Mani (19 page)

The shrine of Poseidon on that shadowy cape was the oracle and sanctuary of the Laconians. A town grew up at Kyparissos for the pilgrims; temples to Demeter and Aphrodite rose from its midst. Much later, after the Roman invasion, Poseidon's temple was destroyed; probably when the Cilician pirates, strong in the alliance of Mithridates, raided and looted the
Roman-occupied Greek peninsula until they were destroyed, in an astonishing campaign of three months, by Pompey. But the temples of Demeter and Aphrodite survived and Kainepolis (the New Town) appeared. They were standing when Pausanias passed this way in the second century A.D. But they too were destroyed at last, possibly five centuries later or more. Nothing is known of the date, though some conclude that it must have been the work of that scourge of the Mediterranean, the “Algerian” pirates based on Spain, who actually captured and occupied Crete for a century, until they in their turn were demolished by Nicephorus Phocas. These terrible men tormented the Greek coasts, looting, killing, burning and destroying for centuries. It is because of them that all the littoral villages of Greece are built a mile or two inland, usually with a tower or a little fort at the
skala
by the sea, to hold the invaders while the burghers stood to their arms or fled.
Epesan san Argerinoi
—“They fell on us like Algerians”—is still a current phrase.

Modern Greek contains another odd survival of the kind which harks back to an even remoter invasion of south-eastern Europe by barbarians: that ruthless Germanic race of the central European forests, the Alamanni. It was strange, during the German occupation, to hear Cretan peasants observe with innocent pleonasm that “These Germans are worse than the Alamanni!” (
Avtoi oi Germanoi einai cheiroteroi apo tous Alamannous!
). It is a little known fact, recorded in the
Wars
of Procopius, that Genseric, King of the Vandals, after he had conquered Carthage, purposed to invade the Mani and establish a forward base on these inaccessible shores from which to harass the Peloponnese. In A.D. 468 he attacked Kainepolis with a strong pirate fleet, but was defeated with such heavy losses that he sailed to Zakynthos in a rage, took five hundred prisoners, hacked them to bits and scattered them over the waves on his way home to Carthage. The little town had saved the entire Peloponnese. Sixty-six years later (according to some
authorities) Belisarius put in here on his way to defeat the descendants of Genseric and restore Carthage to the Empire in a latter-day Punic war.

But these barbaric doings have left no trace in the atmosphere that hangs over Kyparissos. Pirate fleets and jangling Nyklians seem equally remote and equally irrelevant. The slow fall of the evening among this smashed and scattered masonry, the decrescendo and then the silence of the cicadas, the wide unruffled gleam of the sea below and the nerve-stilling quietness of the air, hold a different message. A spell of peace lives in the ruins of ancient Greek temples. As the traveller leans back among the fallen capitals and allows the hours to pass, it empties the mind of troubling thoughts and anxieties and slowly refills it, like a vessel that has been drained and scoured, with a quiet ecstasy. Nearly all that has happened fades to a limbo of shadows and insignificance and is painlessly replaced by an intimation of radiance, simplicity and calm which unties all knots and solves all riddles and seems to murmur a benevolent and unimperious suggestion that the whole of life, if it were allowed to unfold without hindrance or compulsion or search for alien solutions, might be limitlessly happy.

The dusk was reducing those marble fragments to pale shapes among the thistles. It was in just such a mood of serenity that we retraced the winding path to Alika. A hint of moonrise behind the dark towers soon turned the steps to a shallow silver staircase. Down this, buoyed still by the elation that the wreck of these unimportant temples had provided, we seemed to glide or fly. The reflected lamps of Yeroliména were shining in the bay.

* * *

Down a few steps we found a long, barrel-vaulted room. Pinned to the whitewashed walls were Singer sewing machine
advertisements, pictures of King Paul and Queen Frederika, and of the late King George of England, the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth II. Leaning into the cooking alcove a thin handsome woman was delicately arranging twigs, with the economy that treeless regions compel, under a sizzling frying pan. Down a ladder at the other end of this semi-cylinder lay a little platform of rock with three tin tables. It hung immediately above the sea, hemmed in by sweet-smelling herbs in whitewashed petrol tins and a dozen tall sun-flowers. The cluster of masts, the criss-cross of rigging and the sea's many reflections were so close that we seemed, as we settled there, to be under way. The three caique captains were drinking retsina and playing a record so old and defaced that it was hard to detect in the tune an Athenian music-hall song twenty years old. The battered gramophone was armed with a petunia-coloured horn like a giant convolvulus, its open bell painted with faded nosegays. One of the captains, affected by the soft influences of the night, had put a sprig of basil behind his ear. After an omelette and some lentils, we noticed that the water our hostess brought with the coffee tasted slightly of wine. We asked the sailors if they had noticed. The one with the basil—he had a dark intelligent face hard as leather, deeply lined and bashed with vicissitudes, a kind of alert and humorous physiognomy which is just as essentially Greek as the chipped capitals on the headland—said, “Yes, but don't say anything. She's in despair about it.” She had stored her wine in a room above the cistern which warrened the rock under the whole house. One of her barrels had leaked and the wine had dripped through a broken floor-slab into the dark cistern below, draining a hogshead in one long, fatal night. The cistern was filled by rain water led there in conduits from the flat roof, and when the calamity had occurred, spring was on the way and not a drop could be expected till October or later...not till the quails came....

