Sitting in the square at Anopolis on that hot spring morning in 1999, I found it hard to tear my eyes away from the simple majesty of the White Mountain peaks. Eventually I got up and followed the road out of the village through the olive groves where a young shepherd, busby-bearded and saturnine, stood chin on crook contemplating his flock in a timeless pose. He looked every inch the same stock as the fierce andartes one sees in old Second World War snapshots, or those etchings of such leaders as Daskalogiannis that hang half obscured by dusty glass behind kafenion counters.
The road led west to Aradena, an abandoned village on the lip of the gorge I was aiming to follow back down to the sea. A splendidly maintained kalderimi brought me down to the gorge floor in a series of sharp hairpins, and once down there between rock walls hundreds of feet high there was only one choice of path. Goat corpses and fallen prinos trees littered the bed of the chasm, and almost at once an appalling crash of noise rumbled overhead as if Poseidon the Shaker had decided to pull the whole thing down and start again. I ducked, instinctively, and waited for the boulders to come tumbling. But it was only the sound of a car passing over the wooden slatted decking of the bridge that spanned the gorge.
From here on it was pretty much plain sailing, until the sides of the gorge closed together and became impassably choked with a huge boulder fall. There seemed no way through. But red splodges of paint indicated a pathway down across the boulders, a slip-and-slide progress that ended at the rim of a hundred-foot drop. I peered over. A flimsy iron ladder forty feet high ran down the face of the fall, and another halfway down continued to the bottom. Not exactly a Health and Safety exemplar, but it was all there was. Do it now, or go back the way you came. Hanging the katsouna on the ladder a few rungs down, and gripping the plastic bag containing water bottle and map in my teeth, I lowered myself over the edge and proceeded downwards, face to the ladder. Memo to self: bring a bloody backpack next time you do a day walk, you fool. I managed the first ladder all right, but halfway down the second one my hands, greasy with sweat and suncream, slipped off their respective rungs. Both feet slipped, too. A nasty moment. I found myself, ludicrously and improbably, reaching with outstretched lips for the rung in front of my face as it shot upwards and I fell downwards. Plastic bag, map and water bottle tumbled from between my teeth to the ground below.
Two Cretes
Man in a yellow teeshirt, right of shot,
lounging on two chairs under the gridded
shade of the café awning; to the left,
murmurous with beer on this hot
afternoon, two lovers touching knees;
backdrop of mountains, hard and dry as rusks;
centre-frame the blue, the depthlessly blue,
the greener than blue Libyan Sea. I framed
this dreamy photograph, calling it ‘Crete’.
Then thought of dusty roads, of sweating men
stringing their vines, cheeses in a cave
high in the hills, madness at those feasts
of wine and lyra, a shot in the night, sad skin
of a flayed lamb, raki in a priest’s
glass, snores of a stranger, hands of a healer,
fear on a lonely track … and did not take it
Have you seen a three-toed sloth clinging to a cecropia tree? That was the embrace I bestowed on the ladder when I reconnected miraculously with it a few feet further down. The impact gave my arm sockets a wrench, but other than that all was well. Once I’d got to the bottom it took a few minutes to stop trembling. After a drink of water and a quick damage inspection I felt fine, and negotiated several more boulder sides (none as scary) lower down the gorge with a fair pretence at nonchalance.
Down at the beach I found a taverna and sat quaking. Still a bit shook up, are we? Yes. All right – before the coast walk back to Loutro, I prescribe a cold beer, a kebab and a bit of a sit. Thank you, doctor. Just tell me straight – will I ever play the fool again?
Off from Loutro at first light next morning, on the last leg of the journey. I found it strangely hard to get going again. The route of the coast path held no difficulties, but the path itself proved something else again, by far the worst surface I had encountered in Crete, a horrible rubbly mass of awkwardly shaped stones that skidded and stood on end underfoot. When I got to Agia Roumeli I sat down on a beach rock and had a good look at my boots. The scale of mutilation was astonishing. The rubberised seal round the toes had entirely worn away, making them leak like Liza’s bucket. The stout leather uppers had been cut, scored and cracked into crazy paving by 250 miles of Cretan limestone. As for the soles, the constant jarring, abrading and digging in of hard dry stones had smoothed their hi-tech corrugations all but flat. They’d serve me as far as the end of the road, with luck, but after that they’d be fit only for the knacker’s yard.
