The Golden Step (23 page)

Next morning I bid Stelios goodbye. He wouldn't accept a penny for the two good meals and the night's accommodation, but modestly asked if I might send him a copy of the photograph I took of him. I cast around for E4, and found it very fulsomely signposted out of the village. Unfortunately, as I discovered a mile or so down the path, this was an alternative sidetrack leading down to the south coast. The main E4 route, west out of Kallikratis towards the White Mountains, ran innocent of all indications. For me the hopelessness of European Hiking Route E4 waymarking had long become a standing joke, a jolly jape. But I found that at this advanced stage of the journey, three-quarters of the way through Crete, I didn't really care. The dirt roads, kalderimi, dusty paths and village lanes had somehow turned out to form their own heterodox highway to the west, quite passable and even reliable if one simply gave oneself up to it in faith and hope.

Faith and hope were needed, too, on the many-headed road across the hills from Kallikratis. I tossed a coin at a couple of turnings and threw paximadia to a couple of wolfdogs that ran across my path, and arrived in the village of Askifou full of self-satisfaction and confidence. That lasted only as long as it took to get through to Pantelis Kampaxis on the crackly public phone. ‘I am sorry, Christopher, but I have spoke to Pantatosakis and to George Aphordakos. They say it will be too difficult to go to Lefka Ori because of the snow. I am really sorry.'

So that was it, the unassailable verdict. The south coast and the gorges for me.

In the evening the main square of Askifou is a pleasant place to sit under the aspen trees, watching the orange light of sunset fade on the eastern mountains. Four little kafenia surround the square; the village men wander very slowly between them or sit in twos and threes, joining or ducking out of a more or less public conversation as they choose, joking with passing acquaintances, shouting a response to hoots from friends going past in pickups, hawking and spitting, patting children on the head as they scoot by, chewing over weighty matters and trivialities. This expansive rumble and trickle and occasional explosion of men's voices, counterpointed by the lighter notes of the women sitting and chatting as they shell beans and strip mountain herbs on their doorsteps in the street behind the main drag, backgrounded by the birds chirruping the sun down in the aspens and plane trees, is the keynote of a Cretan hill village at this particular time of day.

Copper-coloured beetles were hatching out all over Sfakia. The species seemed very inefficiently designed. Any slight puff of wind would blow them over on their backs, where they would remain helplessly thrashing, at the mercy of any passing predator, until first one and then another claw would chance on an anchoring point and they would be able to flick themselves right way up again. They seemed programmed to climb everything vertical – trees, table legs, lamp posts, fennel stems, and my trouser legs as I sat with a cold Amstel beer and an aluminium dish of pistachio nuts. Three had made it round and up the overhang of the table-top, and were crawling in a rather aimless fashion across the tin surface as if uncertain what to do now. In my state of blissful idleness, and seeing that I had not only two protagonists but also a control group (albeit of only one participant), plus the means (the kafenion owner's charming daughter had just set a complimentary thimble of tsikoudia in front of me), I decided to carry out a scientific experiment. Do copper-coloured beetles get drunk, and if so, on what?

I blobbed a large drop of Amstel and a slightly smaller drop of tsikoudia onto the table. The ‘volunteers' approached. All shied away from the tsikoudia like Blue Ribbon spinsters in a distillery. Their reaction to the drop of beer, though, was significant. Beetle One – the largest – sank its face into the Amstel, drank at least half, crawled off with no visible signs of staggering, and then stopped dead as if suddenly hit by an ‘Oh-Christ' moment. Beetle Two, the smallest, drank the rest of the beer, crawled after Beetle One and leaped on its back, initiating a bar-room brawl (or was it a priapic orgy?) that had them grappling all over the table in an inextricable embrace. Beetle Three, meanwhile, ignored both beer and brawl, made for a peanut and remained clamped to it, licking the salt.

Conclusion: beer and peanuts are better for you than hard liquor, but may still lead to trouble.

