Mani (21 page)

A few feet further along, the lighthouse keeper was sitting on a rock fishing with rod and line. He looked surprisingly neat and sedate for his lonely promontory. We were sailing so close that he only just managed in time to pluck his line clear. His face lit up.

“What news?” he shouted. “
Ti nea?
”

“Good,” we shouted. “All good.
Ola kala!
”

“Order and Quietness,” Panayioti supplemented. “
Taxis kai isychia!
”

“May God be glorified,” he answered. Taking a pear out of his haversack, he put it back and chose a better. We were well past him now but the pear sailed through the air and alighted as though by magic in Panayioti's hand. Then he stood up to throw two more which fell safely into the bottom of the boat. “Go towards the Good!” he shouted as he settled down again to his fishing. Joan pushed the tiller to port and haltingly we sailed along over the remaining half a dozen yards which turned us north-east into the Gulf of Laconia.

Away to the east we could discern the dim outlines of the Elaphonisi—Deer Island—and of Cythera, the birthplace not only of Aphrodite but of Lafcadio Hearn, both hovering on the water as insubstantially as puffs of pale blue smoke: between them and Cape Matapan lay an extent of water which one would have thought (and thought, it seems, wrongly) no cockcrow could ever span. The sky and the sea were a single pale blue and only these wraiths of islands hinted the whereabouts of the far-away horizontal border, until the eye, travelling upwards,
could discern high above that invisible horizon a yet frailer ghost: the long sierra of the Laconian peninsula in a faint and hair-thin seismograph climbing and falling and climbing again across the sky, and dying away northwards at last on its aerial journey to the main body of the Peloponnese.

Here and there as soft as a feather hung the suggestion of a salient, the thread of a celestial ravine descending a little way and vanishing into the sky on which, half-way to the burning zenith, that whole imponderable range was afloat. It died away long before one could follow the drop of its southern extremity to Cape Malea. Behind the two transparent islands, the sea and the sky melted together in the vague and luminous unity of a painted Chinese background. There in the blue haze, circled by tempest-haunting birds, lay the terrible Cape whose storms almost dashed the ships of Menelaus and Ajax, and those of many later seamen, to fragments. The storms of Malea carried Odysseus clean off his course, past Cythera and away for days till he stepped on to the island where—(ah, where?)
[4]
—the Lotus-Eaters lived. At the beginning of the last century an anchorite had his hermitage on the very tip and lived off the alms of passing sailors.

Scarcely a wave had rocked the
St. Nicholas
as she rounded Matapan but many a ship has been smashed on those sharp rocks. The faltering engine died with a gasp and we were becalmed. A sluggish current carried us slowly northwards and while Panayioti laboured at the engine—promoting, again and again, brief velleities of action that petered out in a cough—we toiled with poles fending the caique's bright timbers off the sharp peninsular rocks.

Hours passed and ashore all shade vanished as though it were a liquid whose few pools among the rocks the sun of noon had quite dried up. We anchored and waited, with the sail
hanging dead, for the summer wind. Even swimming round the boat and lying on the decks or the rocks, the lapse of time and the merciless triumph of the sun began to grow oppressive. It must have been for this afternoon wind that Cephalus, hot with hunting and stretched on the shores of Thessaly, called with such longing that poor Procris, hidden in a brake, thought it was a rival's name and met her death. But no wind came, and at last it was a dapper caique, the
St. George
of Piraeus bound for Kalamata, which, late in the afternoon, picked us up and carried us, several miles off her course, to the bay of Porto Cayo. Panayioti, besides having paid for last night's dinner, tried to refuse all payment as he had not been able to drop us where he had promised. This time, fortunately, we won.

