Mani (20 page)

For there was no hope here. It was the end. We thought with sorrow of the silent poles and the huge bereaved antipodes, of the scattered islets and archipelagos that were out of range; of combed heads tucked in sleep under many a speckled wing that no salutation from the Parthenon would ever wake: the beautiful
cocks of the Easter and Ellis and the Gilbert islanders, of the Marquesas, the Melanesians and the Trobrianders, of Tristan da Cunha and St. Helena. This gentle melancholy was diffidently interrupted by our hostess: she was going to bed, but if we would like to sit on and enjoy the moonlight, she would leave the street door open, if we would lock up and slip the key under the door. Remembering our early start next day, we rose and asked for the bill. She smiled and said there was nothing to pay. Covert benefactors, the sailors had paid it on the way out and turned us into their guests.

 

[1]
The ancient Boreas.

[2]
The Bad Mountains.

[3]
The Venetian name for Cythera, still sometimes used.

W
E BOARDED
Panayioti's little caique, the
St. Nicholas
, just before dawn broke. Four black-shawled women and a ragged priest clustered in the stern and, at the embarkation of the latter, Panayiotis with a wink made the privy gesture of spitting to avert the Eye and the evil fortune which is supposed to dog the footsteps of priests, especially on a ship.
[1]
Up came the anchor and the women's sleeves fluttered in repeated signs of the cross before they resorted to their yellow pomanders. An old man and a boy were beside us in the bows. Both the man's hands had been blown off illegally dynamiting fish and one of the stumps was fitted, in lieu of a hook, with an adjustable clamp to hold a cigarette which he lit with a match held in his teeth and struck on a box tucked under his armpit. (These mutilations are common on all Greek coasts.) The water was so clear and smooth that for long fathoms one could follow each detail of the weeds and pebbles and rocks. The sharp-eyed boy, lying precariously prone along the bowsprit and gazing down, spotted and named the fish as they flickered by: “A shoal of
marides
,” he would cry, or “there goes a
gopa
,” and once, with a shout and a downward gesture with his fist as though he were lunging with a trident, “A big
synagrida
! Oh, the cuckold!
Na!
” thereafter resuming his rapt scrutiny as motionless as a figure-head.

Except for the throb of the engine, all was silent. The bows
made a crease like a long soft fold of silk over the stillness of the water. The wrinkled rocks of the shore were repeated upside down in a looking-glass, the emerging spikes turning into symmetrical lozenges invisibly conjoined along the water's edge. Every now and then a faint shaft of wind coming from nowhere would blur the smooth surface with a sudden fan of ruffles, and then all would be smooth again, and the boat and its passengers afloat in a blue dimensionless dream.

Dawn had already broken. But we were sailing south-east and the sombre watershed of the Kakovouni, falling in a staircase of rock to the isthmus that linked it to the last upheaval of Matapan, lay between us and the sun. Resting in notches of this palisade the climbing lances of sunlight were sloping forward and falling level and growing longer and brighter; as the sun's edge cleared the skyline they dipped and expanded down these western slopes in a score of mile-long geometrical shafts, doubling in brightness where two or three of them overlapped, dimming when an intervening hilltop blocked their golden advance with a sudden blue hypotenuse of shadow. Dawn and sunset civilize and rationalize these blank expanses of grey mountains, reducing systemless chaos to sense and running the mountains into each other with a fluid swing, quickening them with rhythm and sinuosity. Laying soft shadows along their flanks, dawn turns the ashen slag to champagne-colour and apricot and lilac and unfolds the dark branching torrent beds and pins them espalierwise across the ranges until they shrink and vanish under the climbing sun, waiting for dusk once more to expand and subdue them.

Now the olive terraces were succeeding each other in stroke after stroke of shade while the ledges they buttressed were thin curling bands of light. The towers of Alika moved towards us overhead and the ruin-crested cliff of Kyparissos; Moudanistica serrated its high pass with shadows; then Tzoukhalia and the tall spike of Vatheia entirely crowned with towers. On half a
dozen heights a hundred sombre towers, each cluster thrust aloft on a coil of terraces, sailed up into the morning to break the parallel slanting rays of the sun, every campanile shedding a long blade of shadow along the sun's advance.