At my lodgings I found my eyesight no longer permitted me to pass the end of a thread through the eye of a needle. I tried for twenty minutes, then asked the taverna owner's wife if she would kindly do it for me. With Herman Munster stitches I contrived to sew up the rip that the Diogenes of the oil-barrel kennel had torn in the knee of my walking trousers, and went to bed determined not to mind too much about the snow and the White Mountains. It wasn't a very peaceful night, though. The Askifou nocturne consisted of the customary barking of the village dogs, the dinging and donging of sheep bells from a fold on the mountainside, and the sounds of
l'amour
through the wall of the neighbouring bedroom where an enviably inexhaustible French cyclist who had ridden all the way up from Iraklion that day (so he'd boasted) was doing his best to ride all night long, too. He made both mattress and mistress squeak till dawn.

Eventually I gave up the struggle to sleep, fetched the
Odyssey
from the backpack and had it finished by first light. Though the Psalms had proved my staple literary fare throughout this walk, Homer had given me a lot of fun, too, and a breath or two of inspiration. If any couple ever overcame a superabundance of trials and tribulations it was Odysseus and his Penelope, reunited at the winning post after being parted all that time. Our hero dealt with the weaselly suitors and with the sexually collaborative handmaidens of his house in terrifying style, too. And that wretched goatherd Melanthius who'd sided with the opposition. God, what a way to die. There was no doubt about it; whatever about Odysseus being born in Ithaca, the man was clearly a Sfakiot, and a black-shirted palikare to boot.

Blissed-out contentment from the Psalmist in the morning. The self-abasement in the dust, the eating of ashes and drinking of tears had been abandoned in favour of sublime praise of God's creation: ‘God who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind … he watereth the earth from his chambers. The earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works! Wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine. The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted; where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.' The Psalmist even went so far as to smile upon the ocean, so often a terror to him. Today he was happy to eulogise ‘this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships,' rejoiced the Psalmist, ‘there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. These all wait upon thee …'

It was the sea I was longing to set eyes on today – the Libyan Sea of the south coast, glimpsed from the summits of Thripti and Psiloritis and from many a pass and high viewpoint over these past five weeks, but never actually encountered. It was a short walk, but a spectacular one, down to the sea from the village of Imbros, winding into the bowels of the earth through the snaking contortions of the Imbros Gorge.

Before entering the gorge I bought a copy of the English translation of the local guide to the chasm, a publication intended to attract foreign tourists, but so Sfakiot in spirit that it featured among its illustrations a graphic shot of a couple of butchered sheep with the alluring caption ‘Slaughtered Animals'. In fact, for the final and definitive summing up of the Sfakiot character, one can't do better than turn to this guidebook: ‘Heroic people … the purest in Crete. Tall, slim people with a look of intelligence always present to accompany their hard characteristics. They are egoists, ambitious, liberal and generous. They, rightfully so, have a high self esteem. When their pride is insulted they will not think twice. They will sacrifice everything they own, even their lives, a way of showing that they will observe and preserve ancient customs and traditions. They are well known for their hospitality, and their true love for big feasts and beauty.'

Once into the Imbros Gorge I dropped 2,000 feet in a couple of hours through the rock-walled canyon, so narrow that at one point I stretched out my arms and found I could touch both sides at once. Down this shadowed cleft in May 1941 passed thousands upon thousands of Allied soldiers, thirsty and exhausted beyond coherence after a three-day forced march from the north coast under repeated air attacks, hoping against hope to be evacuated that night or the next from the tiny south coast harbour of Chora Sfakion. A wartime tin helmet hung by its chin-strap from the branch of a tree as I passed, as if abandoned there only an hour ago by its owner.

Out over the sheet of flood pebbles at the bottom of the gorge, and on west to Chora Sfakion with the sea on my left hand. A big moment, this. From now on the Libyan Sea would always be there, an infallible guide over the last eighty miles or so. The map (and why did I imagine I could trust it now?) showed a confident, unmistakable red line, unbroken and unwavering, hugging the shore from Chora Sfakion all the way to journey's end at Hrissoskalitissas, the Monastery of the Golden Step. No ifs, no buts, no ins and outs. E4, you beauty, you're coming good at last!

