Mani (4 page)

* * *

It was only very much later that this perplexity came anywhere near solution. For there had, indeed, been Jews in the Peloponnese. Gemistus Plethon (the great humanist of the court of the Palaeologues at Mistra a few years before it was overrun by the Turks, whose body Sigismondo Malatesta recovered and buried at Rimini) maintained that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese were of the purest Hellenic descent. The late Byzantine satirist Mazaris ridicules these assertions, in an atrociously written libel in the style of Lucian called the
Sojourn of Mazaris in Hades
, by dividing up the people of the Morea into Greeks (Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesians), Italians (the remains of the Latin conquerors), Slavs (Sthlavinians), Illyrians (i.e. Albanians), Egyptians (Gypsies) and Jews. As this was written with the declared purpose of attacking Plethon, it is suspect; but history lends some colour to his statement. The two wandering Spanish rabbis of the twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela and Abraham ibn Daoud, talk of scattered Jewish communities through the length and breadth of Greece and the Empire. The Synaxary (which chronicles the lives of Orthodox saints) mentions that St. Nikon was unwilling to save the Laconian town of Amykli from the ire of the Christians unless the Jews were expelled, “as the Jews, like the Melig Slavs of the Mani, were a great hindrance to the spread of the truth of the Gospel.” The Greek academician, N. Bees, records that Trypi was known as “a fore-town of Mistra, Jewish Trypi.” So why not Anavryti as well? How long had all these Jews been established in the Peloponnese?

It was with great surprise that I found, in Flavius Josephus and in the first book of Maccabees, mentions of ancient links between Sparta and the Jews; how Jonathan, the high priest in the reign of Demetrius Nicator (circ. 140 B.C.), sent ambassadors to the Spartans, reminding them of their ancient bonds in
the time of Onias the High Priest and of King Areus II of Sparta (who reigned from 264 to 257 B.C.). More surprising still is a letter from the King: “Areus king of the Lacedaemonians to Onias the High Priest, greeting. It is found in writing that the Lacedaemonians and Jews are brethren, and that they are of the stock of Abraham: now, therefore, since this is come to our knowledge, ye shall do well to write unto us of your prosperity. We do write back again to you, that your cattle and goods are ours and ours are yours....”
[2]

Unburdened as yet by all these complications, I slept on peacefully.

 

[1]
Ancient Pharia.

[2]
Macc. I 12. 21–24.

O
N THE
map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southward in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Taygetus mountains, which, from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length—seventy-five miles on their western and forty-five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across—projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani. As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre, subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold. Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of continental Greece. Nothing but the blank Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the northern marches of the Mani, rears a bare and waterless inferno of rock.

But all this, as we toiled up the north-eastern side next morning, was still a matter of conjecture and hearsay. Yorgo, trudging
far above, stooped Atlas-like under our gear. The shoulder-strings of the Cretan bag in which I had stuffed the minute overflow burnt into my shoulders.... The chestnut trees of Anavryti were far below, and as we climbed the steep mountainside and the sun climbed the sky, vast extents of the Morea spread below us. The going grew quickly steeper and the path corkscrewed at last into a Grimm-like and Gothic forest of conifers where we were forever slipping backwards on loose stones and pine-needles. Emerging, we could look back over range after range of the Peloponnesian mountains—Parnon, Maenalus, even a few far away and dizzy crags of Killini and Erymanthus, and, here and there, between gaps of the Spartan and Arcadian sierras, blue far-away triangles of the Aegean and the gulf of Argos. But ahead we were faced by an unattractively Alpine wall of mineral: pale grey shale and scree made yet more hideous by a scattered plague of stunted Christmas trees. These torturing hours of ascent seemed as though they could never end. A vast slag heap soon shut out the kindly lower world; the sun trampled overhead through sizzling and windless air. Feet became cannon-balls, loads turned to lead, hearts pounded, hands slipped on the handles of sticks and rivers of sweat streamed over burning faces and trickled into our mouths like brine. Why, we kept wondering, though too short of breath for talk, does one ever embark on these furious wrestling matches, these rib-cracking clinches with the sublime? Felons on invisible treadmills, our labour continued through viewless infernos like the waste-shoots of lime-kilns.... Finally the toy German trees petered out and the terrible slope flattened into a smooth green lawn scattered with flowers and adorned by a single cistus clump with a flower like a sweet-smelling dog-rose. Yorgo was waiting in a last narrow cleft immediately above. It was the watershed of the Taygetus and so sharply defined that one could put a finger on a thin edge of rock and say, “Here it is.” A last step, and we were over it into the Mani.