As the caique sailed further east, village after village turned its sunlit walls to us. They seemed to be suspended in the air to glow and flash there like the lustres of chandeliers. A headland rose and hid them and as we sailed past the little gulf of Marmari the sun was already high in the limitless Greek sky: a sky which is higher and lighter and which surrounds one closer and stretches further into space than anywhere else in the world. It is neither daunting not belittling but hospitable and welcoming to man and as much his element as the earth; as though a mere error in gravity pins him to the rocks or the ship's deck and prevents him from being assumed into infinity.

* * *

At Marmari the Mani is little more than a mile across. The mountains sink to a saddle, the concave coasts lace it into a wasp waist, then it rises and swells again for a last rocky league or two, the coasts falling almost sheer. We drew alongside a narrow ledge and the passengers leaped nimbly ashore, grasping adzes and sacks to chop the rock-face for lime, leaving us to sail on down the deserted lee of the peninsula. Turning a sa-lient, we came upon a solitary fisherman casting his nets. They were buoyed every yard or so with a hollow gourd. These grow in the shape of globes that narrow at the top and then expand swelling once more in a graceful neck which again contracts to the exact diameter, when the stalk is snipped off, for a cork. Scooping out the seeds they clean them by pouring in gravel which they shake till all is smooth inside; then they are left to dry in the sun. This induces the hue of baked clay, making them light as feathers and hard as wood until they look like
perfect and elaborate pottery: convenient wine flasks for a journey, and, here afloat, resembling prisons for Arabian djinns. Both bulwarks of his boat were equipped with pairs of twin uprights of wood ending in two prongs in which his long tridents lay. These forked rests for fish spears were painted blood red like those mysterious horns, which, with double-headed axes, are the dominating motif of Minoan palaces. A wave and a shout, and another bulge of rock had hidden him. A few minutes further south, in the centre of another little bay, a dark cave yawned over the water. Panayioti cut down the speed of the caique.

“There it is,” he said. “The entrance to Hades.”

He was afraid to stop his engine, declaring it was a devil to start again, but he would steer in circles until I got back. So I dived in and made for the cave which yawned like the lopsided upper jaw of a whale (the lower jaw being submerged), about thirty feet above the sea. As I swam inside a number of swallows flew out and I could see their little nests clinging to the cave walls and the flanks of stalactites. The cave grew much darker as it penetrated the mountain-side, and a couple of bats, which must have been hanging from the roof, wheeled squeaking towards the light. The roof sank lower, and, swimming along the clammy walls, I found a turning to the right and followed it a little way in; but it soon came to a stop. I tried all the way round and swam under water to see if there was a submerged entrance to another sea cave beyond. But there was nothing. The ceiling had closed in to about a foot and a half overhead, as I could touch it now with my hand. The air was dark but under the surface the water gleamed a magical luminous blue and it was possible to stir up shining beacons of phosphorescent bubbles with a single stroke or a kick. Strangely, it was not at all sinister, but, apart from the coldness of the water which the sun never reaches, silent and calm and beautiful. The submarine light from the distant cave-mouth makes an intruder seem,
when he plunges phosphorus-plumed into the cold depths, to be swimming through the heart of a colossal sapphire.

I had never imagined the whole of the cave's floor to be under the sea. None of the legends mention it, though there is not a shadow of doubt that this is the cave through which those famous descents to the Underworld were made. When Aphrodite, in a rage, sent poor Psyche here to bring back the mysterious casket which would restore her beauty, Psyche was advised by a friendly tower (grown articulate at the sight of her about to fling herself from his summit), as follows: “The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out of the way place to find. It is on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you'll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through it and you'll see a road running downhill, but there'll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto's palace. But don't forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.”
[2]