To Agia Roumeli my father had come in Hero on the night of 22 May 1941 to assist fellow destroyer Decoy in retrieving George II, King of the Hellenes, and his small entourage, after their desperate and difficult journey by mule over the still snowy upper regions of the White Mountains. The capture of the King would have been a splendid coup for the Germans if they could have caught up with him, but in the event the royal party arrived safely on the beach and was taken out by small boat to Decoy and a night passage to Alexandria. Dad didn’t get to embark the King of the Hellenes in his own ship, but he never forgot the drama of the approach in the darkened Hero to the mountainous coast looming in the night, the tension of waiting offshore, and the relief as the two destroyers turned and made steam for the Egyptian coast with their precious cargo. The Psalmist’s daily commentary, as I read it on the ferry slipway at Agia Roumeli almost sixty years later, had never seemed more apt: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.’
In Agia Roumeli I couldn’t find a room for love nor money. This small, roadless village at the foot of the Samaria Gorge is entirely concerned with catering by day for the tens of thousands of walkers who pour out of the gorge each afternoon from April, when the flood waters have subsided far enough to make things safe in the canyon, until October when the Samaria Gorge National Park authorities generally take the decision to close the gorge to walkers until the following spring. By nightfall almost everyone has caught the ferry to Chora Sfakion and their bus back to Chania, so that there’s little incentive to provide accommodation. This proved a blessing in disguise, since I was obliged to catch the ferry to the next place down the coast, Sougia, and from the deck was able to get a really close and lingering look at what I’d ducked by choosing the gorge route over the coast ‘path’. The coast of Selinos did look absolutely daunting, wildly rugged, slashed with two cruel gorges and many smaller ravines, rock stacks and pinnacles, and countless mountains great and small that hid modestly away until the ferry, turning some lonely cape or promontory, opened up a view to reveal them in all their pale grey and green splendour. Where E4 lay among these savage scenes I could not guess, and neither, I felt sure, could anyone venturing in this coastal wilderness.
A quiet night in Sougia and a ferry first thing in the morning back to Agia Roumeli, plying the same route in reverse, gawping anew at gorges and mountains lit by the eastern sun to reveal beauties and terrors that had been concealed by dusk and the westering sun the previous evening. I set off at mid-morning up the flood valley of the Samaria Gorge. It was an eerie sensation to have the most celebrated, the most crowded gorge in Europe all to myself. Things were so quiet that when the ticket man’s dog took exception to me at the lower kiosk and demanded a pound of flesh with menaces, it was almost a relief to employ my pet phrase at pigeon-wakening volume: ‘Pare ta skiliaaaaa!’
I came to the tremendous cleft of the Sideroportes, the Iron Gates, and stretched out my arms to their fullest extent as I walked through. You just can’t help yourself, even though you can see clearly that you’re not quite going to be able to touch both walls at once. Beyond lay the luck stone, covered
as usual with tiny pebbles. I added one and walked around the boulder three times in prescribed fashion, making my wish as I did so. Around here, halfway to the abandoned gorge-bottom village of Samaria, I met the first of the walkers coming down. From now on it was hello and how are you, guten tag mein herr and bonjour madame, ciao bella and kalimera, excuse me sir and would you mind awfully, thank you very much, no, after you, every few seconds till I was nearly at screaming point. What can you do? Duck your face and play the miserable bastard? Then I hit on the solution: don’t climb on like a prat with a thistle up his whistle. Lie down under that fig tree by this little run of water, put your hat over your face and catch forty winks. Eighty if you like. What on earth is your big rush?
When I woke towards mid-afternoon, the Samaria Gorge had reverted to eerie silence. Climbing it became a pleasure again, at least until I reached the foot of the xiloskala. The name means ‘wooden stairway’ but the old steps of wood have long been replaced by a good if very steep zigzag path. For downward walkers the xiloskala means a sharp and slippery 2,000-ft descent on skiddy stones into the upper regions of the gorge. For those coming up with a 40 lb pack on their back and flat boot soles, it’s simply one sod of a climb. Near the top I heard the bubble and splash of the Neroutsiko fountain, sank my hot face into its blessedly cold waters and drank as if I’d never stop.
