Mani (22 page)

In the
Odyssey
, the newcomer often strikes a banquet in progress, and very often a stranger in Greece to-day will find himself led to an honourable place at a long table of villagers celebrating a wedding, a baptism, a betrothal or a name-day and his plate and glass are filled and refilled as though by magic. Often, by a little chapel (dedicated to the prophet Elijah, the
Assumption or the Transfiguration on a mountain top, or, outside some built-up cave, to a
Chryssospiliotissa
—a Virgin of the Golden Grotto—or St. Anthony of the Desert), he will find the rocks and the grass starred with recumbent pilgrims honouring a pious anniversary with singing and dancing, their baskets open and napkins of food spread out under the branches, the wine flowing freely from gourds and demijohns; and here, as at the village festivals, the traveller is grasped by horny hands, a place is made smooth for him on the cut brushwood, a glass put between his fingers and a slice of roast lamb offered on a fork or a broad leaf. This general hospitality on feast days is less remarkable than the individual care of strangers at all seasons. It is the dislocation of an entire household at a moment's notice that arouses astonishment. All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by a kindness so unfeigned that it invests the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.

To-night, however, there was a change in the accustomed Homeric ritual. After drinking
ouzo
in the walled yard at the tower's foot, Vasilio's father said, “It's a hot night. Let's eat in the cool.” He took a lantern and led the way into the tower. We followed him up the steep ladders through storey after storey until, breathless with climbing, we were on a flat roof about eight yards square surrounded by a low parapet. Chairs appeared from below and Vasilio took a coil of rope and paid it into the night; hauling it up the sixty-foot drop after an exchange of shouts, with a round tin table tied to the end. She took out and spread a clean white tablecloth and put the lan-tern in the centre, installing a circle of gold in the moonlight. Our faces, which were soon gathered round a roast lamb which I hoped we had not met before, were lit up by an irrelevant glow of gold which changed to the moonlit pallor of silver while jaw-bones and eye sockets were stressed with shadow if anyone leaned out of the lantern's range. The rope, to the end
of which a huge basket had now been tied, was lowered into the dark again and again for more wine and food.

The night was still. As our tower-top was the highest in Vatheia, the others were invisible and we might have been dining in midair on a magic carpet floating across dim folds in the mountains. Standing up, the other tower-tops came into sight, all of them empty and clear under the enormous moon. Not a light showed, and the only sounds were the shrill drilling note of two crickets, a nightingale and a faint chorus of frogs, hinting of water somewhere in the dry sierra. I tried to imagine how this little group, dining formally round a solitary golden star of lamplight on this little hovering quadrilateral, would look to a passing bird. I asked our host if they often had meals up here: “Only when we feel like it,” he answered.

He had been talking of the winter, and the familiar theme of the Mani wind. “It makes a noise that could deafen you, when the tramontana blows through these towers,” he said; and all at once, in the silence and the hot moonlight, I had a vision of that lamentable blast screaming past the shutters, of maelstroms of hail and snow coiling through those perpendiculars. “And when there's a thunderstorm, you think the world has come to an end with all the noise and the lightning! That's when the young think of marrying, to have company in bed to keep them warm....”

The table was cleared and lowered swinging into the gulf and blankets and pillows, glasses and pitchers of drinking water laid out for the guests. “I'll put this on the trap door,” he said, picking up an iron cannon ball from the parapet and cupping it in his palm like an orb, “in case the wind should blow up and slam it shut. It's all they are good for now.”