Porto Cayo is a beautiful but rather mournful bay, a deep inlet scooped from the eastern slope of the peninsula, corresponding to Marmari on the western shore, the steep saddle between forming the isthmus that links Cape Matapan to the Mani. It was on the high rocks between here and the cape that the temple of Poseidon had stood, on the emplacement of one to Apollo in Mycenaean times. It was the central shrine of the Spartans, an inviolable sanctuary for anyone on the run and the seat of an oracle. It was also a great meeting place for the elders of the cities of Laconia and one of several shrines in Greece where the souls of the dead could be summoned by their slayers and placated by sacrifice. Marble slabs found among the ruins prove that human sacrifices were not unknown. Pausanias—not the historian and geographer but the victor of Plataea—was starved to death here in the temple when the Spartans discovered his secret intelligence with Xerxes.
[5]
It was probably, as we have seen, destroyed by the pirates of Cilicia. Little remains,
and many fragments and memorial slabs from here and Kyparissos are scattered in the neighbouring villages. Up the steep northern flank stretch the ruins of an enormous Turkish for-tress, built at the nadir of Maniot fortunes at the same time as Kelephas. It was the scene of hard-fought Maniot triumphs over the Turks during the reign of Zanetbey: actions commanded by the great Lambros Katsonis and by the father of that Odysseus Androutzos who was later to share a cave near Delphi with Trelawny, while in Missolonghi, down the coast, Byron lay dying.

It is called Porto Cayo either from Porto Quaglio of the Venetians or a Port aux Cailles of the Franks for the surrounding rocks are the last place where the quails, migrating south in thousands, alight before flying off to Crete and to Africa. I have seen the fringes of their departing hosts further east in the Cyclades, and of another mass departure, that of the storks, in the Dodecanese. These are prone to hug the Asian coasts, huddling at night in vast unwieldy encampments on every available tree, fidgeting and shifting all night long until at daybreak they spread their wings again and sail away south in straggling interminable armadas. They set off from southern Poland and the Ukraine gathering contingents in Bukovina and Bessarabia and Transylvania and all the Balkans and Greece until, craning their necks towards the flat roofs of Arab houses, they benight the air. The western route, from Austria and Germany and Alsace Lorraine to the coasts of Portugal, lies over the straits of Gibraltar; once across, they disperse in companies to become the roof-guests of Arabs and Berbers and the Atlas tribesmen. Their shaggy nests, meanwhile, are left all winter long to be blown about by the winds of Europe and filled with snow on many a roof-top and belfry and minaret. The cranes I have never seen but Cretan shepherds have told me of that endless caravan lasting for hours stretching beak to tail from one edge of the sky to the other so high above Mt. Ida as to be almost out of sight,
but accompanied by a strange unearthly sound like a far-away conversation; all, it used to be thought, heading for the forests of Central Africa to re-engage the pygmies, who are waiting for them with full quivers and, according to Aristotle, astride goats, in their never-ending war.

The stupor of a lagoon overhung this gulf. There are a few houses widely scattered, and salt and apathy seem to have eroded their dwellers. The Mani, in the accounts of many travellers and by the Greeks themselves, is reported to be mistrustful of strangers; though once their affections have been tried, the same sources declare, they grapple them to their souls. This was the first time I had seen a trace of this initial mistrust. It took a long time and some languid and sulky bargaining, quite out of tune with the normal friendly game, to find a man with a mule to take our gear to some pleasanter village inland. Each time that we protested against the outrageous price he suggested, he shrugged and made as though to drive off, and when we had to give in, without another word he struck the mule's rump a savage blow with his stick and let out a string of oaths as though the beast were standing proxy for these foreign disturbers of his gulf-side vacancy. Greek manners to strangers are so good—a hundred times better and more friendly than anywhere else—that these rare exceptions are disproportionately distressing. All four of us (except perhaps the mule) set off up the steep stream bed in a rage, cursing the thistles and cascading pebbles at each arduous step.

When we reached the saddle and sat on the stones to cool off these bad humours began to disperse. The mule and its churlish owner disappeared round a curve of the mountain-side and left us to gaze down at the beautiful bay of Marmari; for we were on the western slant once more, high on the side of the Kakovouni whence the sun had poured that morning. A fair-haired girl climbed the path towards us carrying a lamb slung over her shoulders and round her nape, fore and hind feet held
in either hand in the manner of many archaic statues. She sat down still holding the lamb and the friendly inquisition began. Where did we come from? Was that our mule that had passed? How much had we paid for it? We told her and she exclaimed with a commiserating laugh that we had been robbed. Where were we heading for? We said that we didn't know; any of the villages inland from which we could continue up the east coast next day. She got up and readjusted her burden. “You must come and stay in my father's house,” she said, “in Vatheia, a big village about half an hour away. We live in a tower.”