“Have you ever eaten quails in Greece?”

“Yes, once, a few years ago. In Santorin.”

He abolished the little volcano with a wave of his hand.

“Here's the place for them. Why, in good years, they used to send hundreds of thousands of them—
hundreds of thousands
—alive, to Marseilles. And those French know how to eat, the cuckolds. You should stay on till the quails come.”

I reminded him that we were off before dawn for Cape Matapan with his neighbour.

“It's a fine journey,” he said, “and the first thing you see when you round the cape is the island of Cythera. Have you been there? You know Aphrodite was born near there, out of the waves? Hm.” He turned to his companions, and said, “You see? Foreigners know more about our country than we do ourselves. But did you go to Egg Island? What, not to
Avgo
? You ought to have gone there; its about an hour's rowing from Cerigo,
[3]
a small round island, covered with seagulls. You only have to clap your hands,” he did so, “and the whole heaven fills up,” his hands fluttered expansively above his head, “with millions of gulls! And there's a deep cave there, with the sea running in, bright blue inside like the sky. There are plenty of seals swimming about too. You can see them lying on the rocks with their wives and their children.”

Having been to Cythera less than two months before, this was shattering news for us. I have always longed to see a seal in Greece and always in vain. The only one I have ever come across is a shrivelled and stuffed one hanging over the door of a sailors' tavern on the waterfront of Canea.

“...and on clear days on Cape Matapan,” he was saying, “you can hear the cocks crowing in Cythera.”

“I've never heard them,” said Panayioti, the skipper of the caique we were to take on the morrow, “never.”

“Neither have I,” said the other.

“Then you ought to buy new ears. I've often heard them when I put my nets down on the windward side of the cape. You need a quiet day and a very gentle
ostrolevante
blowing; a small southeaster, but very small. Then,” he said, leaning back against a sunflower, a finger behind the lobe of his ear, the other hand outstretched with splayed fingers to represent Wind, his wide-stretched eyes indicating Distance, “it comes floating towards you over the water, you can only just hear it.” His voice sank to a singing whisper: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo!” His eyes rolled ominously from one to the other of us. Hypnotized by the dying fall of his onomatopoeia and delighted at the awe of our silence, he repeated this ghostly cockcrow; still more softly and in a slightly different key: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo....”

* * *

They left soon afterwards. We sat on in the cool silence of the floating garden, talking of these phantom cockcrows; and with a special reason. If the reader knows Mr. Henry Miller's book about Greece,
The Colossus of Maroussi
(which I humbly recommend), he will remember an appendix, a letter from Lawrence Durrell to the author soon after his departure; it describes how, following a tremendous dinner in Athens, Durrell and his fellow diners climbed up to the Acropolis but found the gates shut; Katsimbalis, suddenly inspired, took a deep breath and (it is Durrell speaking) “sent out the most bloodcurdling clarion I have ever heard: Cock-a-doodle-doo...” and then, after a pause, “lo from the distance, silvery-clear in the darkness, a cock drowsily answered—then another, then another.” Soon the whole night was reverberating with cockcrows: all Attica and perhaps all Greece.

