Which makes you, Monty told Xan, the master of mayhem in the middle. Clans and villages across the island had turned themselves into small guerrilla forces, each under the leadership of its own chieftain. And every Cretan who wasn’t carrying a gun was still armed with eyes and ears: no German plane could leave the island without being spotted, and no German soldiers could board a troop ship without being counted. Xan would be the spider in the center of the web. He’d have to race back and forth across the island, bringing in weapons by parachute for Cretan bandits and radioing German plane coordinates for British fighter pilots.
Every day that Xan could stay alive, Monty told him, was another day that Field Marshal Rommel’s panzers might have to wait for fuel, Russian fighters could hold out in Leningrad, and entire German regiments would be lost in the Cretan mountains in pursuit of a few dozen invisible men. But for now, Xan would have to do it alone. Monty was heading back to the mainland, so Xan would basically be on his own until a new man could be recruited.
And his first challenge, Monty warned, could be his last. Xan’s only contact with the outside world would be his radio operator, who was in a hideout on Mount Ida. Between them lay some of the most treacherous terrain on the island: the Messara Valley, which led right to the Germans’ main airbase. To establish radio contact with Cairo, Xan would have to trek across a hundred some miles of mountain and slip through crisscrossing German patrols.
If he could do that, then it was on to even trickier territory: the White Mountains, a favorite lair for bandits, rebels, and John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury, the one-eyed archeologist who’d become one of the great enigmas of the war. No one on Crete was more hated by the Germans or more hunted. Stories had spread beyond the island of “Pendlebury’s Thugs,” a band of Allied evaders led by a tall, pale man with a patch over one eye and a silver dagger in the sash around his waist.
“The small force of British, New Zealand, and Australian troops who evaded capture in Crete and are conducting vigorous guerrilla warfare against the Germans,” Reuters news agency reported, “are commanded by a British officer well known to the islanders.” In broadcasts from Berlin, the German military fumed, “It is undoubtedly to be attributed to Pendlebury’s activities that large numbers of the population turned guerrilla.”
The Thugs were said to fight like desperadoes—sniping from the dark with deadly aim, taking no prisoners. If Pendlebury’s exploits were real, Churchill and those two old Shanghai hands, Fairbairn and Sykes, would be delighted; it meant at least one swashbuckling Brit had come up with a way to give Hitler a taste of total war. The Führer was reportedly so intent on seeing Pendlebury killed that he demanded the glass eye be plucked from Pendlebury’s skull and sent to him as a war prize. Greek prisoners were forced to search through piles of corpses, poking their fingers into eye sockets. But as of Xan’s arrival on Crete in December, Pendlebury’s whereabouts were still unknown.
Monty finished his briefing. Xan was desperately tired and needed a solid meal and a good rest before making his attempt on Mount Ida. On the other hand, there were those Australians….
“Since I felt no particular urge to remain in Akendria,” he judged, “I decided to set off at once.”
CHAPTER 15
The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth.
—ARISTOTLE
HORRIBLE IDEA.
“Had we known what was to come,” Xan complained, brushing by the fact that he’d been warned exactly what was to come, “we would never have started out immediately after two consecutive days with little rest or food.” Still, maybe Monty could have been more specific about the weather. Xan and Delaney hadn’t gotten far from Akendria when it started to rain, building to a downpour that continued all night. Finally, after hours of stumbling in the dark on wet stones and pulling his boots out of gluey mud, Xan gave up. If he was caught, so be it.
“Even the threat of capture and its inevitable outcome, the firing squad, were not sufficient to induce us to keep walking,” he’d recall. “I found myself longing for the sudden appearance of a German patrol to put an end to our increasingly unbearable muscular fatigue and sleeplessness.”
That did it for Costa, too. As Xan’s guide, he’d done his best to live up to xenía, the Cretan code of hospitality. Xenía speaks to the heart of Greek identity, because every Greek at some point has been a stranger; in ancient Greek, “stranger” and “guest” are even the same word. In a nation of seafarers and shepherds and traveling scholars, of earthquakes and warfare and overseas trade, relying on an occasional unexpected handout is necessary and inevitable. “All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by kindness so unfeigned,” one British traveler still marveled after many trips to Greece, “that it invests even the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.”
Xenía isn’t even a virtue, really; it’s a law enforced by thunder-god Zeus himself. Much the way Christianity adopted a pay-it-forward policy as its “Greatest Commandment” and reveres a homeless savior who got by on handouts, the Olympian myths are all about the immortals quality-controlling xenía by wandering about in human form and seeing how they’re treated when they show up in disguise. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two Greek pillars of Western literature, are xenía written in blood—a pair of epic thrillers that explore what happens when you (a) abuse hospitality by monkeying with your host’s wife and (b) depend on it during a twenty-year road trip to hell and back. A Cretan is measured by her xenía, and the three rules are very clear:
You offer food.
You offer a bath.
You ask no questions.
