From the Elephant's Back (32 page)

Spirit of Place

Travel Writing

Corfu

Isle of Legend

1939

IT LIES IN THE SHADOW
of the Albanian snows, its yellow sickle dim in this late spring haze, as a vessel lies at anchor;
[1]
northward looms the snout of Pantocratoras,
[2]
like the eroded sutures of a skull; southward the more kindly landscape slides downhill, dappled with cultivation to Lefkimi,
[3]
the flat Calabrian-looking plateau inhabited only by deepsea squills. Strictly speaking, it gives the impression of two islands, not one; the metamorphic northern balconies of stone, habitation only for the monk and the eagle, welded to the sleepy lowlands facing the mainland. To the north and west, vertebrae of stone, the unmistakable Grecian flavour; to the east, in the rich moist acres of cultivation, a polyglot, confusing atmosphere—Byzance, Venice, Turkey, Russia.
[4]

The town itself is enigmatic, various—some have said characterless; the architecture Venetian, confused by British Victorian monuments, French adaptations, modern Greek scenic effects.
[5]
The people shiftless, lazy, not to be trusted; all the vices and none of the virtues of six occupations. The Ghetto still speaks a private argot which has been identified with a Venetian dialect of the Middle Ages;
[6]
the British have left behind them their traditional game, cricket,
[7]
whose terminology has become with time nothing less than fantastic; the French a tradition for sparkle and gallantry; the Turks a hatred and fear which nothing will ever dispel.

But apart from these urban manifestations, the character of the Corfiots has remained a well-defined constant; since the Corinthian wars they have remained a contentious, difficult people: wrong-headed, insular. If their island is Homeric, the fishermen of the northern coasts live up to the reputation history has given them; do not forget that Ulysses was washed up in the great bay at Paleocastrizza.
[8]
The whole impetus of the island's history is contained in a phrase like that. At the mouth of Lake Halkiopolous you can still see the fate of the boat that took him home—spars, rigging, men, all turned to stone. The women still wash their clothes in the little stream that flows down by the hillock still called Atona, where the temple stood; the cypresses still arch in the wind by the deserted temple of Artemis.
[9]

The ancient pantheon still exists, through it has suffered a sea change. Charondas the ferryman has become Lord of Death in the place of Pluto; and in some of the mountain villages he has been turned into “the black cavalier,” the night-rider, who comes down from the sky, gathering little children at his saddle and trailing the old men after him into his kingdom—by the hair! In some places, however, the obol is still placed between the lips of the corpse before burial, indicating that the Ferryman has perhaps not altered his occupation, and still demands the fee for the crossing.
[10]

The Black Rider probably dates from the time of the Klephts, those doughty ruffians to whom Greece owes her present independence; the legends lie like geological formations in the people's consciousness, difficult to disentangle, difficult to assign to their correct period. The overlapping occupations have left behind them their debris of superstition; for example, the Venetians left behind them a headless negro to haunt the scorching swamps by Govina;
[11]
the Turks, the ghosts of an eunuch and a young girl who walk by the full moon among the cypresses near Ypso,
[12]
wringing their hands and moaning.

The patron saint of the island himself (Saint Spiridion) has a formidable reputation for miracles; during the Turkish invasions he performed innumerable feats of divine daring, stamping out armies, sinking flotillas, and decoying a grain-fleet to the island once when the inhabitants were on the point of starvation; the peasants cherish a unique faith in him, taking their diseases to the church, their hopes, their problems, more readily than to the doctors. Every year the wizened little mummy of the saint is carried in a progress round the town, bobbing and twitching, through the glass windows of his sedan-chair. To swear by his name is to swear the most solemn of oaths; to touch him is to be healed of the most intractable disease; to renounce him would be to become tied suddenly in knots by the four agues. But since the good saint is a busy man, and cannot be everywhere at once, complimentary charms against fate are favoured; the cart-horses wear a necklet of beads as a protection against the evil eye; the priest confers a more orthodox blessing at certain times of the year, splashing the house with holy water from a cypress-twig; amulets of terrific efficacy are bartered in the town.

