Mani (41 page)

Vira!
is “haul in,” with the suggestion of twisting a winch.
Ka-rina
is keel,
bastouni
bowsprit,
albouro
mast; and so on. Time has distorted many of them. I can never hear these orders without a momentary glimpse of a many-oared galleon slave-propelled under a crimson gonfalon charged with the gold lion of St. Mark.

The winds have nearly all changed their names and they too whisper a garbled echo of the long-dissolved Venetian power. The north wind is the
Tramountana
, though the ancient Boreas, one of the very few of the winds that Odysseus kept tied in a bag, still survives as well.
Ostria
, the south, in the Latin Auster, though the ancient
Notos
is still sometimes used.
Levante
is
the east wind and
Pounente
the west. N.E. is
Grego
, the Greek wind, S.E. the African
Souróko
, S.W. the Arabian
Garbís
, and N.W. the
Mäistro
, or Mistral. The heart of this wind-rose seems to be somewhere off Sicily, the heart of the Mediterranean in fact. The subdivisions—N.N.E., E.N.E., E.S.E., S.S.E., and so on—are a string of euphonious composite words:
Gregotramountána, Gregolevánte, Sourokolevánte, Ostrosoúroko, Ostrogarbí, Pounentogarbí, Pounentomäistro
, and
Mäistrotramountána
. The words
Euros
—sometimes called
Vulturnus
by the Latins, the wind that oppressed the banished Ovid in the
Tristia
—and
Zephyros
can still be used in the high-flown language to designate the east and the west winds, and the ancient
Lips
, the south-westerly Libyan wind, survives as
Livas
. Homer only mentioned the four cardinal winds. The four beastlike winds—Typhon, Echidna, Chimaera and the Harpies
[5]
—have decamped from the Greek air for good.
Mpátis
(from
embainein
, to enter) is a cool breeze coming in from the sea, drawn there at midday by the growing heat of the earth and rocks to fill the void of the rising hot air.
Apógeios
—quite literally “off shore,” or rather “off land”—is the opposite phenomenon. The liquid sea warms and cools more slowly than the mineral land—like tea and teaspoon—and so between sunset and about ten at night, the track of the morning
Mpátis
is reversed. It blows for a few night hours until the temperature of earth and sea are equal; then the vagrant airs are still. The ancient Etesian winds which blow through the summer months can be a blessing or a curse: they cool the archipelago but drive caiques off their course or lock them in harbour. They are a
Mpátis
on a giant scale, a wind that rushes south across the Mediterranean to fill the airless ovens of the Egyptian and African deserts; which repay them, now and then, with a long dragon's breath of sirocco.
This wind is now called the
Meltém
which philologists derive from the Venetian
bel tempo
because it only blows in summer. When the
Meltémi
blows hard the inhabitants of the island of Spetzai called it
Trapezókairos
—“table weather”—because one gust of it will capsize all the café tables along the harbour. Except that it was too late in the year, this could have been the “tempestuous wind called
Euroclydon
” that gave St. Paul's ship such a rough time south of Crete, when the last chapters of The Acts turn into an Odyssey. But “neither sun nor stars in many days appeared,” so it was winter.
Euroclydon
is called
Euraquilo
in the Vulgate, a north-easter. It was
Notos
, the south wind (
Auster
in St. Jerome's text), which till then had been blowing so softly. How well I remember, during the war, gazing from caves on Mount Ida to “the island called Clauda” under which they ran so close (it is Klauda or Kauda in the Greek testament, Gavdos in modern Greek). The only Western traveller to describe this islet in recent times is an old friend and brother-in-arms from those peculiar years.
[6]
Anyone who has tried to land on that coast from a small boat will appreciate the apostle's difficulties. The Levanter, the strong east wind that blows across the Adriatic, had a deep influence on ancient Greek history. Rather than confront the fierce weather that lay further up the long gulf, Greek emigrants avoided the Adriatic coasts. Following the prevailing wind, they were scattered like grain over southern Italy, Sicily, the coasts of Provence and even southern Spain, and flourishing Greek colonies sprang up there while the coasts north of Epirus and Illyria, so much nearer home, remained practically unknown.

