Roumeli (20 page)

In Crete, this tremendous metrical saga plays the part of the
Homeric cycle in Dorian times. Everyone knows it, all can quote vast tracts, and, astonishingly, some of the old men in the mountains, though unable to read and write, could, and still can, recite the whole poem by heart; when one remembers that it is nearly a thousand lines longer than the Odyssey, this feat makes one scratch one's head with wonder or disbelief. They intone rather than recite it; the voice rises at the caesura and at the end of the first line of a couplet, and drops at the end of the second; now and then to break the monotony, the key shifts. During our winter vigils, it continued for hours; every so often another old man would take over; listening, I occasionally dropped off for an hour or two, and woke to find Erotókritos in the thick of yet another encounter with the Black Knight of Karamania. (He symbolized, at the time the poem first saw the light, the threat of the Ottomans; Turkey had already conquered the rest of Greece, and was soon to submerge Crete itself.) The rhythmic intoning might sway on till daybreak, with some of the listeners rapt, others nodding off or snoring; or until a runner broke in from the dark like a snowman in a gyre of flakes; the news of arrests in Herakleion, Retimo or Canea or the alarm of a mountain battalion advancing up the valley jerked us all into motion.

Life was not always dark and speluncar. When the snows melted we would pitch our ephemeral quarters on ledges of rock among cedars twisted by the wind, or in high and lonely folds of the mountains far from the eyes of all but initiate shepherds. We exchanged the hut roofs and the cave ceilings for a low and enormous procession of stars or a moon so bright that when it was full the colour of the sea, the mountains, the trees, the thorns and the faces of our companions all showed, as in a reduced daylight, darker replicas of their diurnal colour. The
valleys, the foothills and the answering ranges beyond had the gleam of sheet-metal hammered into angles. A blink and a refocus of the eye would bring them close and interleave and volatilize them into a floating and insubstantial universe where only the shadows looked solid: shadows that rocketed in wide spikes up the flanks of the peaks, zigzagged down ravines and spread like immobilized forked lightning along the torrent beds; rock-faults, invisible by daylight, slanted in stripes; the void between the beetling sides of chasms rose in dark obelisks; tapering clefts pitched illusory pyramids: convex and concave changed places. The shade thrown by the nearby fissures, grottos, branches, eyebrows, rifle barrels and scabbards loomed from the insubstantial radiance in geometric figures. They were bars, parallelograms, triangles, lozenges and polygons of darkness; Cubist scenery in which each clump of aloes and cactus rose in a still vortex.

This night life is lodged all the more firmly in my memory because for a long time it was only then that we could move about the island. Night became day. “Look,” a Cretan said, as the upper rim of the moon appeared behind a screen of hills, “our sun is rising. Time to set off!”; and another nocturnal journey began. This was sometimes a caravan of mules loaded with arms and explosives dropped from the sky or disembarked in a lonely cove; sometimes we headed for plateaux where, after days of postponement, the momentary quincunx of our bonfires would bring fresh supplies thudding round us; unless, that is, no miscalculation or sudden wind or confusion of land-marks in the pilot's eye scattered them among the enemy. More often these travels were undertaken alone except for one companion. Cavemen released, free to leave the mountains at last, and bound for some faraway meeting or gathering of guerrillas, we would descend to the foothills and lose height down glimmering staircases of olive and vineyard. The villages through which we stalked with our guns cocked were silent and unreal
as fictions of snow and ivory. We tiptoed under their arches and down lanes that twisted round the corners in paper fans of steps. Sometimes we stopped with circumspection at the shutter of a friend's house, and after a brief entry and whispered confabulation, continued on our way. Metallic chestnut woods gleamed; the oleanders and poplars were doubly silver by the beds of shrunk streams. The water had dwindled to a net of quicksilver in a waste of boulders that Venetian or Turkish bridgebuilders had spanned with pale arcs of masonry. At a loop in a valley, hundreds of frogs drowned the nightingales, the drilling of crickets and the little owl's hesitant note. We heard dogs in the villages and brief jangles as flocks woke and fell asleep again in folds half-way to the sky. These sounds strung a thread of urgency and collusion through the peace of the night. Sometimes we would lie flat with held breath in a cactus clump or among the rocks or flattened against a wall under an archway till the footfalls of an enemy patrol died away; noticing that the boulders, the dust and the white plaster were still warm from the daylight hours of midsummer basking. The smell of many herbs filled the air. (A fragrance so powerful that it surrounds the island with a halo of sweet smells several miles in radius; it told us when we were stealthily approaching Crete by sea on moonless nights from the stinking desert, and long before we could descry the great silhouette, that we were getting near.) Advancing through the warm night, we had the sleeping island to ourselves and a thousand charms hung in the air. We reached our rendezvous before dawn; a broken-down water mill, a small monastery thinly monked by warlike brethren, a solitary chapel, a circular threshing floor, or a lonely goat-fold on a high ledge. There would be challenge and answer, a scrape of hobnails on rock and a clinking of arms as dark figures rose gleaming from the shadows into the moonlight; then salutations and fifty whiskery embraces. When the moon set, the sky lifted a wing of radiance at the other end of the heavens.
The shafts of the sun sloped up into the air from many clefts between the eastern vertebrae of the island. When the beams fell horizontal, our meeting place was anchored like a flying carpet in the line of their advance. We killed the microbe of the night with swigs of raki and watched these massed prisms of light shooting beyond us for overlapping leagues until they hit and ignited the white ibex-haunts in the west. The peaks all round us sent darker volleys of shadow along their path, all of them streaming westwards and tilting down into the canyons until the whole intervening labyrinth was filled with early light.

