dryer and soon had the fire blown to a roaring heat.
A French couple paused by my table. A very, very fit-looking couple. The man eyed my plate of chops and spuds, my jug of village wine. Are you walking? Really? This is not good food for a walker! It is necessary to train properly. He patted his washboard stomach, lightly, with satisfaction. I was 60, three years ago, and to celebrate the fact I walked all the way from Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostella. 1,500 kilometres – 50 days! All on foot! All alone! Thus one should celebrate an anniversary, and not, if you will permit the observation … Well, at all events, goodnight to you! ‘And bonne nuit to you, salaud,’ I allowed myself to mutter through a mouthful of hair-dried and delicious chips. Back at the Green Hotel I discovered that the French couple were my next-room neighbours, and enthusiastic snorers to boot. Well, bollocks. Just a nip of Château Kostas, why not …?
I woke to find sunlight on my face. Eleven o’clock in the morning. I was lying on the bed fully clothed. Realisations: (a) Lotus-eating is as tiring as walking. (b) Raki is a tricky friend, and a subtle enemy. I left the rest of the bottle in the room, and hoped the next guest would investigate and appreciate the master craftsmanship of Kostas Raki.
By the fountain I met an old man with a rubber-tipped and knotty stick. ‘Orea katsouna,’ I ventured. With snippets of Greek, and a lot of pantomime, we compared stick notes. So yours is from Kritsa, eh? Well, well! May I have a look? Yes, this is really fine. Who gave it you? Aphordakos? Can’t say I’ve heard the name – unless it’s the same family as that young runner in the mountains. It is? Well, isn’t that good? Mine is only a European stick, I’m sorry to say. Hardly a stick at all, in the real sense of the word. But this one of yours – now this is a proper Cretan katsouna! I wish I had one. Wouldn’t care to swap, I suppose? No – well, I’ll just have to get someone to go to Kritsa and fetch me one, won’t I? Here it is, sir. Look after it! Goodbye, now!
The youth of Spili’s secondary school, outside the gates on their lunch break, were not so courteous. In fact they ran me o
ut of town with some shouts and a shower of small playground pebbles. News from Kosovo? Or just smalltownitis?
E4 came sidling up outside Spili, tugging at my elbow like an ingratiating lover. Oh please, forgive me for my lies and my deceptions. I promise I’ll be good, really I will. Let’s just go down this nice flowery lane, why don’t we, and see if we can’t start over. We kept company together, gingerly, for a few miles, not exactly in close communication but not entirely estranged, through Agia Pelagia and Koxare, Angouseliana and Paleoloutra. Here I discovered with a thrill that I had just walked into the final side of the map. Now, where to stay tonight … E4 seemed to offer nothing for the next seven or eight miles. How about Kanevos, an hour’s walk to the west? As if miffed that my attention had strayed, even for a second, E4 upped and offed, disappearing into the ether without a backwards glance. Decision made, then.
Rent Rooms Iliomanolis stood at the head of a most beautiful gorge, Kotsifou. I took a stroll down there from Kanevos in the late afternoon under towering and spectacular rock walls. Their opposing curves, if the canyon should happen to have snapped shut, would have fitted as neatly together as a pair of spoons. A clonking of goat bells drew my binoculars to a cave hundreds of feet above, where a couple of goats were nonchalantly browsing. Swifts on passage north from Africa darted about on their evening feeding flight. Above in the blue sky a gryphon vulture wheeled, no doubt waiting (bleached bones on the gorge floor suggested) for one of the goats in the cave to try for a juicy tuft of greenery just that bit too far out of reach. And a dove with pink-grey plumage and a barred tail sat shrilling out a trembling, silvery call on a prinos branch near the top of the cliffs. There were many prinos around the gorge, hunched into clefts, crouching on the skyline, clinging to cracks with contorted roots. I realised how much I had come to admire these mountain trees with their eternal strength, their subtle adaptation to circumstances and their capacity to put up with and even thrive in the harshest of conditions. If ever there was a tree to symbolise the Cretans, it would have to be the prinos.
