The Golden Step (10 page)

On my way down to the Church of the Panagia Kera on the outskirts of Kritsa I pass a man heaving along the carcass of a just-slaughtered lamb, its bloody head and hooves flopping in the dust – a reminder of Real Crete. Outside the Panagia Kera a coachload of French tourists has pulled up. They shuffle round the church, shepherded by a guide with a loud and grating voice. By dint of moving to whichever of the three aisles they are not occupying, I manage to have the impeccably restored frescoes more or less to myself. Before becoming immersed I take a minute or so to recall the Byzantine convention by which the biblical topics are arranged throughout the church: Christ Pantokrator (‘All-Powerful') looking down from the ceiling of the apse, the Evangelists and Holy Fathers below him; in the roof of the nave, scenes from the life of Christ including the Nativity, Baptism, Crucifixion and Resurrection; the lower walls occupied by a selection of military and secular saints; on the west wall a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ and the ghastly torments of the Damned to terrify outgoing peasants at the end of each service.

In the central nave I find a calm St Michael dispatching a very lowly dragon, each of the beast's thorn-like teeth a single bold stroke of white paint. Salome in harlot scarlet balances the head of John the Baptist on top of her own in a dish with a beaded rim as she performs a wild jig in front of King Herod and his cronies. In a ferocious Slaughter of the Innocents a mother cradles in her lap the severed heads of three infants with the faces and receding hairlines of middle-aged men, while Mary and the infant Jesus hide in an annexe from a file of Herod's men who, dressed in Venetian chain mail and cloaks, are about to slice off the head of another baby. In the north aisle I stand a long time admiring a walled and fortified Garden of Eden where birds perch in the trees, the four Sacred Rivers curl from their springs like grey horse tails, and a bright red seraph with six wings and a spear guards a door at which the outcast Adam and Eve knock unavailingly. There's an action-packed Day of Judgement, too, in which the souls of the Damned, dressed in white jumpsuit-style winding sheets and packed one behind another into a communal tomb, go hurtling like a bobsleigh team down a dark rocky defile into Hell, where a crowned Satan with a snake for a scarf awaits them among his horde of demonic enforcers.

I drift across to the south aisle, whose scenes are dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. A remarkably beautiful Virgin, large-eyed, sorrows with her hands outstretched in resignation or pleading. On a tiny donkey she journeys to Bethlehem, shielding her swollen belly with one graceful hand, a gesture completely natural. The most touching depiction of all is a highly emotional Sorrow of St Joseph. The indignant carpenter of Nazareth, hurt and betrayal all over his countenance, turns his back on his pregnant betrothed and hunches into the bottom corner of the fresco like a sulky child. An angel reaches out a comforting hand, but is ignored. Mary, tense and miserable, slumps in a richly carved chair, her head sunk on her palm. ‘Oh, Joseph, don't do this to me … it's true, what I've been telling you! There's no-one else, honestly!'

All over the church one sees faces painted full of sorrow or joy, hands outstretched in admonition or sympathy. Actions generous and mean, loving and brutal are part of the warp and weft of human existence. Life and death contend, closer than brothers. In the background birds flirt and leaves shimmer, flowers deck the meadows, cloud shadows cross the sky, streams tumble, shelf-like mountain ledges pile upwards to rocky peaks. You only have to step outside and glance about you to see where these island artists found their inspiration.

The Plains of Plenty

(Kritsa to Asites)

I got an inkling about Pantelis's level of fitness as soon as we had left Kritsa. On the mountain road to the plain of Katharo we cut corners mercilessly, forging a straight line upwards across the rubbly slopes, only touching the road at its hairpin elbows. Under his skin-tight running shorts Pantelis's leg muscles bunched like steel hawsers as he sprang lightly ahead from stone to stone. By the time we had climbed 2,300 feet to the edge of Katharo I was a panting ball of sweat; but my companion's brow betrayed not one spangle, his chest nary a heave.

Katharo in the full flush of April was just as delectable as Iannis Siganos had promised. The new grass of the undulating plain lay spattered yellow with flowers. Fruit trees foamed pink and white. The first tractor of spring went grunting along a field, drawing a dark furrow in the soil, and a man walked behind, casting out seed by hand from a basket. Those fresco painters of the 16th century might have stared in wonder and terror at the red-nosed devil snorting and clawing the earth in front, but they would instantly have connected with the timeless figure of the sower and his deliberate tread along the furrow, the easy, strength-conserving swing of his hand and the silvery shower of the falling seed as it caught a glint of sunlight.