The Cretans have many backgrounds. Visions, accumulated over nearly a thousand nights and days, drop into the brain and replace each other with the speed of lantern slides: darting scattered through olive trees, firing from behind rocks and walls, then running forward again; cursing at wounds, stoically dying; in flight from blazing and exploding villages, uttering promises of vengeance through their teeth; executing, on a lonely plateau, apprehended traitors; sitting, at peaceful moments, relaxed under the great plane tree of a village; gathering grapes into giant baskets; treading out the wine; watching the women harvest the olives by beating the branches with poles of reed and bringing the berries pattering on the bright blankets spread below; loading mules with cheeses like millstones; raising dust clouds at the dance to the
lyra's
frenzy; assembling at midnight in a church set about with sentries while some proscribed foreigner stands godfather to the child of a friend; feasting afterwards on a roof and emptying their pistols into the air to bring luck to the newly-baptized little girl.
[16]
There are battle
scenes, dramas, genre pictures, conversation pieces, kermesses and eclogues, all subdivided into close-ups which pin this world down and make it jut and recede in its proper dimensions.

Were my feelings for the island planted by insufficient and subjective causes? The circumstances of war and the exhilaration of youth have much to do with it; also, perhaps, some chance affinities with the Cretan temperament, abetted by an interest in remote communities and language. The emotions of gratitude and of brotherhood-in-arms and community of purpose all play a part; the Greek bent for hospitality, too, and the universal wish to please. My sentiments may have been affected by our position in their midst. After all, we were isolated links with the headquarters on which all of our military fortunes depended, lonely swallows presaging summer; magicians, almost, who could summon arms and gold from the sea and the sky. But any straggling allied soldier, from whom nothing could be expected but death and destruction as the punishment for harbouring him, was welcomed and cared for as warmly; and all their sacrifices were prompted by an imperious sense of duty; some of them were, quite literally, saints. They not only risked everything to help their solitary allies; they made them members of the Cretan family. Best of all, they forgave our mistakes.

In a place where all is violent and extreme, faults must abound. The passion for arms, the dashing costume, the immense and articulate local pride sometimes degenerate. A damaging minority of
pallikarádes
, as they are called—armed braggarts or bravos, as opposed to
pallikária
, or warriors—and of
pseudokapetanaioi
—“false captains”—does exist. Some of them proved, surprisingly, as good as their wildest boasts. Others vapoured about the foothills on their own or attached themselves until they could be got rid of to the fringe of guerrilla bands; useless mouths to fill and a burden to their commanders. (It is a type of Cretan which, in Athens or on the
mainland gives a bad name to the island in communities that do not know Crete itself.) Mistrust of the truth clouded matters now and then, and the ravines were smooth channels for rumour—it murmured there as unreally, sometimes, as the noise of the sea in the whorls of a shell. Internal suspicion and jealousies were frequent stumbling blocks. Collaboration with the enemy was miraculously scarce, treachery rarer still. Headstrong wills sometimes collided, anger flared, the canyons echoed with ultimata. “Ah,
Micháli mou
,” an old Cretan said to me at such a moment. “We've only got to put a glass roof over this island, and there's a first-class lunatic asylum for you....” But in spite of all these things, there must be a deep underlying wisdom that guides the island in time of stress: the resistance in Crete, under an occupation of great savagery, was one of the best organized in Europe. It was resolutely maintained and unanimously backed; and, in spite of the island's name for discord and insurrection, it was one of the few parts of occupied Europe which was not, after the liberation, mangled by civil strife. Political differences were sunk. The movement was launched beyond recall from the moment the Cretans took up arms at the invasion; it absorbed all the best in Crete. All that was good, brave, wise, tough, enterprising, spirited, dangerous or amusing was on the same side; every Odysseus and Pheidippides, all the Hectors, Ajaxes, Nestors, Lancelots, Merlins, Rowlands, Herewards, Robin Hoods, Maid Marians, Friar Tucks, Dick Turpins, Hiawathas, Kims and Mowglis, were ours. Communist organizations wrought chaos on the mainland; when, later on, they attempted to do the same in Crete, only the scum was left for them to recruit. Negligible in numbers and deplorable in quality, they were soon scattered.

