Mani (5 page)

One of the shepherds, with a hand laid on our shoulders, said the great bond between Greece and England was that we both had kings and queens. It was the first time we came in contact with the unshakable royalism of the Mani. Minute,
long-necked casseroles were pushed into the embers, and, after coffee and farewells as cordial as though we were leaving after a month's stay, we continued down the gorge. Our hands were filled with gifts of almonds and pears, our stuff was piled on a mule and driven off by a boy of sixteen called Chrysanthos. Yorgo's office being accomplished, he shook hands and sped clean up the mountain-side as though he were wearing seven-league boots. Soon he was a speck far above us. He planned, incredible as it seemed, to be back at Anavryti by daybreak. His last words were a whispered admonition about the inhabitants of the Mani....

Further along the gorge, Chrysanthos pointed to some scattered bones. “There you are,” he said, “the remains of a rebel.” I know nothing of anatomy, but they looked very much like the fragments of a human pelvis, a tibia and a couple of ribs. Then we noticed an old boot and a bit of rotted webbing. A little further on he picked up an empty cartridge-case and whistled down it.

“These mountains were full of the cuckolds,” he went on, “a real stronghold. It took a man like Papagos to do them in.” He described, with staccato gestures of aiming and trigger pressing and all the onomatopoeia of a battle—the whistle of bullets, the stutter of machine-guns and the bangs of mortar bombs exploding—how the rebel force had been outflanked and destroyed....“The mountains stank of dead Elasites for weeks afterwards and a good riddance of bad rubbish. But they fought like dogs. Like dogs!” He bared his teeth. “Because, after all, they were Greeks and they knew how to fight....”

The gorge grew claustrophobically narrow and the whirling stratification of each side tallied as accurately with its fellow as if a knife stroke had sliced them apart. They almost joined overhead—spanned at one point, high above, by an old semicircular bridge—plunging the narrow rock-strewn bottom into the half darkness of a cave. Eaves and ledges of damp rock overhung
and dripped with stalactites and a thicker and thicker mantling of creeper and weed and stunted trees choked the converging walls. It was gloomy and dank, the rocks shone with sweating seams and the tracks of snails and the passage was festooned with spiders' webs. At each step their silken meshes snapped and we brushed the tangle from our hair and faces.

“Not many people come this way,” Chrysanthos observed, slashing through films of this grey rigging and wiping the tatters from his stick. “It's a bad place.”

He rattled the stick across some boulders and a small party of bats went hurtling up towards the ribbon of sky overhead. Once he dislodged a little owl of Pallas Athene which flew noiselessly to the branch of a wild fig and watched us out of sight, its body in profile and its head full-face in the precise posture of vigilant alertness one knows from Greek coins.

At last the walls began to slant outwards and subside. The sky expanded. Curling down from the east, an old road, paved with slabs, carried us up again over a milder hillside while the river bed and its diminishing canyon trailed away to the west. We followed Chrysanthos on to a knoll, which he said had been the site of an old temple of Artemis, and sure enough, guarding the corridor which led back to the pass, great irregular blocks of Pelasgian masonry jutted in a bastion, and on the top of the knoll, presumably on the emplacement of the vanished temple itself, stood a handsome old church embedded in scaffolding. The interior was a jungle of lashed beams and platforms of planks, and three masons in those neat paper caps, of the kind worn by the Carpenter in
Alice in Wonderland
(made, in this case, of folded sheets of the
Akropolis
and the
Ethnikos Kiryx
), were sitting smoking among a débris of fallen plaster. They were repairing it, they said, as it had been struck by lightning the year before. They led us up a ladder to the top of the narthex. Daylight showed through gaps, fragments of the rood-screen were broken off, and great fissures crossed the painted
walls. These were populated with lively seventeenth-century frescoes bright with the elaborate gilding of haloes and splendid with splashes of blue and scarlet robes; all were dominated by the church's patron, St. Demetrius, on a prancing steed. A ray of sunlight fell on a menacing figure of Apollyon holding aloft a flaming sword. A mason stroked his gorgoned breastplate, and the two hideous faces embossed on his brazen greaves.

“Look at those two ugly devils!” He pointed to one on the left leg. “That's Stalin,” he said, then at the right, “and that's Gromyko.”