Not, at least, until the traveler has been refreshed. That way, he’ll at least get a bite and a breather in case you discover you can’t stand him. You can think of xenía as compassion, but only if you get rid of the notion that compassion is based on sweetness, or charity, or even trading favors. Compassion is a battle instinct, a jungle-law alert system that lets you know when someone, or something, is closing in on you for the kill. We like to pretty it up with a halo and call it angelic, but compassion really springs from our raw animal need to figure out what is going on around us and the smartest way to respond. It’s your social spiderweb, a protective netting of highly sensitive strands that connects you to your kinfolk and alerts you the instant one of them runs into the kind of trouble that can find its way back to you. Compassion requires you to be a wonderful listener, much like psychiatrists and FBI profilers and for essentially the same reason. The goal is to get inside someone else’s head, and in that regard Rule #3 of xenía was way ahead of both crime detection and psychoanalysis; peppering someone with questions, as any police interrogator will tell you, isn’t nearly as effective as letting him relax until the words flow on their own. And when they do—when you get access to someone else’s feelings—you can put aside your own and see the world through a new set of eyes. That kind of insight is crucial to what combat soldiers call “situational awareness”—a constant mental scan of your environment so you’re always up to the second on the best and worst way out of any situation. That’s really the unvarnished essence of xenía, and it’s the reason Darwin and Andrew Carnegie could never quite grasp what heroes are all about. They thought it was crazy to risk yourself for a stranger. But to someone truly tuned into situational awareness—into xenía—treating a stranger like a brother can be the only sane response.
—
Many years after the war, Americans rushed to their televisions to watch xenía in action when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the icy Potomac River on January 13, 1982. To horrified viewers, it seemed impossible that anyone could be alive inside the mangled steel carcass slowly vanishing into the water. But one by one, six survivors gasped to the surface and grabbed at the tail of the plane. Freezing rain and winds were so brutal, it took twenty minutes before a rescue chopper finally arrived. It dropped a life ring into the hands of one survivor and plucked him from the water. Then something peculiar happened.
The man gave away the ring again.
And again.
He even gave it away when he knew it was his last chance to live. He must have known, because when the chopper thundered back seconds later, he was gone. The man in the water had vanished beneath the ice. He was later identified as Arland “Chub” Williams Jr., a forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner who hated water and spent his life, until the day he lost it, playing it safe.
“Arland never called a lot of attention to himself,” says Peggy Fuesting, his high school sweetheart from Illinois, whom he’d begun dating again shortly before the crash. “He’d had that fear of water his whole life.” Arland was trusted by bankers and borrowers alike, his boss would say, because he was careful and discreet and never took risks. But there was another side of Arland, one that was formed nearly a quarter-century earlier when he was a cadet at one of the country’s most demanding military colleges: the Citadel. “They make a man out of you,” I was told by Benjamin Franklin Webster, Arland’s Citadel roommate. “The job of the upperclassmen is to remake you from a boy to a man in one year. They push you, physically and mentally. We lost thirty cadets before we even started classes.”
When Webster heard about the crash, he was perhaps the only person who wasn’t surprised that a risk-averse accountant would suddenly emerge as the Hero of Flight 90. The Citadel has one iron law: “Always take care of your people first,” Webster says. “That’s an unbreakable code. You go last. Your people go first.” Some of the survivors said Arland seemed to be trapped by the wreckage and unable to free himself. But instead of clinging desperately to the life ring or clawing out for help, he assessed the situation and realized there was only one best decision. To Arland, the survivors around him in the water weren’t competitors in a battle for survival. They were family.
Of course they were, agrees Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D., a professor of biology at the University of Louisville who specializes in altruistic behavior. After all, xenía is the military’s specialty. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors moved in such tight family circles that the only people they’d ever see were members of their own hunter-gatherer clan. “If you saved someone’s life under those conditions, you were very likely saving a blood relative,” he says. But now our relatives are scattered all over the place, so the military has made a science out of reviving that lost feeling of fellowship.
“The armed forces always use the language of kinship to condition soldiers to think of one another as family,” Dugatkin points out. “They’re not ‘strangers’; they’re a ‘band of brothers.’ ” Consider what happens when a bus full of strangers of all races and backgrounds pulls into Fort Benning for boot camp. As soon as you arrive, your head is shaved, your clothes are replaced with a uniform, you’re taught to walk and talk and eat and make your bed exactly the same way as everyone around you. Because the more alike you look, the Army understands, the more likely you’ll look out for one another.
Lawrence of Arabia underwent the same transformation during his first trip abroad as a young archeologist. He arrived in Egypt as a fussy Brit and made one crucial decision that would change his life: instead of spending his nights in the English compound, he began camping at the dig site with the Arab workers. He shared their meals of sour goat’s milk and warm hearth bread. He traded his khakis for a tunic and a Kurdish belt and joined the singing and storytelling around the fire. Mostly he listened, absorbing “the intricacies of their tribal and family jealousies, rivalries and taboos, their loves and hates, and their strengths and weaknesses,” as one biographer would put it. When the Arab Revolt began, Lawrence’s xenía knew exactly where he had to be. He saw himself in them, and them in him.