We sauntered to the end of the village before going to bed. Beyond the cactuses a few miles to the south, a long row or twinkling lights, sailing westward under an upright pale pillar of smoke, suddenly slid out of the lee of Cape Matapan. It
must have been an enormous liner lit up for a gala night. Could we hear the sound of music? One could almost imagine it. “
Megálo
,” said our host, “Big”; truthfully enough. It disappeared behind the leaf of a prickly pear and emerged a minute later. I wondered where it was coming from. Beirut? Alexandria? Bombay? Colombo? Hong Kong? I thought of the passengers in tropical mess-jackets and low dresses and comic paper hats, the brandy revolving in balloon glasses, cigar smoke ascending, ship-board romances ripening, cliques cohering and splintering, plans forming and couples pairing off for the sights of Naples and trips to Vesuvius; of the gallant ship's doctor, of the life and soul of the party, of the ship's bore and the ship's vamp. Perhaps they were wearing false noses fitted with burlesque moustaches and large cardboard spectacles? To what tunes were they dancing, and were streamers being thrown? I remembered once, sailing past the southern Peloponnese and Calabria, leaning across the bulwarks as many of the passengers must have been leaning at that moment and wondering what happened in those wild and secret looking mountains to the north. “Look,” perhaps they were saying, “there's a light up there! How lonely it must be...”

The lights grew smaller as the liner followed the same path as many a Phoenician galley and many a quinquereme; heading northward in the invisible groove of Harald Hardraada's ships, sailing shield-hung and dragon-prowed from the Byzantine splendour of Mickelgard for grey northern fjords at the world's furthest edge. At last it shrank to a faint glow and was swallowed up by an immense obliterating cactus.

* * *

There was much, it occurred to me next day, to be said for tower-dwelling, especially in summer. Eating and sleeping on the roof while the lanes below hoard the stagnant air, one
catches every passing shred of wind. One sleeps in the sky surrounded by stars and with the moon almost within arm's reach. Dawn breaks early, and, by chasing the sleeper down the ladder out of the sunlight, solves the daily martyrdom of getting up; and the Bastille-thick walls cool the rooms with a freshness that grows with each descending storey as the layers of ceiling accumulate overhead: six gradations of temperature from the crucifying blaze of the roof to the arctic chill of the excavated cellar. And towers ensure the rare and inestimable boon, that non-existent commodity of Greek village life, privacy. The turmoil of domestic life, insulated by the absorbent vacua of the intervening chambers, swirls and bubbles fifty feet below. Who is going to climb all those belfry ladders? (Alas, no physical barrier can daunt the thirst for company; but for the moment all was quiet.) There was another negative benefit of the Mani, and one which it had taken some time to appreciate: not since Areopolis had there been a single wireless set; nothing but that delightful horned gramophone in Yeroliména. The rest of Greece, even the remotest Arcadian or Epirote village, rings from sunrise to midnight with swing music, sermons in English, talks on beekeeping in Serbo-Croat, symphonic music from Hamburg, French weather reports, the results of chess contests in Leningrad or shipping signals in morse code from the Dogger Bank, and, as the instrument is nearly always faulty, all these sounds, turned on full blast, are strung on the connecting thread of an unbroken, ear-drum-puncturing and bat-like scream. Nobody listens, but it is never turned off. Towns are pandemonium. Every shop and café sends out a masterless, hydrophobic roar. These rabid wirelesses should be hunted out and muzzled or shot down like mad dogs. In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set.... But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails. The only sound at the moment,
as I sat over my long neglected diary among piles of sacks, was Vassilio half singing and half humming to herself in the room below.

She had demanded, the night before, all the washing which had accumulated since Sparta, and I had seen her foreshortened torso thumping and rinsing before daybreak in a stone trough in the yard and later spreading the laundry to dry on boulders and cactus branches. Now with this soft singing the delicious childhood smell of ironing floated up through the trap door. A floor further down her mother was weaving at her great loom which sent forth a muted and regular click-clack of treadles.

Beyond the bars of my window the towers descended, their walls blazoned with diagonals of light and shade; and, through a wide gap, castellated villages were poised above the sea on coils of terraces. Through another gap our host's second daughter, wide-hatted and perched on the back of a wooden sledge and grasping three reins, was sliding round and round a threshing floor behind a horse, a mule and a cow—the first cow I had seen in the Mani—all of them linked in a triple yoke. On a bank above this busy stone disc, the rest of the family were flinging wooden shovelfuls of wheat in the air for the grain to fall on outstretched coloured blankets while the husks drifted away. Others shook large sieves. The sun which climbed behind them outlined this group with a rim of gold and each time a winnower sent up his great fan, for long seconds the floating chaff embowered him in a golden mist.