The mountains were behind us, and the gentle foothills waved softly seawards dotted with villages and sparkling with threshing floors. Beyond the last hills lay the mild expanse of the Messenian Gulf and the westernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, where Methoni and Coroni lay. To the north a grey shoulder of the Taygetus concealed the innermost part of the gulf, where sizzled Kalamata. In Galtes, the first village, we stopped for a glass of wine under a trellis with the priest and some peasants in those great Maniot hats, and continued downhill. The road unwound in easy loops. The late afternoon sunset softened everything and, combined with the relief of escape from the confinement of the mountains, it charged the air with a feeling of well-being and holiday. As the hills subsided into a little plain, we fell in with a troop of mules, three of which were mounted by young men. One was a god-brother of Chrysanthos, so in a moment we were hoisting our tired limbs into the saddle.

“From Kalamata?” the god-brother asked.

“No, from Anavryti.”

“Where's that?”

“The other side of the Taygetus.”

He plainly didn't believe it, until Chrysanthos assured him it was true. His sympathy was immediate. “And the lady—I'm sorry, I don't know your name——?”

“Ioanna.”

“And the Kyria Ioanna too?
Po, po, po!
You must be dead! Those goat-rocks are enough to kill anyone. They are desperate things, they drag the soul out of you.” His face grew serious. “There's only one remedy when anyone's as tired as that.” He spoke with the earnestness of a diagnostician. “A medium coffee carefully boiled. Then, after half an hour,” he closed and raised his fist and made a gesture of pouring towards his mouth with an extended thumb, “wine. Good wine. And a great deal of it.” His knit brow became still graver and to avoid all ambiguity he decided to re-phrase it. “When you get to Kampos,” he pointed to the little town ahead of us, whose bells had been clanking for the last few minutes, “you must drink a great deal of wine.”

We were riding through a grove of olives growing out of red earth scattered with stones. The twisted branches were strident with cicadas. The mules trotted along at a spanking pace, and, infected by the excitement of nearing home, they broke into something approaching a gallop. The little cavalcade kicked up a cloud of dust that the last rays of the sun turned into a transfiguring red-gold cloud. We drew rein at the outskirts of Kampos, as the mules were going on to Varousia to collect sacks for wheat which had been threshed during the day. The sun had gone down but the trees and the first houses of Kampos were still glowing with the sunlight they had been storing up since dawn. It seemed to be shining from inside them with the private, interior radiance of summer in Greece that lasts for about an hour after sundown so that the white walls and the tree trunks and the stones fade into the darkness at last like slowly expiring lamps.

“Don't forget my advice,” the muleteer said and with a rattle of hoofs his brisk score of mules went pricking away through the olive trees in their strange aureole of dust.

* * *

His prescription was excellent. Sitting in the humble
plateia
of Kampos after dinner, fittingly drugged with wine, all the weariness of the long day's trudge had resolved itself into a pleasantly blurring torpor. Over the rooftops and leaves in the glimmer of starlight and of the thin ghost of a new moon, the bulk of the Taygetus mountains looked steeper and more impregnable than ever. It seemed impossible that it was only that morning we had set off from that far-away pseudo-Judaea the other side.... Self-congratulation, however, deflated slightly at the thought of Yorgo striding across them at that very moment....A tall form, wishing us good evening and then subsiding on a chair, broke the trend of our sleepy talk. It was a lean, quixotic-looking man with hollow cheeks and beetling eyebrows. He put an
ekatostáriko
of wine on the table and filled the glasses. We asked him about the town of Kampos.

“It's a miserable place,” he said, “a suburb of Kalamata, really, although it's several hours away, and the inhabitants are a useless lot. They're Vlachs.”

“Vlachs? Surely not in the Peloponnese?”

“That's what we call them.”

I said I had never heard of any Vlachs south of the Gulf of Corinth, and never expected to find any in the Mani.
[1]

“This isn't the real Mani,” he said, “it's what they call the Exo Mani, the Outer Mani. You have to wait till you get to the Deep Mani, the Mesa Mani, south of Areopolis, before finding true Maniots. They are quite a different thing. Honourable, tall, good-looking, hospitable, patriotic, intelligent, modest——”

“So you don't come from Kampos?”

“May God forfend!”

“Where from, then?”

“From the Deep Mani.”

 

[1]
See page 86.

