The Golden Step (26 page)

After the 3,000-ft ascent from the sea with its nasty steep sting in the tail, the three miles of flat walking across the high plain into the village of Omalos seemed a doddle. Found room. Ate goat stew. Put head on pillow. Slept like tree.

In the morning the wind had veered round into the west and a cold grey morning lay spread over the White Mountains. It took me an hour to figure out a passage across the plain of Omalos, another of those flat saucers of upland grazing ringed by mountains and dotted with sheep and goat folds and little settlements of brightly painted beehives. Shortly after leaving my lodgings I met a most magnificent billy goat. His deep-toned neck bell sent out a hollow clanging as he flounced away, feathery shins all a-flutter like the chaps of a gay cowboy.

E4 signs directed me down a side track, a well-found kalderimi that brought me onto a hillside where all trace of the path had been wiped away by a giant and very recent landslide. Pebbles were still dislodging themselves and rolling down the fresh scree. The slip must just have taken place. What now? It didn't look stable enough for a mouse to venture across, let alone a laden walker. I took off the pack and sat myself down in Micawberish style. And sure enough, after ten minutes or so a couple turned up on the far side of the landslip. We gesticulated our intentions. I think you were first, Sir! No, you first! No, really, we can wait! No, I'm actually waiting for … for a friend, so do please have the first crossing! Gingerly they came inching across. Neither rolled screaming to destruction. I waited till they were well past me and out of sight before scampering across myself.

Somewhere hereabouts I passed from the province of Sfakia into that of neighbouring Selinos, a region less famed for bloody deeds and heroic resistance than Sfakia, but one capable of producing a clan as altogether redoubtable as the Paterakis family of Koustogerako, a mile or so away across the mountains. Whatever the region, the terrain remained hard to read and hard to negotiate. Waymarks led on to what I assumed was the upper entrance of the Agia Irini gorge. That was confirmed as the gradient steepened and fell away over rock slides and under fallen trees towards the unmistakable high walls of a Cretan gorge. At some point in the long downward scramble, I realised later, I must have passed the Chyrotrypa cave, scene of one of those tremendous tales of heroism by the palikares of the past, when brave local boys Pentaris and Marangakis held off a punitive raid by the Turks in 1822 for long enough to allow the women and children to escape. One of the heroes was killed after a lucky Turkish shot had damaged his gun; the other was smothered to death in the cave when the attackers, unable to winkle him out, lit a smoky fire at the cave entrance and choked him where he lay.

Pine trees provided all the foreground smell today. Other keynotes were visual – shocking pink bushes of oleander, papery leaves of maple and fig against the blue sky, sulphur-coloured butterflies in the clearings. Faded icons and many small coins lay on the church-shaped rock of Agios Giannis, a rallying place for local people living under punitive regimes since time out of mind. Widely spaced rest areas were provided with water taps; I tried one, and received a mouthful of metallic liquid hotter than any shower I had yet enjoyed on this adventure. The black rubber hose that supplied the tap had been lying baking in the sun, who knows how long for? The path leaped up and back down again, now high in the gorge wall, now down among the oleanders in the bed of the canyon. At one point I passed a tumble of car-sized boulders fallen from the walls, and marvelled at the thought of the flood that must have swept them all together at this point. The scale, the weight and the seemingly precarious balance of these huge masses of rock combined to make me feel extremely small.

At the foot of the Agia Irini gorge a road scooped me up and carried me unresisting all the way down to the tiny seaside resort of Sougia, a cluster of houses and rent rooms on a big beach of floury grey sand. I found a bed at Number One, Paradise. At evening, a bottle of cold Mythos beer in my hand, I stood out on the beach and turned my face to the White Mountains, now bulking against the eastern sky. Their ranges and slopes stood bathed in beautiful magenta light, cut abruptly with indigo slashes of gorges and the high black blobs of cave mouths. Up until today I had been among mountains the whole adventure long, for the best part of two months and almost 300 miles. From now on it would be a coastal setting till the end of the walk. As when I had faced the White Mountains from the peak of Psiloritis, I found my hat was in my hand in a bareheaded salute. These great ranges of Crete seemed somehow to demand it.

‘Oh man,' slurred the boy on the beach below my taverna table early next morning, ‘this is just too much, man.' Great shades of Leary! Was this the 1960s all over again? It could seem so, down in laid-back, go-with-the-flow Sougia. The boy and his friend sat on the sand in their dew-pearled sleeping robes, loose bags of cloth enclosing their dreadlocks. The one with the big Taliban-style beard sat cross-legged and straight-backed, meditating perhaps, or maybe just lost in the pinks and greens of sunrise. His chum continued to mutter, ‘Too much – oh man, too much,' as he prepared their breakfast, the fattest and longest ‘Camberwell carrot' I have ever clapped eyes on. If he had entered it for the Preposterous Spliff medal at the Hippy Olympics, gold would have been guaranteed. Long after I had finished my eggs and coffee and started to chat to Roger and Randi, its stink of smouldering pinecones continued to pollute the crisp morning air.