The sun poured into this stone casket through deep embrasures. Dust gyrated along the shafts of sunlight like plankton under a microscope, and the room was full of the aroma of decay. There was a rusty double-barrelled gun in the corner, a couple of dog-eared Orthodox missals on the shelf, and, pinned to the wall above the table, a faded oleograph of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, with King George and the Queen Mother, Olga Feodorovna, smiling with time-dimmed benevolence
through wreaths of laurel. Another picture showed King Constantine's entry into re-conquered Salonika at the end of the first Balkan war. On a poster, Petro Mavromichalis, the ex-war minister, between a pin-up girl cut-out from the cover of
Romantzo
and a 1926 calendar for the Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue, flashed goodwill from his paper monocle. Across this, in a hand unaccustomed to Latin script,
Long live Uncle Truman
was painstakingly inscribed. I felt like staying there for ever.

* * *

What sort of life went on in these towers in the palmy days of the Mani? When the great Nyklians, kind in tower and fierce in fray, were still supreme? The few travellers' reports are very conflicting. Many of them praise their love of liberty and their courage, others strengthen the adverse legend. “Famous pirates by sea, pestilent robbers by land,” one calls them;
[2]
another, Lord Sandwich,
[3]
after praising their irredentist spirit, says much the same. A third,
[4]
without a shred of evidence, accuses them of cannibalism: “It is probable,” he says, “that the Maniots of Laconia have likewise in their fits of fanatical fury, devoured several Mahometans of the Morea.” Not even Leconte de Lisle, in a poem of most bloodthirsty fustian, beginning,
Les Mavromichalès, les aigles du vieux Magne
, goes as far as this, though he describes the battle between the Mavromichalis and the Turks near Pyrgos, and how the chief of the clan nailed the heads of the Turks round his tower until it was studded with skulls. Captain Stewart, coasting the region in 1807, pronounced them “the most savage-looking animals I ever saw, very dark coloured
and ill-clad.” Haygarth, the contemporary of Byron, in a rather fine poem written very slightly before
Childe Harold
but in a strain of pure Byronic philhellenism, compares them with their Spartan forbears:

 

 

Indeed, their Spartan descent, their legacy from the time of Lycurgus, was the theme of many writers. But before the War of Independence few actually went there, not even Byron, alas. Almost the first traveller to say anything pleasant about the Maniots in a non-heroic key was John Morrit of Rokeby. A Whig squire aged twenty-one just down from Cambridge, he made a leisurely journey through Greece from 1794 to 1796 (about thirty years, that is, before Greece was free), and wrote some charming letters home. He was stuffed up with the usual forbidding tales about the region, and (though he never penetrated into the Deep Mani) what a pleasure it is to hear someone writing in so natural and unstilted a vein! “If I see any danger of not getting out (of the Mani),” he writes, “it is not from banditti, but from the hospitality and goodness of the Maniots.” The mountains were poor in antiquities, but the Ancients “survive here in a bolder manner, since certainly these people retain the spirits and character of Grecians, more than we had ever seen.” He obviously had a great deal of fun on his travels, and talked flippantly of marrying and settling here as chief of a Maniot band. He bought a Maniot costume for his sister: “a muslin chemise and a blue silk pair of trousers,” and suggests that they should both, on his return, go to Ranelagh dressed up as Maniots. All this is a great relief after the inflated sentiments of most previous travellers to occupied Greece, the
ignorance, the bombast and the false and patronizing comparisons of the glorious past to the humiliating and servile present; the elaborate academic misapprehension by which all the Greeks were either demigods or crawling bondsmen: extremes to which poor Greece had been subjected for centuries by western travellers.

The thing that everyone seems agreed upon, including modern Maniot writers, was the lack of education and the comparative illiteracy of the region. But, in the first house he stayed in, Morrit found a copy of
Belisarius
and Rollin's
Ancient History
translated into Romaic, and his host “talked to us a great deal about ancient Greece, of which he knew the whole history as well or better than us...and his eyes sparkled with pleasure as he talked of the ancient Spartans.” Well, well! But then, of course, it was only the Outer Mani....