Mani (40 page)

Beyond the skimming gulls, the steep mountains of the coast followed each other southward with scarcely a village. I asked the captain if it was true about the seals at Egg Island, off Cythera. “Absolutely true,” he said, “
tous vlépei kanéis na kánoun vengéra—na seirianízoun kai na perásoun tín óra tous
”—“you see them hobnobbing and strolling about and passing the time of day.” This reminded me of a phrase I heard years ago when I asked Katsimbalis, before going there, what the Sporades were like. “Wonderful islands!” was the answer. “Skiathos! Skopelos! Skyros! The lobsters in Skopelos are the best in the world, and the biggest! They're all over the place. Why, you see them walking up and down the streets and sitting down at tables—reading newspapers, playing tric-trac, ordering coffees and smoking narghilehs....” It was practically true. The first thing I met on landing in Skopelos was a young deacon carrying an enormous lobster under each arm, their slowly swivelling antennae covering so wide a span that they quite barred the narrow lane. But I have been unlucky with strange animals in Greece. Most of my contacts have been at one remove. I have never seen a wolf in Greece, though I arrived in Grevena years ago just after a party of Gipsies, trudging across the snow to play at a wedding, had been eaten to a man, little remaining except their boots and a hand clutching the neck of a fiddle with which its owner had obviously been laying about him as a weapon of defence. I once saw a wild boar on the Albanian border, one or two deer in Pindus, a bear never, though a few years ago, just after the civil war, an old Vlach shepherd in Samarina said to me: “Last year, when the hard fighting was going on up there,” he pointed to the surrounding peaks, “the bears all moved down into the valleys and villages. You met them everywhere. They couldn't stand the noise, and I don't blame them.” I think, but am not
quite sure, that I have once caught a distant glimpse of an
agrimi
, the mad, shy, fierce, the all-but-invisible and nearly extinct ibex of the White Mountains in Crete. I have seen a landslide caused by its leap and I am deeply ashamed to say I have eaten a bit of one in the last tiny hamlet in the Samaria gorge. It was dark and gamey and incredibly good. A turtle I have seen only once, from the deck of a ship, floating languidly and then sculling steeply down into the blue-green depths between Bari and Corfu almost exactly at that point in the dotted line down the middle of the Adriatic where the
filioque
drops out of the Creed. I have once or twice seen the top half of their shells sliced from their base and, turned upside down, transformed into a cradle. One had a fisherman's daughter asleep in it and very comfortable and decorative it looked. I have never seen a shark. They are extremely rare but they are, unfortunately, occasional visitors, following ships through the Suez Canal and straying into Greek waters. There was a terrible tragedy a few years ago—again, off Corfu—when a beautiful girl fell a victim to one, vanishing for ever on the eve of her marriage. But these monsters cannot be entirely due to the digging of the Canal. Solomos, the great Zantiot poet, wrote a moving elegy on the similar death of a soldier from the British garrison in those same Ionian isles. Fortunately, in spite of local scares, it no more stops people bathing than an occasional train accident stops travel. One never hears much about tunny in Greek waters; they seem to proliferate further west in the Mediterranean though their relation, the palamida, is not uncommon. In ancient times a special watchman, a
thonoskopos
, would keep vigil for tunny shoals on likely headlands and when his warning cry came the young men would run down to the boats with tridents and harpoons.

This journey seems vowed to zoological incident, for soon the delighted cry of “
Delphinia!
” went up: a school of dolphins was gambolling half a mile further out to sea. They seemed to
have spotted us at the same moment, for in a second half a dozen were tearing their way towards us, all surfacing in the same parabola and plunging together as though they were in some invisible harness. Soon they were careering alongside and round the bows and under the bowsprit, glittering mussel-blue on top, fading at the sides through gun-metal dune-like markings to pure white, streamlined and gleaming from their elegant beaks to the clean-cut flukes of their tails. They were beautiful abstractions of speed, energy, power and ecstasy leaping out of the water and plunging and spiralling and vanishing like swift shadows, each soon to materialize again and sail into the air in another great loop so fast that they seemed to draw the sea after them and shake it off in mid-air, to plunge forward again tearing two great frothing bow-waves with their beaks; diving down again, falling behind and criss-crossing under the keel and deviating and returning. Sometimes they flung themselves out of the sea with the insane abandon, in reverse, of a suicide from a skyscraper; up, up, until they hung poised in mid-air shaking in a muscular convulsion from beak to tail as though resolved to abandon their element for ever. But gravity, as though hauling on an oblique fishing-line, dragged them forward and down again into their rifled and bubbling green tunnels. The headlong speed through the water filled the air with a noise of rending and searing. Each leap into the air called forth a chorus of gasps, each plunge a sigh.