K
AMPOS
by daylight was a hot, characterless little town and we were glad to leave. While we waited for the bus in the market-place, the Deep Maniot with the sorrowful countenance came loping towards us under his giant Mambrino's helmet of straw. He produced a clean blue handkerchief in which some plums and greengages were knotted. Peeling them carefully with a jack-knife, he dropped them into glasses of retsina to cool and then offered them in turn impaled on a fork. There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little forethought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one's elbow by ravens. Our benefactor was in the throes of acute melancholia. He hated living in Kampos among all these half-baked Vlachs. He spoke once more of the Deep Mani as a longed-for and unobtainable Canaan. Why didn't he live there? “Don't ask,” he said, and made that tired circular gesture with his open hand suggesting a piling up of complications on which it was too tedious and vexatious to embark. “Troubles...” he said. It occurred to me that he was perhaps involved in one of the feuds for which the Mani is notorious and had fled to these alien lowlands for refuge.

“You ought to be there in the autumn,” he said, “when the quails fly over in millions. We spread nets and set traps for them and roast them on spits.... If you gave me your address in London and if God grants me life till the autumn I could get my niece down there to fill up a great can with quails in oil for
you to eat as a
mézé
in London.... We could seal it up at the top with a soldering iron....”

The bus rattled us along a switchback road above the Messenian Gulf. Twice everybody had to dismount and negotiate bad bits of road, until, after an hour, we came in sight of Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea. Several towers and a cupola and a belfry rose above the roofs and a ledge immediately above them formed a lovely cypress-covered platform. Above this the bare Taygetus piled up.

It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church. The mountains rushed down almost to the water's edge with, here and there among the whitewashed fishermen's houses near the sea, great rustling groves of calamus reed ten feet high and all swaying together in the slightest whisper of wind. There was sand underfoot and nets were looped from tree to tree. Whitewashed ribbed amphorae for oil or wine, almost the size of those dug up in the palace of Minos, stood by many a doorway. Once more I wondered how these immense vessels were made. They are obviously too big for any potter smaller than a titan with arms two yards long. As usual, theories abound. Some say a man gets inside the incipient jar like a robber in the Arabian Nights, and builds up the expanding and tapering walls as they rotate on a great wheel; some, that the halves are constructed separately and then put together; others that they are cast in huge moulds; yet others assert that they are built up from a rope of clay that is paid out in an expanding and then a contracting coil until the final circle of the rim is complete; which is made to account for the ribs and the fluting that gird them from top to bottom....I had heard, all over Greece, that they came from Coroni in the Messenian peninsula, only the other side of the gulf. It was strange that, even here, there should be such a conflict of solutions. There were only four men in the
little group I asked among the beached fishing boats. If there had been more, no doubt the total of solutions would have risen accordingly.
[1]

For the first time,—in conversation, and over the very few shops,—I became aware of one of the typical Maniot name-endings, one which is found nowhere else in Greece: Koukéas, Phaliréas, Tavoularéas, and so on. The last of these was the name of the schoolmaster, a charming and erudite man, who told us of the vanished temple of the nereids built there to commemorate the time the sea-nymphs came ashore to gaze at Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles—or Neoptolemos as he is called in Homer—when he set off for his wedding with Andromache's rival, Hermione. The church, dedicated to the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, now occupies the site. There was a marble rosette in the centre of the floor under which a dowser, some years previously, had divined the presence of gold in large quantities a few metres down; perhaps gold ornaments in some pre-Christian tomb. Strangely, nobody had got busy with crowbars.... In a little room in the schoolhouse was a
rose antique
funerary slab with a beautifully incised epitaph in Hellenistic characters commemorating the great love and respect that all his contemporaries felt for the deceased, “the Ephebe Sosicles the Lacedaemonian.” The inscription ended with a delicate curved loop of knotted and fluttering ribbon. Above the village, in the burning and cactus-covered hillside, he pointed out two rectangular troughs hacked out of the rock: the graves, after all their vicissitudes, of Castor and Pollux; or so it was thought...they looked far too short for the great boxer and his horse-breaking twin whose constellations shine in the sky alternately. Further on a dark cistern was hewn in the mountain-side surmounted by a roughly carved lion's head and, yet
further, hard by the golden church lay the castellated remains of a fort with dungeons and barred windows and rough-hewn staircases. The little castle and the church, we were told, were built by one of the descendants of the Palaeologi who had sought refuge here from the Turks after the fall of Mistra in 1461.