Ahead of us as we rounded the outcrop of mountain a long backbone of rock advanced westward from the massif, dipped, and then rose in a high bluff to sink through loop after widening loop of olive and corn terrace to the sea and then melt into the westward-reaching coast that slanted away under familiar villages to Yeroliména and Cape Grosso. The wide ridge was jagged with broken towers like the spikes along an iguana's back and as it swept upwards to the bluff they spread and climbed with it, growing in number and height. An angular stook of towers was rooted in a cloud of cactus and olive, ending on the brink of the steep fall of the ledges and their many round threshing floors where the horses and mules, shrunk by distance, rotated like toys. This eclogue world and the brooding castellations unfolded in a flowing and passive enchantment through the tired gold light of the summer evening.

Vasilio, holding all four of the lamb's feet in one hand, pointed with the forefinger of the other to the tallest of Va-theia's turrets. “There,” she said, “that's my father's tower and welcome to Vatheia.”

It always happens in Greece that encounters with disagreeable people are followed by an overwhelming compensation as though the entire race by an unconscious second sight were in league to compensate the victim and smooth his ruffled spirits. One reads of poisonous leaves and others which contain their
antidote fluttering side by side on the same Indian tree. In the case of this small jungle, it was as if nettles and dock-leaves were growing from a single stalk.

 

[1]
The alternative exorcism is to touch one's pudenda.

[2]
Translated by Robert Graves,
The Golden Ass of Apuleius
(Penguin).

[3]
See Gerard de Nerval,
El Desdichado
.

[4]
Djerba?

[5]
Hard by, on the edge of the gulf, stands a cliff from which Petrobey ordered a delinquent priest to be flung. Bound hand and foot, he was left, broken on the rocks, to perish. Both deeds have left a curse on their localities.

T
HE NAME
of the Evil Mountains—
Ta Kakavounia
—has infected the inhabitants as well as the range itself: the Deep Maniots are dubbed “The Evil Mountaineers” by the outside world. Alternatively (for these points of naming and derivation are never simple) the name is declared to be
Kakovoulia
, the Land of Evil Council, a damned region balefully populated by Evil Counsellors. There is even an ingenious third version,
[1]
based on the diminutive ending—
oula
appended to
kakkavi
(which means a small bronze three-legged cauldron); this turns the Deep Maniots into “The Cauldroneers.” It seems that the Maniot pirates, before boarding an enemy vessel, would helmet themselves in these pots, and, with the legs sticking up like three horns, leap in swarms from the shrouds: enough to alarm any Turkish or Venetian merchantman into surrender. But the first two are the everyday connotations. They have done much to confirm the Mani's sinister fame, which has long been promoted by a supposed hatred of strangers and implacability in seeking vengeance.

Never has a reputation for xenophobia been more convincingly belied than by our welcome to Vatheia. Vasilio, the lamb slung across her shoulders, befriended us with the solicitude of Nausicaa. She led the way through a contorted and bulbous
jungle of prickly pear which the dusk was transforming into the most queer of groves and up into the massed volley of skyward-shooting walls. Somewhere among them, directed by her carrying shouts across the valley, the muleteer and his beast had halted at the foot of her father's tower.

Many things in Greece have remained unchanged since the time of the
Odyssey
and perhaps the most striking of these is the hospitality shown to strangers; the more remote and mountainous the region, the less this has altered. Arrival at a village or farmstead is much the same as that of Telemachus at the palaces of Nestor at Pylos and of Menelaus at Sparta—so near, as the crow flies, to Vatheia—or of Odysseus himself, led by the king's daughter to the hall of Alcinöus. No better description exists of a stranger's sojourn at a Greek herdsman's fold than that of Odysseus when he stepped disguised into the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus in Ithaca. There is still the same unquestioning acceptance, the attention to the stranger's needs before even finding out his name: the daughter of the house pouring water over his hands and offering him a clean towel, the table laid first and then brought in, the solicitous plying of wine and food, the exchange of identities and autobiographies; the spreading of bed-clothes in the best part of the house—the coolest or warmest according to the season—the entreaties to stay as long as the stranger wishes, and, finally, at his departure, the bestowal of gifts, even if these are only a pocketful of walnuts or apples, a carnation or a bunch of basil; and the care with which he is directed on his way, accompanied some distance, and wished godspeed.