Head-scarfed and knee-booted Katerina had opened her little taverna for spring only an hour before we appeared on her threshold, but she bustled about to make us a cheese pancake and to set a jug of clear, earth-scented Katharo well water on a table outside. We ate to the sound of birdsong, and Pantelis offered me a few slices of his own story. He was happy enough working as a hotel bell-hop down on the coast, saving money in order to marry the pretty girl who'd accompanied him to our Dikeosinis Street meeting. George Aphordakos was his brother-in-law, he revealed, and together with the mighty palikare Iannis Pantatosakis they formed a trio who often went hiking, climbing and mountain running together – hence the Kampaxis thews and sinews. ‘Iannis knows every stone of Crete,' said Pantelis, ‘he is always in the mountains. Always.'

We followed the dirt road through the middle of the plain, looked down upon by a pair of snowy peaks away to the south. The lesser of the two was certainly Lazaros. The greater height, named Spathi by Pantelis, had the mapmaker's name of ‘Dikti', the 7,047 ft summit of its namesake range. What do maps know? – particularly this equivocal specimen flapping itself to shreds in the sharp mountain wind. I had the measure of it by now with its misplaced villages, non-existent paths and economies with the truth of contours. If instead of ‘Dikti' I had found ‘Everest' printed there, I would hardly have raised an eyebrow.

At the west side of the plain a stony gully took us up to a saddle of ground spread with clumps of orchids and drifts of crocuses. ‘Give a girl a crocus,' observed Pantelis, ‘and you are saying something serious to her.' Here we pulled up to take a last look back over Katharo, the ‘place of purity'. God forbid that a current scheme to attract a richer class of international
tourista
to the Kritsa area by building a first class golf course on the plain, complete with access highway and many-starred hotel, should ever come to pass.

Now the path – if there was a path; I never made out a trace of one – threaded one of those scrubby, rocky, up-and-down wildernesses I was coming to recognise as a keynote of the Cretan mountains. We began to gain height, moving steadily up through a scoop-shaped basin of ground. Massive old
prinos
, the spiny prickly oaks of the uplands that one finds grazed by goats into all manner of outlandish forms, clung to the rocks with gnarled fingers of roots. Rivers of birdsong poured from bushes and trees that had colonised the ledges of ancient, long-abandoned terraces. A rubbly old kalderimi ran round the rim of the valley, passing the ruins of a couple of cheese-huts as it climbed gently to the upper skyline. I asked Pantelis how long he thought it had been since people lived and worked in this silent hollow in the hills, but his reply was a shrug and a shake of the head. Who knows? A long time.

Looking back from the pass we had an unexpected and final glimpse of Katharo, a far green island among grey waves of limestone. Ahead, a thousand feet below, lay the patchwork fields of the Lasithi Plain, a perfect circle of perfectly flat ground within another bowl of mountains. A dozen villages were spaced out evenly round the perimeter. It was like looking at a relief map from an eagle's back. But where were the famous 10,000 ‘windmills', the little cloth sails in Maltese cross shape that once whirled round to power the irrigation pumps of the plain and keep Crete's picture postcard photographers in business? ‘Not put up till summer,' said Pantelis, ‘but they are very rare now.' Why was that? ‘Electricity' was his one-word reply.

Descent to the plain was by a precipitous hillside of ankle-breaking scree. The backpack pushed me this way, swung me that. I had to dig in my Kritsa katsouna and watch every step like a hawk, while Pantelis the aegagros grew smaller and smaller as he leaped balletically down before me. Down on the plain at last, we stayed to pass the time of day with a shepherd whose local accent, even I could tell, was of the strongest. ‘Hard to understand, even for me,' said Pantelis as we walked on, following the dead flat dirt road past the skeletons of abandoned wind-pumps. Tractors raised plough dust from the fields each side. The dry plots made a strange contrast with the straight drove roads dividing them, which still gleamed silver with the undrained floodwater of winter, rich in the minerals leached from the surrounding mountains that form such productive soil in the plain. Lasithi was always a place of lush fertility, and also of refuge and resistance. After a rebellion in 1263 so ferocious that reinforcements had to be brought to Crete from Venice to snuff it out, the people of the plain caught the brunt of Venetian revenge. They were all evicted, their homes were destroyed, and for the next two centuries not a seed was permitted to be sown in the wilderness of Lasithi.