Neroutsiko water
Slogging hangdoggedly up the gorge where
I had struggled since the climb steepened
on rubbly stones, sick with the sweat and effort,
I found you, Neroutsiko water,
gushing in a grooved stone basin
like something offered. I pushed my whole head
into your jet, made a channel of
my lower lip: drank and drank.
Traveller of deep pathways,
I looked up at last from your cold
complexity of taste – earth, rock,
ice, and something faint and sweeter –
and saw your parent snow, high in a shadebound
gully, ungenerous until the sun
called for you. Neroutsiko water,
you have wounded me, a Pyrrhic
dart. In all the cafés of the world,
by all the springs I’ll mope, ceaselessly
drinking, endlessly unsatisfied:
never again to taste perfection.
After the 3,000-ft ascent from the sea with its nasty steep sting in the tail, the three miles of flat walking across the high plain into the village of Omalos seemed a doddle. Found room. Ate goat stew. Put head on pillow. Slept like tree.
In the morning the wind had veered round into the west and a cold grey morning lay spread over the White Mountains. It took me an hour to figure out a passage across the plain of Omalos, another of those flat saucers of upland grazing ringed by mountains and dotted with sheep and goat folds and little settlements of brightly painted beehives. Shortly after leaving my lodgings I met a most magnificent billy goat. His deep-toned neck bell sent out a hollow clanging as he flounced away, feathery shins all a-flutter like the chaps of a gay cowboy.
E4 signs directed me down a side track, a well-found kalderimi that brought me onto a hillside where all trace of the path had been wiped away by a giant and very recent landslide. Pebbles were still dislodging themselves and rolling down the fresh scree. The slip must just have taken place. What now? It didn’t look stable enough for a mouse to venture across, let alone a laden walker. I took off the pack and sat myself down in Micawberish style. And sure enough, after ten minutes or so a couple turned up on the far side of the landslip. We gesticulated our intentions. I think you were first, Sir! No, you first! No, really, we can wait! No, I’m actually waiting for … for a friend, so do please have the first crossing! Gingerly they came inching across. Neither rolled screaming to destruction. I waited till they were well past me and out of sight before scampering across myself.
Somewhere hereabouts I passed from the province of Sfakia into that of neighbouring Selinos, a region less famed for bloody deeds and heroic resistance than Sfakia, but one capable of producing a clan as altogether redoubtable as the Paterakis family of Koustogerako, a mile or so away across the mountains. Whatever the region, the terrain remained hard to read and hard to negotiate. Waymarks led on to what I assumed was the upper entrance of the Agia Irini gorge. That was confirmed as the gradient steepened and fell away over rock slides and under fallen trees towards the unmistakable high walls of a Cretan gorge. At some point in the long downward scramble, I realised later, I must have passed the Chyrotrypa cave, scene of one of those tremendous tales of heroism by the palikares of the past, when brave local boys Pentaris and Marangakis held off a punitive raid by the Turks in 1822 for long enough to allow the women and children to escape. One of the heroes was killed after a lucky Turkish shot had damaged his gun; the other was smothered to death in the cave when the attackers, unable to winkle him out, lit a smoky fire at the cave entrance and choked him where he lay.
Pine trees provided all the foreground smell today. Other keynotes were visual – shocking pink bushes of oleander, papery leaves of maple and fig against the blue sky, sulphur-coloured butterflies in the clearings. Faded icons and many small coins lay on the church-shaped rock of Agios Giannis, a rallying place for local people living under punitive regimes since time out of mind. Widely spaced rest areas were provided with water taps; I tried one, and received a mouthful of metallic liquid hotter than any shower I had yet enjoyed on this adventure. The black rubber hose that supplied the tap had been lying baking in the sun, who knows how long for? The path leaped up and back down again, now high in the gorge wall, now down among the oleanders in the bed of the canyon. At one point I passed a tumble of car-sized boulders fallen from the walls, and marvelled at the thought of the flood that must have swept them all together at this point. The scale, the weight and the seemingly precarious balance of these huge masses of rock combined to make me feel extremely small.