Caique sailors are for ever peering at the surface of the sea like joiners studying the grain of a piece of wood to see what ripples or markings the wind makes and murmuring “
garbis,” “maïstro
,” or “
sourokolevánte
,” and predicting
bonatza
,
fair weather, or, with gravely shaking heads,
phourtoúna
, a storm. (In Crete, foul weather is called
cheimonas
—winter—even if the season is midsummer.) The air in Greece is not merely a negative void between solids; the sea itself, the houses and rocks and trees, on which it presses like a jelly mould, are embedded in it; it is alive and positive and volatile and one is as aware of its contact as if it could have pierced hearts scrawled on it with diamond rings or be grasped in handfuls, tapped for electricity, bottled, used for blasting, set fire to, sliced into sparkling cubes and rhomboids with a pair of shears, be timed with a stop watch, strung with pearls, plucked like a lute string or tolled like a bell, swum in, be set with rungs and climbed like a rope ladder or have saints assumed through it in flaming chariots; as though it could be harangued into faction, or eavesdropped, pounded down with pestle and mortar for cocaine, drunk from a ballet shoe, or spun, woven and worn on solemn feasts; or cut into discs for lenses, minted for currency or blown, with infinite care, into globes. On top of this, all the nautical wind-talk and scrutiny of the elements fills it with innumerable unseen coilings and influences and cross currents and comings and goings. It is no wonder that the Greek word for wind—
anemos
—should have produced the Latin word
anima
, for soul; that
pneuma
[7]
and
spiritus
should mean spirit and breath and wind in both languages. Perhaps it is not strange that the age-old Greek war-cry—the equivalent of
St. George!, Montjoy-Saint Denys!
, and
Santiago!
—should be the single word
Aera!
which means both wind and air.

There is, in fact, more in the air than meets the eye. The element is further complicated by the presence of
ta aërika
, the spirits of the air. They have cropped up earlier on in these pages. They are less of a problem to present-day sailors than
they used to be a few decades ago. But there is a subdivision of the species of daemons, or genii, of the air which has an immediate relevance to sailors. They are known as
ta telonia
: the customs offices and, by extension, officers. Popular fancy has created a whole hierarchy of hovering excisemen through which the soul has to pass on its way to Paradise or to Hades. Soaring souls are examined by invisible
douaniers
who scrutinize their psychic luggage for unatoned sins, both deadly and venial. Tradition has degraded them from their severe but benign status to the rank of evil harm-wreaking spirits whom the corpses—or their flying spirits—can placate with a coin that may, alternatively, have been placed in their mouths either to placate Charon or to block, with their metal barrier, the ingress to other evil spirits. Shooting stars, comets and other celestial portents are considered manifestations of
ta telonia
. These affect—or used to affect—all mortals; but the customs-phenomenon most dangerously and specifically aimed at sailors is St. Elmo's Fire. This sinister light flickering and shuddering about the mast and the yards of a caique foretells with certainty the onslaught of these baleful air-denizens. Exorcism and incantation used to be effective antidotes, but the surest way of all—like the remedy against the Lamia of the Sea when she appears in the form of a waterspout—is to stick a black-handled knife into the mast, if possible after it has been used for cutting an onion. The reek aroints the air. In ancient times, two such airy manifestations were considered propitious; they were the Gemini, protectors of seamen. A single flame, however, betokened their sister Helen whose fatal beauty wrecked towns and ships and lives.

Seamen peer into the sky at night not only to steer by the stars but to prognosticate the future from the tilt of the crescent or decrescent moon. “
Orthio to phengári
,” they say, “
xaploménos o kapetánios
': if the moon is upright, the captain can lie down. If the incomplete moon is lying on its back, the captain stands
to the helm; it foretells
phourtoúna: “Xaploméno to phengári
,” in fact, “
orthios o kapetánios
.” They are great ones for steering by their fingers—holding up a hand at arm's length to measure off one, two, or three fingers' breadth from a cape or a rock and moving the rudder accordingly. I once heard an old ocean-going sailor describing, only half in fun, between puffs at his narghileh, how to sail from the Piraeus to London entirely in such terms. “When you get to Cape Malea,” he said, “aim three fingers to port of Matapan, a finger to starboard south of Sicily, two to port at Cape Spaptiventi in Sardinia, one to starboard at Gibraltar, three at Cape St. Vincent, two at Finisterre, two more at Ushant...why a baby could do it... Then four to port at Margate, follow the Thames upstream, drop anchor at Tower Bridge, then go ashore and order a beef-steak.
Na!
...”