In the village of Psychro we stopped to shoot the breeze with a family, acquaintances of Pantelis's, who sat in plastic chairs by the roadside in hopes of selling a piece of weaving to a passing tourist. It was wonderful to get the pack off my aching back and sit behind a glass of raki and a cup of intense black coffee, with nothing to say or do except smile at Father (or perhaps it was father-in-law), the village priest in grey cassock and tall black stovepipe hat, his uncut hair neatly scrolled in a bun at the back of his head. He was the first to leap to his feet and cajole a party of French motorists when they pulled up for a moment.

At nightfall, with 20 miles or more under our belts, Pantelis and I pitched up at a cheap hotel – a cheerless place with cold water, a chilly room and a very nasty lavatory. I sat like a stone with aching feet and a nice big beer. ‘I think I will go for a warm-down,' said Pantelis. His warm-down consisted of a 15-mile run – a
run –
right round the rim of the plain. ‘You don't have a problem if we share a room?' enquired Pantelis politely on his return. Problem? I would have slept like a log if he had been an axe murderer with a very loud stereo.

In the night I woke to find the temperature had dropped below freezing. A shivery mountain night with a million stars above and a hard frost on the fields. Close by, hidden in the black slope just behind the hotel, the mouth of the deep dark cave in which celestial Zeus was born. Frogs jabbered in their hundreds from the ditches of Lasithi, and the village dogs kept them company with a concert conducted all over the plain.

Early mist was smoking from the ditches when we set out in a pink and pearl dawn. According to the map – but unacknowledged by any waymarks – we were back on E4 once more. Scarfed and swaddled women were already riding in pairs on the little potato-sorters as the tractors dragged them round the deeply furrowed fields. In the villages mules were being saddled and kicked into motion. A woman passed us with three goats on a lead, their muzzles wrapped in cloth bags to stop them delaying progress to the high pastures by grazing at the roadside. A causeway led above the
khonos
, the rocky gash which drains the plain of its winter floodwater. The khonos lay half choked with dumped rubbish, its sides embanked by neatly maintained stone walls. It was a long and (for me) sweaty slog to the top of the pass, but the view when we got there was even better than yesterday's over the Lasithi Plain – a great mouth-watering prospect west to the coastal sprawl of Iraklion and its fertile hinterland of olives and vines, climbing gradually inland to meet the noble profile of Mount Iouchtas, the summit where Zeus lies buried. Three eagles – Zeus's own birds in Greek mythology – were wheeling over the peak. Against the blue haze forty miles off in the west rose the long white spine of Psiloritis, Mount Ida of the ancients, the highest mountain in all the island. Its snow-covered flanks fell seemingly sheer, their sides indented with dark ribs of shadow. I gazed long and delightedly towards the roof of Crete. In a week's time, maybe less, I should be taking the final steps of the climb to its summit.

‘Waiting for us to fall down,' commented Pantelis of the circling eagles; and in the ensuing couple of hours they might have picked my bones if my luck had been a little worse, or theirs a little better. The dirt road we were following, having dipped kindly at the start of its downward run, suddenly thrust its head into a solid wall of rock and gave up the ghost. Like yesterday, the only exit strategy looked to be a thousand-foot scramble down a pathless slope. But yesterday's descent was a doddle by comparison. This mountainside fell away at about 60° of slope. It was blanketed in prickly bushes and carpeted with slippery rocks that skidded and squirted away from under my boots. No waymarks, of course, and no visible path either. If E4 had been set by its ‘planners' to snake down here, it was being very modest about it. I turned into a cowardly spider, a wobbly-kneed creeper and crawler. The pack and its unbalancing weight was the problem. That, and my clumsiness. And my general unfitness, my creaky knees, my cartilaginous twinges. And my chicken-heartedness. I began to despise my timorous self, doubling into a crouch to sidle round each step in the rock, as I watched Pantelis bounding on down far below. Clouds of dust marked his track as he skidded and cornered in his slick little trainers, exulting in his sense of balance, his young man's temerity. Every now and then he would stop and gaze back up the slope, hands on hips, the picture of aplomb as he assessed my progress. Halfway down, the inevitable happened; I tripped over the katsouna while Pantelis was watching and took a toss, sliding headfirst for twenty feet into a needly tangle of astivitha tussocks. Oh, bollocks. Physical damage negligible – a scratched arm, a bashed shin. Psychological bruises – painful. What was it the Psalmist had said, four or five days ago? ‘I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.' I can't say I caught Pantelis actually shooting out his lip and shaking his head, but I knew what he was thinking; and later on he admitted it. ‘Christopher, when I saw your technique of coming down this mountain, I thought of how you will manage on Psiloritis and on Lefka Ori, and I was not happy for you.'