At the foot of the Agia Irini gorge a road scooped me up and carried me unresisting all the way down to the tiny seaside resort of Sougia, a cluster of houses and rent rooms on a big beach of floury grey sand. I found a bed at Number One, Paradise. At evening, a bottle of cold Mythos beer in my hand, I stood out on the beach and turned my face to the White Mountains, now bulking against the eastern sky. Their ranges and slopes stood bathed in beautiful magenta light, cut abruptly with indigo slashes of gorges and the high black blobs of cave mouths. Up until today I had been among mountains the whole adventure long, for the best part of two months and almost 300 miles. From now on it would be a coastal setting till the end of the walk. As when I had faced the White Mountains from the peak of Psiloritis, I found my hat was in my hand in a bareheaded salute. These great ranges of Crete seemed somehow to demand it.
‘Oh man,’ slurred the boy on the beach below my taverna table early next morning, ‘this is just too much, man.’ Great shades of Leary! Was this the 1960s all over again? It could seem so, down in laid-back, go-with-the-flow Sougia. The boy and his friend sat on the sand in their dew-pearled sleeping robes, loose bags of cloth enclosing their dreadlocks. The one with the big Taliban-style beard sat cross-legged and straight-backed, meditating perhaps, or maybe just lost in the pinks and greens of sunrise. His chum continued to mutter, ‘Too much – oh man, too much,’ as he prepared their breakfast, the fattest and longest ‘Camberwell carrot’ I have ever clapped eyes on. If he had entered it for the Preposterous Spliff medal at the Hippy Olympics, gold would have been guaranteed. Long after I had finished my eggs and coffee and started to chat to Roger and Randi, its stink of smouldering pinecones continued to pollute the crisp morning air.
Roger was an interesting man. Dressed in loose silk shirt and fluttering eastern slave pants, barefooted, broad and fair-haired, he looked every inch the louche Irishman of a certain age, abroad upon his adventurous occasions. ‘A couple of times a year my lady in Dublin says to me, go on, get out of my hair, I can se
e what’s going on. Bring me something nice back from Crete, but I really don’t want to know about anything else you get up to, OK? And I say, Well, all right, if that’s what you really want …’
As soon as he arrived in Sougia, Roger had hooked up with Randi, a Belgian woman perhaps 20 years younger than him, with a nice square face and gummy smile under a pert urchin cut. They’d shared a week of uncomplicated, uncommitted sex, and would part with no regrets when he moved on elsewhere tomorrow. The success of this sort of very casual liaison seemed to depend on keeping things light, amusing and flirtatious – little glances and secret smiles. No declarations, no follow-through – God forbid. Randi would take on someone new as soon as Roger’s bangled wrist had ceased to wave goodbye from the departing ferry. So would Roger, as soon as he had landed at the next little beach resort along the coast. That was quite clear, and obviously part of the contract.
Looking around the beach and seafront of Sougia I could see twenty couples in various stages of entwinement. Were they all parties to such agreeable conspiracies? Out along the beach a colony of nudists was settling like pink seals among towels for a day’s sun-worshipping. ‘We call that the Bay of Pigs,’ Roger murmured, following my glance. ‘All those pink bodies lying out snoring all day, shagging in the caves – you know.’
I felt like writing to The Times. What the hell was going on? How dare he, and she, and they, and those boys with their reeking Camberwell carrot? How could they do this to beautiful Crete? It took a little walk and a little me-to-me talk to get back my sense of perspective. You’ve been too long away from the coast, too long in the mountains with your head in the clouds, that’s all. Too long among Cretans. This isn’t Katharo or Thronos or Kallikratis, you fool. Don’t be a prig. Of course this is how people go on when they’re on holiday by the sea. Just be thankful it’s all still small-scale, gentle and good-humoured. When they build a casino here and a motorway to bring the punters to it – that’ll be the time to get the ‘Yours, Disgusted’ letter-paper out. What are you – a middle-aged man, all of a sudden?
The Golden Step Page 20