Could the land have tilted here, plunging far under water one of those measureless caverns so common in the Greek mountains that go wavering into the dark mineral for slithering and zigzagging furlongs, along which, with sudden strange draughts blowing one's taper out, one crawls past organ-pipes and chasms and stone honeycombs, and between stalactites and stalagmites like the molars and wisdom teeth of some tremendous monster on the point of clenching, to arrive at last, deep in the airless mountain's heart and pouring with sweat as in the hottest of calidaria, at (he stifling shrine of some local, troglodytic and half-wild saint like that of St. John the Hunter on the Acrotiri in Crete), installed to counteract the ancient chthonian
demons which dwelt there before Christianity came? An endless grotto from which the Lacedaemonians, knowing whither it led, recoiled in terror? Its mouth might lie drowned and swamped somewhere in the hyaline chasms beneath my water-treading feet; a landslide may have effaced or a boulder sealed it. The damp surrounding walls were seamless and solid. Fortunately, mythology is seldom so literal and the fact that Charon might not have been the first boatman Psyche had to pay on the day of her descent is of no importance. Down there lay the way to the river afloat with ghosts and the horrible three-headed dog (for whom the two sops, like the two coins for the ferryman, were a return ticket), the dim fields and the long sad halls of Persephone; the grey world where the ghost of the mother of Odysseus was wafted again and again from his arms like the shadow of a dream. It was under this very cave that the bereaved Orpheus, making the dread journey in quest of lost Eurydice, lulled the hateful Cerberus to sleep with his lyre; and here that Herakles dragged the hell-dog into the upper air, slavering and snarling (and, it seems to me, soaked to the skin), by its triple scruff.

There is always something about these earthly identifications with Hades that fills one with awe. Lethe, they say, rolls its stream of oblivion near the Syrtes in Africa. The source of the Styx sends its little cascade down the rocks of Mount Chelmos in Arcadia, and I have followed the baleful windings of Cocytus across the Thesprotian plains in Epirus, not far from the deep forested gorge under indomitable Souli where the Acheron falls thundering. (For literary reasons I swam across it victoriously three times.)
[3]
It is somewhere near here that Odysseus, on the orders of Circe, descended among the shades. The most sinister of all, a few miles from Naples, beside the small gloomy mere of Avernus, is the deep tunnel through the volcanic
tufa where the Cumaean Sibyl lived and where, by flickering torchlight, one can see, so far from its Achaean source, a tributary of Styx. It was here that Aeneas made his facile descent. In the meadows near Enna, the Sicilian peasants still point to the spring of Cyane where Pluto opened the earth with a trident-blow to carry Persephone down to his dismal kingdom.

A few strokes carried me round the corner of rock, the roof lifted and the sunlit mouth of the cave beckoned in a brilliant semicircle round which the swallows were still twittering and wheeling. Beyond, in the flashing sunlight, the caique, although it was quite close, looked very small and far away. It was still travelling in a ring, refurrowing its circular wake again and again. Joan sat at the tiller, Panayioti leant against the mast lighting a cigarette. How clear the daylight looked, and how bright the colours! I caught hold of the anchor on the boat's next circuit and, grasping the shank and putting a foot on the one rusty fluke, took Panayioti's extended hand and climbed on board. Joan pulled the tiller towards her and the wake uncoiled into a straight southward course. Panayioti offered me a cigarette and lit it with his butt.

* * *

The summit of the peninsula sank steadily as we followed our southward course. At last the trim lighthouse of Matapan appeared and the rocks fell steeply to the cape. At the very moment that we reached it, the engine spluttered and seemed on the point of extinction; but the caique sailed slowly past. Leaning over the edge, it was possible to touch the last sharp edge of rock where it met the water. This quick, rough contact with a geographical feature my finger-tip had often covered on the atlas page was a satisfactory moment, like the nursery ambition of closing one's fist one day round an actual north pole in the snow. That final jut of barnacled limestone was the southernmost
fragment of continental Greece and, except for the Andalusian rocks below the flat Moorish roofs of Tarifa beyond the Pillars of Hercules, of Europe too. All the islands lying further south—though nothing actually intervened between this point and the desert—were scattered Greek outposts and skirmishers on the road to Africa and Asia; this was the phalanx-tip. These are simple pleasures.