Possession by devils is a phenomenon to be met with also; by great luck I was able to witness the possession of an old lady by the Fiend, a sight not only convincing and frightening, but one which did not seem to answer any medical descriptions of suggestive hysteria or epilepsy. The subject collapsed on the deck of a sailing-boat (she was on her way to the town), and became absolutely rigid, her features drained of blood until the flesh took on a strange mud colour. A moment of this rigidity and she began to tremble convulsively, and to utter the strangest of sounds—the hoarse, muffled barking of a dog. The fit lasted perhaps five minutes, perhaps slightly more.

Other cases of demoniacal possession have been recorded in which the Fiend spoke from the mouth of the subject in an unknown language (analogous to the “pneumatic tongues” mentioned by St. Paul).
[13]
The exorcism service in Alexandrine Greek, chanted by an unlettered priest, however, is apt to be almost as bizarre as the phenomenon it is intended to destroy. Possession by devils is second only to possession by nereids; the penalties are not specified but they are grave ones. To a woman one can lose one's heart, but to a nereid a man will lose his soul.

On the deserted sand-beaches of the west coast at the full moon strange ceremonies are supposed to take place. The man who sleeps by the surf will be woken at midnight to see the salt-dripping figure of a woman standing ankle-deep in the foam. What they will say to one another is not told; but he will bring her back by morning to his village where he will marry her. Beautiful she will be, but dumb; and barren also. But should anyone by chance ask her the fatal question “What is your name?” she will disappear down to the sea by night, leaving behind her a curse on the husband's family and on his descendants.

Midday and midnight are the two fatal times for charms to taken effect; sleep in the shadow of a cypress at either time and you will awake mad: a tonic madness which will give you the second sight necessary to see goblins, the nereids who sit and watch by the deserted springs, and the great god Pan, who is by no means dead.

For the mountains there is one set of legends; for the lowlands another; and for the sailor his own nostrums against evil at sea.

The patron saint presides over all of them. With his image nailed to the prow a man can be sure of a smooth journey across these blue waters, among the islands where the cypresses nod. Nicholas the old sailor (whose portrait appears here)
[14]
declares that when he puts out with his amulet, the good saint locks up the narrow seas and chains up the north wind. He considers himself personally favoured.

But there are other eventualities to be considered, such as waterspouts. A very special technique has been invented for dealing with these. Each craft carries on board a black-handled knife: and when a waterspout has been sighted the captain sends below for it. Seizing it in his right hand he carves on the deck a sacred pentacle; and then, aiming the blade of the knife, like a revolver, at the middle of the column of water, he intones the first phrases of the Demotic Bible:

Éις την αρχην εταν ο Λογος

Και ο Λογος εταν ο θεος
[15]

The desired effect is produced; the waterspout breaks, and the ship can run safely to her harbour.

To sail at the full moon also demands a measure of caution; the Ionian is haunted by the unknown goddess, who rises like a serpent beside a boat and calls out, in fearful tones: “And how goes it with Alexander?”
[16]
Should she receive no reply. She is liable to overturn the boat with a gesture of rage; the only answer which will avert tragedy is: “He lives and reigns still.” For the benefit of fair-weather Ionian sailors, the Demotic text of the formula is appended.

Q:
Τι γινεται ο Αλεξανδρος;

A:
Ζει και βασιλευει
[17]

Nicholas the sailor insists on the necessity of learning this charm. “Because,” says he, “an angry sea is simply water—but an angry goddess is a woman.” No-one who has sailed by moonlight under the Venetian forts, on a sea like silk, would ever disbelieve him. Charms against fate are necessary here in a landscape where the harbours are few, and the villages perched on the ribs of the mountain inaccessible; where a journey of twenty miles by sea seems equal to a journey across a continent.

At Kassope in the north the ruins of the Tiberian fort are overgrown with arbutus and asphodel; the walls gnawed by the weather.
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At dawn on certain days, however, the inhabitants of the little town, huddled beneath, have heard the hobnailed tread of roman centurions and seen the flash of bronze at the fents and loopholes; at Halkiopolous in the south (the Phaecian port, the γλυκυς λιµην
[19]
of Dion Cassius) the petrified barque of Ulysses has been known to move: oars have been seen beating: and the whole island, impelled by them, has started out for Ithaca with its royal guest. By morning the tragedy has happened again. The cypresses sprout from the broken walls of the monastery; the rats scuttle in the dark outhouses. Masts, rigging, shields, men they have been turned back to stone again.