Perhaps all Greece. The distance between Cythera and Cape Matapan on the tattered map in my pocket, was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. This enormously extended
the possible ambit of George's initial cockcrow. If the Maniots, with a helping wind, could hear the cocks of Cythera, the traffic, with a different wind, could be reversed, and leap from the Mani (or better still, Cape Malea) to Cythera, from Cythera to Anticythera, and from Anticythera to the piratical peninsulas of western Crete; only to die out south of the great island in a last lonely crow on the islet of Gavdos, in the Libyan Sea.... But a timely west wind could carry it to the eastern capes of Crete, over the Cassos straits, through the islands of the Dodecanese, and thence to the Halicarnassus peninsula and the Taurus mountains.... The possibilities became suddenly tremendous and in our mind's ear the ghostly clarion travelled south-west into Egypt, south-east to the Persian Gulf; up the Nile, past the villages of the stork-like Dinkas, through the great forests, from kraal to kraal of the Zulus, waking the drowsy Boers of the Transvaal and expiring from a chicken-run on Table Mountain over the Cape of Good Hope. North of Athens, all was plain sailing; it would be through the Iron Curtain, over the Great Balkan range and across the Danube within the hour, with nothing to hinder its spread across the Ukraine and Great Russia—the sudden hubbub in a hundred collective farms alerting the N.K.V.D. and causing a number of arrests on suspicion—until it reached the reindeer-haunted forests of Lapland, and called across the ice towards Nova Zembla to languish among igloos. How far north could poultry thrive? We didn't know, but every moment the wind was becoming a more reliable carrier and further-flung and the cocks robuster. Thus, as the northern call fell silent among the tongue-tied penguins of the Arctic floes, the westward sweep, after startling the solitary Magyar herdsman with the untimely uproar and alarming the night-capped Normans with thoughts of theft, was culminating in ultimate unanswered challenges from John o' Groats and the Blasket Islands, Finisterre and Cape Trafalgar, and a regimental mascot in Gibraltar was already
rousing the Berbers of Tangier... Due to the new impetus of Leghorn—enough to send a tremor through the doffed headgear of Bersagliere in many a draughty barrack-room—the Sicilian barnyards had long been astir.

The south-eastern tributary meanwhile, after sailing across Baluchistan, was initiating a fuse of clamour across the Deccan, and, reaching Cape Cormorin, leaping the straits, like the magic bridge of Hanuman, to set the roof-tops of Kandy ringing; travelling east to Burma and raising winged mutinies in the Celebes and the Malaccas. There was no problem here. Thanks to swarms of the far-wandering junks of the bird-loving Chinese, shrill calls were soon sounding across the gunfire of Malaya: fumbling for their blowpipes, head-hunters rubbed their eyes in Borneo; Samoans were stretching and yawning on the split bamboo of their stilt-borne floors and hieratic and glittering birds, poised on branches heavy with almond blossom, were swelling their bright throats above the distant triangle of Fujiyama.... And what of the long eastern journey from the Asia Minor? Those solitary cries across the Oxus, those noisy resurrections among the black yurts of the Khirgiz and the Karakalpacks? The contagious din of nomad poultry ringing across steppe and tundra, waking the wiry Mongol fowl and sailing forlornly over the Great Wall of China; turning north to Kamschatka and straining for the Aleutians? What of the shivering, ruffled frustration of the Behring Straits?

Yes, what indeed?

Hearing us talking with some excitement, the moonlit figure of our hostess had appeared at the top of the ladder with another blue enamel half-
oka
can; and before we were a third of the way down it, we were across: a whale-fishing fleet materialized in the mists, each vessel captained by an eccentric Ahab engaged on a poultry-fancying competition with his colleagues, and it was entirely due to their hardy pets, beating their icicle-weighted wings and calling over the dark sea, that their Athenian
message ever reached Alaska and the new world, crossed the Rockies and rang forth across the Hudson Bay towards Baffin Land. Without them, the Mormon roosters of Utah would have slept on; it would never have needed the sudden boost of Rhode Island which was to waft it safely across the mangrove swamps of Louisiana and through the Maya temples and the nightmares of Nicaraguan revolutionaries and across the Panama Canal. Now it spread like a jungle-fire through the southern hemisphere and a strident spark of sound leapt the swift-flowing narrows of Trinidad to ignite the whole Caribbean chain, jolting the rum-sodden slumbers of the Barbadians and touching off, in the throats of sacrificial birds in Haiti that the dark fingers of Voodoo priests were soon to silence, a defiant
morituri te salutamus
. In the dank unexplored recesses of the Amazonian hinterland, aboriginal and unclassified poultry were sending up shrill and uncouth cries and high in the cold Andean starlight gleaming birds were spreading their wings and filling their breasts on the great tumbled blocks of Inca palaces. The volume of the call was swelling now, sweeping south across the pampas, the Gran Chaco, the Rio Grande; and then dwindling as the two great oceans inexorably closed in, causing the superstitious giants of Patagonia to leap from their rough couches and peer into their wattle hen-coops wild-eyed. Now the dread moment came, the final staging-point and terminus of those great Katsimbalis lungs; the last desperate conflagration of sound in Tierra del Fuego with the ultimate chanticleer calling and calling and calling, unanswered but undaunted, to the maelstroms and the tempests, the hail and the darkness and the battering waves of Cape Horn....