The Gorges of the West

(Chora Sfakion to Paleochora)

Pondering this and other all-too-vivid wartime experiences in these waters, Dad became aware of the proximity of another man of about his age, upright and disciplined in bearing, evidently an Englishman, obviously ex-Services. This person, too, was staring around him as if old memories were being awakened.

‘It looks as if you'd been here before,' remarked Dad.

‘Yes,' returned the other man. ‘1941, May, Battle of Crete. I'll never forget it. And you?'

‘I was around here, too,' Dad said, ‘in the Navy.'

The man stiffened and glared. ‘Bastards!' he said. ‘Bastards! You left us behind!'

Standing in my turn on the Chora Sfakion ferry slip, I took a long glance across the tight cluster of white houses and tavernas to the brown slopes that rose dramatically at the back of the town. In caves, holes and hollows the shattered men from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Greece had crouched by day in hiding from air attack, emerging each night to join the more or less patient lines waiting on the beach, each man straining to spot the arrival of the boats and landing craft that would ferry them out to the darkened ships. A few sour notes developed. There were a couple of unsuccessful attempts to sneak into the boats out of turn, to pull rank. Some stragglers faked wounds to gain priority. On the whole men behaved as they had proved to do throughout the war so far – doggedly, decently and with bitter humour. But some scars lasted, especially among those who could not be embarked before the Royal Navy's margin of safety ran out. My father never learned which unit his interlocutor had belonged to, but he was certainly one of the unlucky ones who had been left to fend for themselves. Some found shelter in mountain villages, at the risk of their hosts' lives; some made their way to welcoming monasteries such as Preveli, back along the coast to the east. Many were spirited away from Crete, one way and another. But, said Dad, he'd surmised that this man must have been one of the 12,000 or more who ended up enduring for the following four years the long-drawn-out misery of prisoner-of-war camp. What could my father say? He had murmured something conciliatory, and disengaged himself.

Dad, like so many of his generation, disliked talking about the war. But this pungent little scene, one he would allow himself to rehearse from time to time, had always stuck in my mind. Now, walking on through Chora Sfakion and fending off the blandishments of importunate taverna waiters (‘Sir, you from Germany? From England? You want room, very cheap?'), I thought of Dad, and the millions of servicemen and women like him, who found when they emerged from the strange and intense adventure of the war that they had left an irretrievable piece of themselves behind.

On a bend of the road beyond Chora Sfakion an E4 sign stood up proudly on its black-and-yellow striped pole. A large-bore rifle bullet had punched a hole with gleaming edges of raw aluminium through the centre of the waymark square. The pellets of a shotgun blast had turned the remaining tatters of the sign into a fine-mesh sieve. ‘Shepherd people like to shoot many signs in Sfakia,' Pantelis Kampaxis had warned me, and here was the proof. Sfakiots are notorious for gun-toting; if there is not quite a pistol in every pocket, there's certainly a gun in every sheepfold. However, no matter how riddled the sign, it was there, and I found it reassuring. Likewise the black and yellow stripes on the rocks ahead. I left the road, and plunged along a narrow ledge that swung in and out of clefts in the mountainside, now scraping my right elbow on the rocks, now with my left boot heel overhanging space. This was fantastically exhilarating. The coastal landscape had me gasping: tremendous rocky bluffs and gorges marching inland, orange and grey rocks the size of houses that had tumbled down from on high, headlands enclosing tiny bays of grey pebbles only to be spotted from this path or from a boat at sea. Way out on the southern horizon two islands floated in a dreamy grey mist – Ghavdos and its neighbour, Ghavdopoula. As for the path: what had seemed at first the roughest of haphazard sheep tracks gradually revealed itself, by its subtlety in always choosing the best line, as a cleverly engineered, carefully buttressed, well-surfaced kalderimi – the old coast road from Chora Sfakion, in fact, built when donkeys were the only driven things in Sfakia.