We rounded a small cape. A valley full of scarcely believable green trees appeared and a mile or so up the mountain, a towered village. A busy little port sheltered half a dozen caiques. “We've arrived,” the captain said. “Kotronas,” he announced and then, pointing uphill at the towers, “Phlomochori.” Alongside the mole a few minutes later we heard his voice cry “
founda!
” and down went the anchor with a clatter and a splash.

 

[1]
Alas, he died last year, a sad loss to his friends everywhere.

[2]
I have heard, on equally uncertain authority, that the Turks have a superstition about storks and never shoot them. They are now jealously preserved in Greece, but apparently it was not always so. Many thousands of storks spend the spring and summer in Greece, but none of them nest south of a line running south of Epirus and Thessaly from the Ambracian Gulf to the Gulf of Volo. This was roughly the Greek-Turkish frontier until the first Balkan War in 1912, when the Greeks captured and retained all of northern Greece which is now the storks' chief habitat. It must have been about then that the laws protecting them came in. Storks have proverbially long memories, but (if this story is true) I hope they will let bygones be bygones and return to their old haunts in Roumeli and the Peloponnese; old prints show that they were common in Turkish-occupied Athens at the beginning of the last century. They are unknown there now. Their nests and their graceful flight ennoble the humblest village. A strange example of traditional fear among migrating birds comes into Alan Moorhead's
Gallipoli
. A vast column of duck and other birds flew over the Dardanelles at a moment of total deadlock in 1916. Exasperated by inaction, the two entrenched armies opened upon them with all they had. It was a massacre and the birds avoided the baleful straits for many years after.

[3]
See Norman Douglas,
Siren Lands
, and Lord Kinross's
Europa Minor
.

[4]
This happened in Batsí Bay, off the western shore of the island.

[5]
The harpies have settled in the two desert islets of the Strophades. I shall have much to say of these bird-winds in another book. See the
Æneid
, bk. III.

[6]
See
The Stronghold
, by Xan Fielding (Secker and Warburg).

[7]
The
Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius Loyola can be exactly paraphrased as
Pneumatic Drill
.

T
HE DEEP
Mani had stopped. This cove, half an hour on foot south of Kotronas, was dominated by a huge fig tree. The cliffs closed to a steep stream-bed thick with oleanders. Two more fig trees grew like polished silver candelabra from a small rocky island composed of a dozen massive and wavy strata snapped off and tilted to an oblique angle, which lay in the position of a star between the crescent horns of the bay about a furlong from the shore. We had swum there half an hour ago and clambered up its steep wall, treading the hot and sweet-smelling herbs on its overgrown summit; then dived in again to swim into a sea-cave whose filtered light turned us a deep green. The water, sliding in and out of it, plopped with a hollow and lulling resonance a few yards away. All of this, with the golden sand and the polished pebbles I could feel against my shoulder blades, belonged to a more familiar Greece. Like one of the seals off Cythera, I was lying half in and half out of the sea, my ears full of water noises and the rise and fall of a million cicadas, letting the sun's horses and chariot wheels ride over me roughshod; leaving my eyelids just ajar so that the lashes split the sunlight into dozens of straight, wire-thin and mile-long rainbows that lengthened and expanded into more dazzling sheaves with every millimetre I lowered them. I had only to close them completely for orange, magenta, grass-green and violet suns to glow against the dark shutter and change into luminous latchkeys and sieves and reef-knots and bowler hats
and lopsided harps and tulips and tuning forks against magnificently clashing backgrounds of electric blue and burnt sienna and mushroom and daffodil coloured velvet. Equally, I had only to open them suddenly and gaze accusingly and painfully at the real sun for it to turn jet black and oscillate and put forth petals like a marguerite and revolve at high speed, exactly as it does in Ghika's pictures; then shut them again and watch the contents of a junkshop collide, expand, shrink and change shape and turn inside-out again in the secret
camera obscura
behind my eyelid and fall asleep with feelings of supreme voluptuousness and idle omnipotence.