In the early evening a young boy with a katsouna big and curly enough to put mine to shame drove a great herd of goats down from the pastures at the rim of the Kotsifou Gorge to be milked, their neck bells making a beautiful melodious ringing – the music of the Cretan highlands. My host Manolis and his wife sat at their kitchen table, stripping the spiked leaves from a vast mound of artichokes. It took them a good couple of hours. I offered my help, but only succeeded in jabbing my fingers so badly that I got blood all over the artichokes and my one clean shirt.
Prinos
Prinos, prickly oak, I have admired you
guardsman tall on a skyline, challenging
all weathers; have seen you hold goats high
in sinewy hands; have met you crouched in gullies,
dwarfed by wind, your fingers dug into
cracks, a grim survivor; and have passed
your whitened corpse, toppled to a grave
among dry boulders in a gorge bed.
Tamarisk shades the beach; asfendos sings,
lyra-shaped; men sit under
plane trees, nibbling olives. Iron-hard
prinos, you make an everlasting crook
for goatherds; indomitable, you take your stand
on mountains, shoulder hardship, and endure.
Next day I made north-west at a good lick across the narrow western waist of Crete, leaving the Libyan Sea and the south coast behind me as I set off, and topping a rise within a mile or so to see the Cretan Sea ahead in the Gulf of Amirou on the north coast of the island. Over the grey wall of the Lefka Ori foothills to the west peered the conical crests of the highest White Mountains, still blanketed with snow. They seemed to have marched very close all of a sudden. Whether I was going to be able to make a direct crossing through the High Desert heartland of the White Mountains, or whether I would be obliged to take the south coast route with its great gorges, was not really up to me. In the end it would be the Clerk of the Weather who would give the high-level route the thumbs up or down. Having seen the sink holes on Psiloritis, I knew the heights of Lefka Ori would be impassable under any kind of snow blanket. I needed sun, lots of hot summery sunshine in the next few days, to melt that late-lying snow. It was just a question of wait and see.
In the month since I set off from Kato Zakros the thistles, poppies and mulleins had all flowered. The roadsides were a madman’s palette of splashed and spattered colours. Down in the tree-hung village of Moundros I got directions from a kafenion owner. See that old kalderimi? Down there, past that black and yellow sign, says epsilon tessera on it – that’ll tell you you’re on the right track. Then you just kind of follow the valley to the north, due north, all the way to Argyroupolis – OK?
Hello again, E4. Side by side my inconstant lover and I descended the cobbled pathway and made our way through olive groves and stands of cypress into a gorge. Marked on the map? No. The track rose to run through the ruins of a deserted village high on the hillside, then passed a nice bold yellow and black waymark on a boulder and continued its climb as a well-engineered, carefully walled kalderimi. An hour later and 500 feet higher, I pulled out the compass. I was heading due south. Too disillusioned even to curse, I retraced my steps back into the ruined village.
Just beyond, the track split into two identical paths. One up, one down, neither going north. The map, for what it was worth, showed the path dipping shortly to cross a river. I ventured fifteen minutes along the down track. No signs, no river. Back to the fork. Up the left track for fifteen minutes. No signs, no river, and no northward trend. Not a sound among the trees. I stopped, and could feel my heart beating heavy with rage. Back to Moundros and face a three-hour slog along the tarmac, with Argyroupolis, the City of Silver, a mile away at most? A month ago, confronting the same kind of obstacle at Vori, I’d lacked the confidence to grit my teeth and go for it. Now, with 200 miles and plenty of bumps and bruises, inside and out, under my belt, I was absolutely damned if I was going to go all the way back to Moundros with my tail between my legs. I carried on down the up track, and smacked the first E4 sign I came to so hard I thought I’d cracked my katsouna. It was just as well I hadn’t, because round the corner, just where the track swung decisively north and sloped towards a water splash, an oil-barrel dog kennel blocked the way.