On the long white road which skirts the Venetian salt-pans and leads to the town, the man who walks in the siesta-hour runs the risk of a meeting with the Three Women; if their beauty is not enough to move him they will try other means of getting him to speak to them. They will even take up sticks and belabour him silently where he stands: and if he should so much as open his mouth and speak a syllable he will be struck dumb for the rest of his life. Pan himself has a private dancing-glade above Cannone,
[20]
deep among the cypress and olive trees, where the peasants do not dare to venture; it gushes out of an apparently blank rockface and dribbles down towards the sea. Drink of this water and return, they tell you; for once having drunk of it you will always come back to the island. The charm is on you.

In the spring the turtle-doves arrive,
[21]
and the hills echo with their plaintive, insistent note, whereby hangs a legend perhaps the most beautiful of all of them.

In some of the remoter parts of the island these are known as
deka'ktures
, which means literally “eighteeners” (δεκα'κτο). They say that when Christ was on His way to the Cross, a certain soldier in the crowd, seeing His distress and pitying Him, tried to buy a bowl of milk from a woman standing nearby. Now she was crying at the top of her voice, “Eighteen a bowl.” And the soldier when he came up to her was met by this same insistent cry; and on searching about he could only muster seventeen coins to pay for the milk he wished to buy. All attempts to bargain with the woman failed; to his entreaties she only returned the harsh cry “deka'kto, deka'kto.” Accordingly she was changed into a turtle-dove, to cry her wares forever, in a lower and more melodious key, to be sure, but just as insistently as ever, among the fields. That is the legend; and to it they add, with perhaps just a touch of malice, the belief that should the turtle-dove ever, by mistake, cry “seventeen” instead of her customary “eighteen,” the end of the world would be at hand.

The legends are alive here because they form an intimate part of the Greek peasant's daily life; and not merely alive but necessary to a people which lives in a world so violent in its colour, so terribly lonely in its scenery—a world in which a belief in God is as imperative as a belief in His dark opposite, the Devil. Among these long olive-glades anything is possible; and if it has been said that the ancient Greek legend is dead, it is only because it is almost unrecognisable under its patina. But legend itself lives; and by it the people themselves no less than their scenery become legendary, fabulous.

Here is an island where garlic is still prophylactic against the evil eye, the fingers of the toad against possession by demons; and superimposed upon these folk-superstitions are the lovely aerial sculptures of the ancient world; the mother of Gorgons with her belt of snakes from the temple of Artemis (now alas! A museum piece);
[22]
the deserted bays were Nausicaa played with the court maidens; the long yellow coastline stretching down into the blue towards Xante and Crete, alive under this sky as flesh is alive.

The traveller who climbs the Corfiot olive-groves to drink from the Traveller's Spring must find out sooner or later the uselessness of the act; the difficulty is not to return to Corfu, but to leave it.

The Island of the Rose

1947

IF YOU SHOULD HAVE THE LUCK
to approach it, as perhaps one should, through the soft mist of a June nightfall, you would undoubtedly imagine it some great sea-animal asleep on the water. The eastern spit of sand upon which both the ancient and the modern town were built shelves slowly down into the channel from the slopes of Monte Smith, so called because Sir Sidney Smith,
[1]
the conqueror of Napoleon at Acre, once set up his battle headquarters here. This would constitute the hump of your whale. Eastward loom the weather-worn Carian mountains, casting shadows so dense that the sea is stained saffron by the last rays of the sinking sun. Nestling in the natural amphitheatre where once stood the dazzling buildings and temples of the ancient town, the Crusader fortress
[2]
with its encircling walls and crumbling turrets looks for all the world like a town in pen and ink, situated upon the margins of some illuminated manuscript: a mediaeval dream of an island fortress called Rhodes which the mist has invented for you, and which will dissolve as you enter the tiny harbour of Mandraccio to anchor under the fort of St. Nicholas where once, it is suggested, the famous Colossus stood.
[3]