Roger was an interesting man. Dressed in loose silk shirt and fluttering eastern slave pants, barefooted, broad and fair-haired, he looked every inch the louche Irishman of a certain age, abroad upon his adventurous occasions. ‘A couple of times a year my lady in Dublin says to me, go on, get out of my hair, I can see what's going on. Bring me something nice back from Crete, but I really don't want to know about anything else you get up to, OK? And I say, Well, all right, if that's what
you
really want …'

As soon as he arrived in Sougia, Roger had hooked up with Randi, a Belgian woman perhaps 20 years younger than him, with a nice square face and gummy smile under a pert urchin cut. They'd shared a week of uncomplicated, uncommitted sex, and would part with no regrets when he moved on elsewhere tomorrow. The success of this sort of very casual liaison seemed to depend on keeping things light, amusing and flirtatious – little glances and secret smiles. No declarations, no follow-through – God forbid. Randi would take on someone new as soon as Roger's bangled wrist had ceased to wave goodbye from the departing ferry. So would Roger, as soon as he had landed at the next little beach resort along the coast. That was quite clear, and obviously part of the contract.

Looking around the beach and seafront of Sougia I could see twenty couples in various stages of entwinement. Were they all parties to such agreeable conspiracies? Out along the beach a colony of nudists was settling like pink seals among towels for a day's sun-worshipping. ‘We call that the Bay of Pigs,' Roger murmured, following my glance. ‘All those pink bodies lying out snoring all day, shagging in the caves – you know.'

I felt like writing to
The Times
. What the hell was going on? How dare he, and she, and they, and those boys with their reeking Camberwell carrot? How could they do this to beautiful Crete? It took a little walk and a little me-to-me talk to get back my sense of perspective. You've been too long away from the coast, too long in the mountains with your head in the clouds, that's all. Too long among Cretans. This isn't Katharo or Thronos or Kallikratis, you fool. Don't be a prig. Of course this is how people go on when they're on holiday by the sea. Just be thankful it's all still small-scale, gentle and good-humoured. When they build a casino here and a motorway to bring the punters to it – that'll be the time to get the ‘Yours, Disgusted' letter-paper out. What are you – a middle-aged man, all of a sudden?

That night I ate good fish with Roger and Randi, and we yarned long and tall over the pink metal jugs of wine. It turned out a great night, and I was sorry to say goodbye to them the following morning. But something was still bugging me as I started out on the long day's march from Sougia to Paleochora. I nailed it finally as I sat in ancient Lissos, thinking things over, in the ruins of the temple of Asklepios, god of healing. Somehow the mountains and their people, the green upcountry plains, the rushing cold air, the hard work and courtesy of rural men and women, the indignant lectures, a bloody fleece, a bowl of beans, a bed on a bench under a Turkish arch – mountain Crete, harsh and difficult as I had often found it, had got to me, got under my skin and into my bloodstream, as the cosy coasts would never do. The sea was beautiful, the little coast towns picturesque, the sand warm and the living easy – for visitors, at all events. But the mountains had soul. When I got to Paleochora, a charming old town straggling along a promontory around the golden stone walls of a Venetian fortezza, the first bed for the night I could find was in a house whose neon sign proclaimed, with many a curlicue: ‘Dream Rooms'. After ‘Number One, Paradise', that seemed to hit the nail exactly on the head.

Late that night, a paradigm shift. Out from the self-absorption and self-righteousness of seven weeks in my own company, and into the jolly social stew of a football crowd. I fell in with a bunch of friendly holidaymakers from Cologne, and we went off together to watch the European Cup final on kafenion TV. Not one ragged Kosovar corpse or wretched bereft Serbian mother tonight – in fact, since reaching the coast I had heard neither hide nor hair of NATO, nor of Slobodan Milosevic, nor of Beelzebub Beel the big bad bugaboo. Those ardent confrontations, those bitter harangues and passionately held opinions, seemed part of the life I had left behind in the mountains.

I was amazed to see it was Manchester United – Jane's team – against Bayern Munich. I hadn't even realised that United had their hats in the ring. It was brilliantly exciting. Bayern led 1–0 from the sixth minute on, and played a very subtle, very tight defensive game. It looked as if it wasn't going to be United's night. Then they scored in the very last minute. Then, unbelievably, again in injury time. Wild scenes on the screen – the goalie doing backflips, one of the goalscorers dancing with the cup on his head, the granite-faced manager grinning from ear to ear. Best pleased of all were the German lads alongside me. They whooped, they cheered, they threw back their beer and yelled for more. How could this be? ‘Because,' roared red-faced Günter, ‘we are from Westphalia, and we like to see those Bavarian snobs to get smashed! United! United!'

At some o'clock past midnight I walked up alone to the fortezza and stood looking back at the mountains. A fantastic yellow moon floated there. I found oleander petals in my shirt pocket and tears on my face. Strange days.

Of Earth and Dreams

(Paleochora to Hrissoskalitissas)

Suddenly I was tired – bloody tired. A half-finished rent rooms offered itself in a dusty chicken yard. I got a room and sat poleaxed on its grubby little balcony all day. But I couldn't sleep. When I did doze off, it was to dream of Hrissoskalitissas and its golden stairway. By six in the morning I was gone. Last day on the road, with the cracked boots flapping and the map breaking apart at the seams. I scarcely needed it now. E4, having played the haughty paramour for so long, had come over all cuddly and close on this final day. Striped poles abounded, tin signs glinted in the sun, rocks and trees carried brave stripes of black and yellow as if it was Cup Final morning.