Those dogs
Those dogs that writhe black lips back
from traps of teeth, that burst their chains,
that prowl the tracks thirsty for blood
the colour of mine, that leap fences,
scale walls, gallop the hills
with lolling tongues dripping; dogs
that snarl and hackle, tear and rip;
dogs adrift, abroad, aflame
with killing lust: I know those dogs,
have nurtured them, have laid them on
my trail myself. Every hour,
on every path, I will outface them.
I had given myself many a talking-to about my Cretan dog phobia. Generally speaking, I love dogs, and they get along pretty well with me. That was the funny thing. No matter how much I tried to reason with myself, no matter how many times I told myself that no packs of rabid hounds roamed the Cretan mountains, somewhere in my psychological backpack the worry drumbeat on. By this stage of the walk I’d got a fairly clear idea that it had nothing to do with reason; that the dogs were just four-legged, fang-baring middle-aged anxieties, running loose in my head but nowhere else. I wrote a poem to expel them and to chide my inner coward, and tried to think of something else.
Cretan dogs – the real ones – have a bloody time of it. I’d grown used to seeing them roped short to iron stakes in the full sun, or chained like this one into a makeshift kennel, usually an old metal barrel guaranteed to become an oven in summer, a fridge in winter. Sympathy for their plight as a race, however, wasn’t going to get me past this particular cur. I took a firm grip of the katsouna and sidled up level with the barrel. Diogenes look
ed to be fast asleep. He also looked to be a cross between an Alsatian and a timber wolf – the dog, in fact, of my pre-adventure nightmares. I took a step forward. Like a flash he was out and at the end of his rattling chain, snarling like a lion and doing that terrifying dog thing that involves twisting blue-black lips back into a wrinkled muzzle, exposing shocking pink gums studded with far too many yellow teeth. Those teeth snapped together, so close to my leg that they made an incision in the knee of my trousers as neat as any surgeon could have managed. I said a bad word, lashed out with the katsouna and jumped back ten feet – or that’s what it felt like. Diogenes stayed hackling in the middle of the path for a minute or so. Then he slunk back into his oven and collapsed again with nose on paws, still grumbling, keeping both ears pricked and both eyes fixed on me.
I pulled up my torn trouser leg, but the yellow teeth had missed me by – quite literally – a whisker. I waited till the shock waves subsided, then inched forward once more. The head came up, the lips flickered, and the growling changed gear like a motorbike meeting the open road. I stepped back. Christ! What now? Then I remembered the slices of paximadia, dried rusk bread, in my pack, left over from today’s picnic lunch. Cretan guard dogs don’t exactly live off the fat of the land. I got a rusk out and threw it to Diogenes. It didn’t bounce twice. Problem solved. I won’t say he licked my hand as I passed, but there was no more of that lip business, and the drooping tail gave the ghost of a wag.
Argyroupolis, the City of Silver, is one of the most charming spots in Crete, a handsome little town among the mountains, perched on a hilltop above a valley shaded by big sweet chestnut and plane trees where springs of water come gushing and tumbling by the dozen out of ferny clefts in the rocks. The water is the liquid treasure of the City of Silver – it supplies the whole of the town of Rethymnon, and has spawned a clutch of tavernas around the sources, which have used the waterfalls for scenic effect with spillways, sluices and cascades. A steep zigzag path, lit by muted lamps by night, connects the upper town with its springs, and the whole effect is of one of those ‘Little Switzerland’ resorts at the height of some Victorian heyday. Yet you need only a glance around the town to see relics of a far more glorious Venetian past. Along the narrow streets one spots handsome doorways with beautifully carved capitals, fluted columns and elaborately bevelled pediments, some opening onto ancient vaulted interiors, others into wastelands of weeds. One carried the fading inscription ‘Omnia Mundi Fumus Et V…’ (‘…mbra’ was missing) – ‘All this world is but smoke and mirrors’.
The Golden Step Page 16