A wilderness of barren grey spikes shot precipitously from their winding ravines to heights that equalled or overtopped our own; tilted at insane angles, they fell so sheer that it was impossible to see what lay, a world below, at the bottom of our immediate canyon. Except where their cutting edges were blurred by landslides, the mountains looked as harsh as steel. It was a dead, planetary place, a habitat for dragons. All was motionless. There was not even a floating eagle, not a sound or a sign that human beings had ever trodden there, and immense palisades of rock seemed to bar all way of escape. The perpendicular and shadowless light reverberated from the stone with a metallic glare and the whole landscape had a slight continual shudder, trembling and wavering in the fierce blaze of noon. The only hint of salvation lay far away to the south-west. There, through a deep notch in the confining mountains, gleamed a pale and hazy vista of the Ionian with a ghost of the Messenian peninsula along its skyline. Everything, except this remote gleam, was the abomination of desolation.

On a narrow ledge that overhung this chaos we found a miraculous spring: a trickle of cold bright water husbanded in a hollow tree-trunk lined with brilliant green moss. A wild fig-tree gesticulated overhead. Here, after long draughts, we lay with our feet propped on boulders. While sweat dried in salty craters and our pulses gradually slowed down we watched the thin blue wreaths of cigarette smoke melt into the sky as speech came slowly back. These empty peaks, according to Homer, were the haunt of Artemis and of three goat-footed nymphs who would engage lonely travellers in a country dance and lead them unsuspectingly to the precipice where they tripped them up and sent them spinning down the gulf.... All at once a further wonder came to increase our well-being: a cool breath of wind. This is one of the seldom-failing blessings of midsummer in the Peloponnese. After long broiling mornings when the afternoon, one would think, can only bring fiercer refinements of
torture, the static air, heated beyond endurance, rises all at once like a Mongolfier and the sudden threat of that vacuum which nature abhors, drawing cool drafts from the sea along the winding canyons, sets up a delicious atmospheric commotion: a steady cool breeze that revives the traveller at his last gasp.

A faint tinkle of bells from the abyss told that faraway goats were shaking off the mesmeric stupor of midday. Yorgo, meanwhile, was busy slicing onions and garlic and green paprika pods into a concavity of the rock. Snipping the end off a cucumber, he handed it to Joan, who, without a word, stuck it on her forehead. (This curious custom spreads a welcome coolness on the forehead. It is common, in summer, to see people sitting over their food, or even walking in the street, with these mysterious dark green excrescences growing from their heads like the incipient horn of a unicorn's foal.) Reaching into the hollow of the log, he extracted three
paximadia
from the spring and wrapped them in a cloth to draw the water out before they got too soggy. These dark brown pumices of twice-baked bread—the staple fare of Greek shepherds and of the medieval Basilian hermits—can be kept for months. Hard as fossils, they are excellent; especially with garlic, when soaked to the right consistency. (The baked oblongs are fluted with deep clefts for easier breaking, and the detached fragments look like nothing so much as the brown treeless islets scattered round the coasts of Greece; in fact, many a small archipelago—notably the crags jutting from the Libyan sea off the south of Crete—are called
Ta Paximadia
.) Unwrapping the cloth, he put them on a stone, sprinkled the onions and tomatoes and peppers and cucumber with rock-salt and poured oil over them. Then he picked a fig leaf on which he piled a handful of olives in a black pyramid and pulled out a small bottle of wine. We joined him, he crossed himself three times, and we all fell to. When we had finished, emptying the glass in turn and mopping up the last puddles of oil with lumps of
paximadia
, he produced some
small green pears which were hard and sweet. While we leant back smoking against boulders, he scrupulously collected what remained of the
paximadia
, kissed it, and knotted it in a cloth. There is a superstitious veto against throwing away all but the smallest crumbs of bread and the kiss is a thanksgiving and a memento of the Last Supper. He was a fair-haired, friendly but rather silent man.

“You shouldn't go to sleep under a fig tree,” he said, observing our falling eyelids.