The island has always abounded with marvels and portents and
the exaggeration of the mountains casts an overpowering spell. Insanity and genius vibrate in the air. It is no wonder that the spirit of early Greece, surfacing in the Minoan world, took so odd a twist here, or that this should be the birthplace of Zeus and the setting of the myths of Pasiphae and the Minotaur and Daedalus. Nobody who knows the lines and the mood of these mountains can be surprised that they gave birth to the most brilliant of the Greek schools of ikon painting; those crags almost turn El Greco into an explicable phenomenon.

The islanders' passion for their country turns the island itself into the heroine of most of their songs: “Crete, my beautiful island, crown of the Levant,” runs one of the couplets they often sing, “your earth is silver and your rocks are diamonds.” This is more than a flowery trope: the metamorphic limestone mass, especially where it soars above the tree-line in a wilderness where nothing can grow, does shine like silver and lend to the great peaks, even in August, an illusion of eternal snow; and the sharp-edged and many-faceted rocks throw back the light with a dazzling and adamantine flash. In ravines and hollows at midday, when the sun has drained every shadow, a hint of feat is present. There are no trees for the cicadas, no goat-bells to be heard across the stagnant air; the far-off ricochets of an invisible shepherd practising against a boulder, stop. Sound expires with a gasp; the only hint of life is a horned skeleton lying among the rocks, as though an ogre lived not far off. The world becomes a hushed and blinding wilderness. Colour ebbs from the sky; the hot mineral shudders; all is haggard and aghast. It is the hour of meridian fright and an invisible finger runs up the nape of the lonely traveller there and sets his hair on end. At moments like these the island stands in the sea like an anvil for the inaudible strokes of the sun.

Then pinpoints of shade expand. There is a jangle, and a waking hoof, unloosing a small landslide and an echo, puts an end to this catalepsy. Afternoon divides the ascending gorges
with diagonals of light and flutes the overhangs of rock. Shadows accumulate in corridors frilled with dittany. Narrow enough for spiders to span, they wind for miles at the bottom of precipices that almost close overhead. At last the walls begin to yawn and fall apart. The gap is full of wheeling kestrels and a causeway opens on the hollow evening universe.

Below, in the gold and powdery radiance, village follows village down the flanks of Canaanitish valleys. Their western walls descend in tiers of light. If it is spring, a mist of green corn bright with poppies almost brushes the olive branches. Later, the lanes are pulpy with fallen mulberries; flocks trail their shadows along the slant of the light in a score of tinkling dust-clouds. But, in the years of which I have been speaking, we had to turn away from these georgic scenes and climb into a landscape as different from them as another star. In those giant apocalyptic regions the sun lingered long after the lowlands had been invaded by dusk. Lit still by the remains of the day, the rocks flared ochre and apricot and orange, with shadows of electric green and ice-and magnesium-blue. The edges of the crags and the tilted rock-blades turned saffron and mauve as the last light filled those barren glades and slid upwards out of reach. Then in the wolf-light, the colours would soften and deepen and merge and each dying stone disputed the advance of the dark with its own private glow. The world became legendary. Oracular caves gaped, chasms of delusion fell away, each canyon was the Valley of the Shadow. Sinais, and the Eternal Rocks in the background of Cretan icons, soared. Solemnity invaded everything. We were in the landscape of St. Jerome's hermitage, of
trecento
Temptations and Agonies. High above, on the uttermost pinnacle, the last of the daylight would linger like a Transfiguration, then glide aloft and disperse in the fainting and darkening sky. It was night. Our red cigarette ends would brighten as we sat on the rocks before the final weary
scramble and the exchange of whistles in the dark that would tell us that we were home again.