These creatures bring a blessing with them. No day in which they have played a part is like other days. I first saw them at dusk, many years ago, on the way to Mount Athos. A whole troop appeared alongside the steamer, racing her and keeping us company for three-quarters of an hour. Slowly it grew darker and as night fell the phosphorescent water turned them into fishes of pale fire. White-hot flames whirled from them. When they leapt from the water they shook off a million fiery
diamonds, and when they plunged, it was a fall of comets spinning down fathom after fathom—league upon league of dark sky, it seemed—in whirling incandescent vortices, always to rise again; till at last, streaming down all together as though the heavens were falling and each trailing a ribbon of blazing and feathery wake they became a far-away constellation on the sea's floor. They suddenly turned and vanished, dying away along the abyss like ghosts. Again, four years ago, when I was sailing in a yacht with six friends through the Outer Cyclades in the late afternoon of a long and dreamlike day, there was another visitation. The music from the deck floated over the water and the first champagne cork had fired its sighting-shot over the side. The steep flank of Sikinos, tinkling with goat bells and aflutter with birds, rose up to starboard, and, close to port, the sheer cliffs of nereid-haunted Pholegandros. Islands enclosed the still sea like a lake at the end of the world. A few bars of unlikely midsummer cloud lay across the west. All at once the sun's rim appeared blood red under the lowest bar, hemming the clouds with gold wire and sending a Japanese flag of widening sunbeams alternating with expanding spokes of deeper sky into the air for miles and spreading rose petals and sulphur green across this silk lake. Then, some distance off, a dolphin sailed into the air, summoned from the depths, perhaps, by the strains of
Water Music
, then another and yet another, until a small company were flying and diving and chasing each other and hovering in mid-air in static semicircles, gambolling and curvetting and almost playing leapfrog, trying to stand on tip-toe, pirouetting and jumping over the sinking sun. All we could hear was an occasional splash, and so smooth was the water that one could see spreading rings when they swooped below the surface. The sea became a meadow and these antics like the last game of children on a lawn before going to bed. Leaning spellbound over the bulwarks and in the rigging we watched them in silence. All at once, on a sudden decision, they vanished;
just as they vanish from the side of the
Aphrodite
in this chapter, off the stern and shadowless rocks of the Mani.

“
Kala einai ta delphinia
,” the captain said when they had gone. “They're good.”

Mythology and folklore are full of tales about dolphins. They all revolve round their benevolence, their love and solicitude for man. It is well-known how Taras, saved from drowning by a dolphin, lived to found the city of Tarentum: the manner of his rescue is immortalized on Tarentine coins. Between Corinth and Syracuse, Arion the lyre-player was rescued from death at the hands of predatory sailors by a troop of dolphins that had gathered round the ship to listen to his playing. There are heartrending tales of dolphins falling in love with mortals and attempting to join them on land, dying by cruel misadventure and changing, in their death throes, through all the colours of the rainbow.
[3]
Their passion for music was queerly illustrated a few years ago. A friend of mine, Dr. Andrea Embirikos, the psychiatrist and poet and a member of the well-known ship-owning dynasty, was rowing peacefully in a boat one afternoon off the coast of his native Andros, listening to a concert on the small portable wireless he had placed on the bench in the stern. After a few bars, half a dozen dolphins appeared from nowhere and began to swim quietly round the boat. Soon, however, carried away by the crescendo they grew more boisterous and leapt out of the water, banging the side of the boat and even attempting to join him on board. The boat rocked dangerously and Andreas hastily picked up the wireless lest it should be knocked overboard and put it under his arm—it was one of those sets that switch off automatically when the lid is closed. Almost at once the dolphins disappeared and all was calm. A few minutes later he opened the set again and an identical scene took place. Finally he was forced to row to land
and finish the concert among the rocks, under the reproachful gaze—at a safe distance now—of his would-be companions.
[4]

I was told, for what it is worth, another queer tale, the same year, of a sailor who fell overboard between Crete and Santorin. He was a bad swimmer, and when he was tired out and about to sink to the bottom he felt something large and smooth thrusting between his exhausted and water-treading legs: his knees were being separated by the back of a surfacing dolphin bent on saving him. Soon he was being carried along at a gentle pace by the kind mammal and after a while, afraid of losing his seat, he wrapped his arms round his saviour's neck. But in a few seconds his mount became as stiff as a plank, and rolled over with its white belly in the air, unsaddling the sailor, who had unwittingly blocked the dolphin's blow-hole with his forehead and killed it stone dead by suffocation. But the man's feet touched bottom and he was saved....

Similar tales abound....

Could they have any connection with one of the most notable mentions of the species and one of the strangest scenes in mythology? Once, when Dionysus had hired a ship to carry him incognito from Icaria to Naxos, the crew, a band of conspiring Tyrrhene pirates of the same feather as Arion's malefactors, altered course to Asia to sell the god as a slave. The god changed himself into a lion and the mast and the oars into serpents and entwined the ship with a sudden network of ivy and filled the air with the sound of flutes. Mad with terror, the pirates leapt overboard and, changed into dolphins by the god, swam bewildered away.... Could this account for their obsession with music and their age-old courtship of mankind to which, before their metamorphosis, they belonged? Their kindness to mankind might be a protracted atonement for their past
harshness and impiety....I don't think so. They seem too transparently good to have been villains in a previous life....

The captain was pleased, because they bring luck to a ship. He leant contentedly on the blue and white striped tiller flicking his tasselled chaplet of amber beads over and over between his index and middle fingers.

“They are strange fish,” he said. “Some sailors know how to summon them. If they see them swimming in the distance, they shout ‘
Vasili!
' in a special way they have. The fish stop dead, standing upright in the water, looking round to see who has called. When the sailor shouts ‘
Vasili
' a second time, they join him like lightning. They all have the same name.”

So they are all called Basil. Is there a link missing, a lost anterior fable that connects them with
basileus
, or King, from which the word derives?

“I've never seen it done,” the captain admitted, “but I've often heard of it. They have a special way of shouting....”

* * *

The watershed of the Taygetus climbed steadily, and its retreat inland indicated that the Mani was growing wider. It rose in a sierra as desolating as a dirge. Lolling satrap-like among the corn-sacks, we watched the dry ravines succeed each other above the restless jungle of goats' horns. The captain gave an occasional shift to the tiller and shouted an order and then continued humming to himself.

* * *

Most of these orders and many maritime terms in Greece are of Italian origin, in the same way that so many English sea terms, though to a lesser degree, are Dutch. They are a legacy from the Venetian maritime empire. The same nautical
lingua franca
holds good, irrespective of nationality, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Red Sea and along the southern Euxine coast as far as the Caucasus. The Greek
Laska!
is
Lascia!
—“pay out rope,” or “let loose.”
Founda!
is “let the anchor drop to the bottom!”