“Why not?”

“The shadow is heavy.”

I had heard this before, especially in Crete. There is never an explanation of this heaviness, except that it is alleged to bring on vertigo and bad dreams; it is as odd as the Caribbean superstition that sleeping under the bells of a datura tree in flower drives the sleeper mad. I shifted a few inches out of politeness, though I have never felt the ill effects. Yorgo lay with his head on a stone.

When we woke up half an hour later, two small figures were standing at gaze a little distance off and behind them half a dozen goats had materialized, their presence unheralded by the clash of bells. We called to them but they neither answered nor moved, and it was only by dint of long coaxings and assurances that we were neither robbers nor outlaws that they ventured closer. They were two barefoot, raggedly dressed and ikon-faced little girls of ten and twelve, both of them extremely beautiful. They were tanned to a gypsy darkness, their hair was inexpertly bobbed and their brown legs were criss-crossed with the scars of thorns and thistles. They sat side by side on stones with their hands clasped round their knees and drank us in with immense black luminous eyes strangely compounded by innocence and wisdom under brows like arched and sweeping penstrokes, which seemed to fill their entire faces. Delicate, fine-boned and solemn, they could have been nothing but Greek; not so much
the Greeks of the pagan world as the spiritual etiolation that gazes from the walls of St. Sophia and Ravenna: the bewildering combination of aloofness and devouring intensity that radiates from the eye-sockets of eastern Madonnas and empresses. They were called Anastasia and Antiope. Too shy to talk, almost their only utterances were an occasional cry—accompanied by a flung stone or a menacing flourish of their crooks—directed at a goat straying too far from the flock. Then they would sink into their silent and wide-eyed scrutiny. We gave them our remaining pears, and they thanked us with a polite gravity, but kept them, they said, to eat later. The pears remained like votive offerings in their cupped brown hands. When we rose and said good-bye, they asked us, suddenly articulate, why we didn't stay on, and the eldest waved her hand round the rocky landscape as if to say that their house was at our disposal. But we hoisted our bundles and set off downhill.

“Go towards the Good,” one of them said, and the other, “May you have the Good Hour!”

The immobile figures of these two little Byzantines dwindled as we zigzagged downhill. Even at a distance we could sense the wide effulgent gaze which those four eyes aimed from their ledge half-way to the sky. They waved when we were just about to dip out of sight. There are very few people in these surroundings, Yorgo observed. “They are wild and shy and not accustomed to talk.” He pointed straight up into the air. The canyon was closing round us. “They see nothing but God.”

* * *

The mountain-side descending into the chasm was an upturned harrow of spikes, the spaces between the spikes were choked with boulders and loose stones and so steep was the slope that every other step unloosed a private landslide. Labouring downhill in cataracts of falling stones whose clatter
sent echoes volleying along the ravine, we got to the bottom at last.

The torrent bed, filled with bleached boulders, wound away nowhere between confining walls of rock. It was utterly desolate. Sometimes the dry bed would widen into a broad pebbly loop, only to close again to narrows which must turn the spate of winter waters into a swollen turmoil of foam and spray. Now there was not even a trickle; only the occasional loyal emblem of an oleander. But one of the turnings brought us on top of a shady and idyllic clump of plane trees growing round the entrance to a cave. It was built up with flat stones into a fold for flocks, and a group of men and women were squatting or lying under the leaves. Donkeys were tethered to the lower boughs, and goats, whose far-off bells we had heard from the mountain top, nibbled invisible vegetation among the rocks. Bronze cauldrons of whey bubbled over fires of thorns, dripping cloths full of wet cheese hung from the branches among bright haversacks and crooks and blankets and a couple of double-barrelled guns and a portable cradle like a Red Indian papoose which swung like a pendulum. Wooden saddles, to three of which we were promptly bidden—side-saddle, they make comfortable chairs when standing on the ground—were scattered about. The men and women, lean and dark as Algonquins, wore plaited wicker hats with brims almost a yard in diameter: great discs over which the shadows of the plane-tree leaves flickered and revolved and slid when their heads moved. We were given wooden spoons and half-calabashes of warm milk sprinkled with salt and then grilled about politics in England, the chances of war, the Cyprus question, Middle East strategy and the nature of the British Constitution.