—
So when Xan and Delaney began lagging, Costa remained true to the xenía code. For as long as he could. He slowed his pace and carried their supplies, and he even bit his tongue when Xan weirdly insisted on bolting out of Akendria the same day they got there. But take a bullet for them? Forget it. Xenía says you have to be hospitable; it doesn’t say you have to be an idiot. When the young Brit and the aging Aussie sergeant sank down and refused to get up, Costa tore into them.
“Delaney and I would have willingly succumbed but for Costa’s example and exhortation,” Xan would admit. The relentless Costa dragged his two charges to their feet and got them moving again. By dawn he’d harried them as far as the southern foothills of Mount Ida. There, at last, they could hole up in a little village and get some rest before pushing on that night.
Except…something didn’t feel right. Something about the valley was making Costa uneasy. It just seemed…wrong. He hunted up a local and discovered his suspicions were correct: Germans were ransacking the villages in search of a local guerrilla. Costa had to get Xan and Delaney out of sight before the sun came up, so he led them into the cliffs and found a snug spot between some brush-covered rocks. They burrowed in while Costa slipped off for provisions, soon returning with goatskins of wine, a pot of cold beans, and some friends in the Resistance. By the time he got back, Xan was already out cold. While the other men ate and whispered, Xan slept through the day on the cold, wet stone, too exhausted to eat.
Turning himself into John Pendlebury was turning out to be a lot tougher than Xan had expected. Of course, Pendlebury had an advantage: he’d been practicing the art of becoming John Pendlebury his entire life.
—
When Pendlebury was two years old, his parents left him one evening in the care of friends. When they returned, one of his eyeballs was punctured. Maybe the boy poked himself with a pen, maybe he was scratched by a thorn—no one saw it happen or could ever figure it out, not even his father, a surgical professor and house surgeon at St. George’s Hospital. Pendlebury didn’t seem to mind at all; he liked to dress up the glass replacement with a monocle, or pluck it out when going on a hike and leave it behind on his desk as a way of saying he’d be gone awhile.
His taste for masquerade followed him to Cambridge, where he became an excellent high jumper, despite poncing around between jumps in a white cloak. Although he was the university’s preeminent archeology student, Pendlebury liked to “play the buffoon,” according to a friend’s recollection. He’d scrawl endless doodles of knights in armor in his notebooks, and he founded a drinking club he called Ye Joyouse Companie of Seynt Pol, a sort of boozing fantasy league for make-believe Merry Men. He and Lawrence of Arabia loved the same favorite book, which is an even odder coincidence because it’s so awful. The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay is the story of Richard the Lionheart, except told with more stabbings, straining bosoms, and wild-eyed killers than a Mexican telenovela. Lawrence read it nine times before he graduated Oxford, while Pendlebury was always raving about it to his friends. When a classmate dropped by before returning to Australia, Pendlebury “pounced on his Richard Yea and Nay, by Maurice Hewlett, which he gave me with instructions to think of him when I read it. This was a much bigger gesture than it appeared, for this grubby little book was, to John, a symbol of heroism and romance.”
Wrong! That’s what his friends didn’t get. To Pendlebury, those mace-and-maiden tales weren’t symbols; they were real voices from the past with important lessons to teach. Chivalry and the art of the hero were the fading lights of a train he’d just missed, and Pendlebury was obsessed with finding a way to catch up. Yea-and-Nay was his inspiration, and soon after he graduated Cambridge, he found his path.
Pendlebury spent his twenty-fourth birthday as a visiting student at the British School in Athens, and it was there that a strange book with a blue-and-gold cover came into his hands: The Palace of Minos. Inside, he found a thrilling proposition: was he willing to believe that all those myths he’d loved as a boy—King Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne, the Iliad and the Odyssey—were based on real people, real places, real events? Could he accept that they weren’
t just make-believe, but a snarled thread of history that, once untangled, led back to a time when heroes roamed the earth? Because if he could, fantastic new discoveries awaited him.
And they began on the island of Crete.
Pendlebury was so electrified, he left Athens within days of reading The Palace of Minos and went in search of its author, Arthur Evans, the eccentric adventurer and antiquities collector. Evans claimed he’d found hard proof that the legend of King Minos—son of Zeus, stepfather of the monstrous half man, half bull who ate fourteen of Athens’s best-looking teenagers every year—was based on a true story. Evans said he’d located not only Minos’s lost kingdom and the Minotaur’s fabled Labyrinth but also the remains of a fabulous Minoan culture that dominated the Mediterranean two thousand years before the pyramids were built.
Was it a hoax? If so, Evans was going all out. To believe his story, you had to believe he’d found the birthplace of, well, everything. This lost world he described was so old, it was already dying by the time the Egyptians began making words out of dog and bird drawings. Science, literature, politics, advanced math, philosophy, sports, theater—according to Evans, it all sprang from Crete, that craggy little cinder in the sea. It also meant that this nearsighted amateur, a fiery, squinting little man who strode about London smacking carriages with a hiking staff he called “Prodger” and set entire teams of diggers to work because he’d caught a whiff of fennel, had stumbled across a new chapter of human history nearly as long as the span from the birth of Julius Caesar to the death of Steve Jobs.
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