The Golden Step (16 page)

‘Do you know my brother-in-law, George Aphordakos?' Pantelis asked. Aphordakos the runner? Oh yes, everyone knew Aphordakos. Hadn't he stayed sixty days by himself on the plain, training, running up and down the mountains like a champion? That was a man who could run from Nida to Anogia and back in one hour: a man, in fact, who could catch blackbirds in his hands. So legends start.

It was a beautiful evening on Nida, with the music of sheep bells filling the plain. Behind the taverna the central bulk of Psiloritis loomed, sending an inky shadow creeping out to swallow the hills in the east, one by one. Pantelis yawned and stretched, looking across to the still sunlit tip of Skinakas. ‘Christopher … I think I will go for a little run, to relax the muscles. Just up Skinakas and back – just one-two hours. We must sleep well tonight.'

Off ran the iron man. We had climbed and descended some 8,000 feet today, and covered perhaps 15 miles in eight hours on the hoof, but Pantelis was still on fire. I watched him spring away down the road, as light and energetic as a whippet. Then I slumped over a beer, sleepily watching the shadow of Psiloritis snuff out the foothills and scribbling ideas for poems.

In the night I woke from a tangled dream. Slow quiet breathing came from the bed where Pantelis slept, head pillowed on hand, goatee beard making a neat dark circle on his moonlit face. I slipped out of bed and crept downstairs to stand at the taverna door and scour out my head. Sheep bells tinkled from the unseen slopes. The moon gave out a frosty light. Psiloritis rose like a white whale against a black starry sky, with a spume of cloud streaming eastward from the crest. Leaning shivering against a pillar, I experienced a sense of release. The mountain that had weighed on my mind all these months was lifting clear; no longer a hydra-headed monster eating away at the imagination, but simply a presence of great beauty, a calm shape anchored to the plain, faintly radiating snow light into the night.

A superb blue morning dawned over the mountains, and we were way up high to greet it. The wind had swung round and was pushing hard from the north-east, exhilaratingly cold. Nida lay spread a thousand feet below, its flocks drifting like lemon yellow clouds in the sunlight. None of this was registering with me at the moment, however, as I snotted and sweated through the pain barrier. The only realities half an hour into the climb were the dusty trainers of Pantelis ticking ahead like metronomes on a level with my face, the clatter of loose rocks squirming underfoot, and the urgent need to reach the zen plateau of
kalo tempo
.

Another hour, another thousand feet of climb. Heart, blood, lungs and thoughts had slowed to a smooth interdependent flow. It came as a shock to find the first snow crunching under my boots at 6,000 ft. I looked up. Snow in a blinding white sheet, rising steeply to meet a dark blue sky. Pantelis a couple of hundred yards ahead, putting on sunshades against the glare. Next thing, my nose was in the snow and my boot soles in the air.

I had walked on mountain snow before, but never on snow like this. The Inuit would have a word for it: snow up to five feet deep in the hollows and perhaps a foot thick on the mountainside as a whole, snow with a coarse crystalline crust over a slippery, icy subcutaneous layer. Nine footsteps out of ten sank an inch into the crust and were held there; the tenth would break through and skid backwards on the skating pan below. Bit of a problem. Eventually, after a couple of knee-jerking falls, I worked it out. Kick in the boot toes with each step, jab the katsouna down, and lever upwards. An effective way to make progress, but a tiring one against the strengthening mountain wind. Soon a whole chorus of leg muscles was backing the solos of complaint from my toes, already blistered from their prolonged pounding on Cretan limestone rubble. Why hadn't I nipped up and down a few Welsh mountains for practice last winter, my body wanted to know. How could I have been so casual in my preparation for this adventure? Didn't I understand it was hurting?

‘Christopher!'

Pantelis's shout from above broke the surface of this sea of self-absorption. The wind had snatched off his black and yellow cap and thrown it playfully down the mountainside. As the cap came spinning past I let go of the katsouna and launched myself sideways in a goalkeeper's slide across the snow. The recklessness of the dive amazed me. Whoever it was, skidding down the slope on his back, it certainly was not the timorous fellow who had quavered his way into the Valley of the Dead a fortnight before.

Only those who share my lifelong inability to make bat, racquet or hand connect with an oncoming ball will understand the pure thrill of pleasure I got when I came to a stop a few seconds later, opened my eyes and found the cap wrapped round my skinned fingers. ‘Manchester United!' was Pantelis's one-liner as he resettled his headgear and handed me my stick.

Now there was time to look around as the climb went steadily on. The snow surface was not the unblemished white sheet I had taken it to be at first. The storm winds of winter and the warm sunshine of early spring had powdered it with rock dust and smeared it with meltwater mud. Under overhanging ledges, and at the rim of corries such as the one we were now inching up, the snow had been sculpted into quiffs and waves by wind flow. Where it had melted, pale mauve mountain crocuses were already pushing up among the spiky cushions of
astivitha
. Cretan sage grew there, too, its whitish flowers set among pale furry leaves. ‘With these we make mountain tea,' said Pantelis, ‘mix with honey, make you strong for walking and not to be sick.' Somewhere up here the herb-seekers find dictamos or dittany, the famous cure-all marjoram plant endemic to Crete which the islanders used to say was eaten by wounded deer and wild aegagros to expel the hunter's arrows and heal the wounds. Dictamos keeps out the cold, cures headaches and fevers, increases a man's stamina on the hill and in the marriage bed. You should not trust the dried stuff they sell in cellophane packets down in the town markets, Pantelis had advised me. Better to use dictamos freshly picked from the mountains. But there was none to be seen around the snowbound slopes we were traversing.

Like the Page in Good King Wenceslas, I followed the footprints of Pantelis over the brow of the corrie. An ice-cold wind gave me a shove tough enough to make me stagger. Beyond an intervening valley the high, ship-like prow of Psiloritis came into view at last, a magnificent white nape rising steeply to the summit. I put my head down, pushed my frozen hands into my pockets and plodded up the final rise. Up at the top at 8,058 feet, a giant cairn of roughly fitted stones poked out of deep snow. Pantelis and I embraced, yelling with delight, the highest men in Crete. Tiny icicles clung in the cropped hair of Pantelis's moustache, and wind tears streamed down his cheeks. A huge grin split his goatee. The wind sang out of a royal blue sky. It was a wild and overwhelming moment.

After the celebrations, the hundred-mile view: a compass-wide panorama to all points of Crete. I planted my stick in the snow and turned round and round while the wind tore at jacket and trousers, feeling the island revolve like a propeller around the hub of Psiloritis. Back in the east, cut out of blue lead, the jagged spines of mountains I had crossed: Lasithi, Dhikti and Thripti, Iouchtas and Skinakas standing proud and closer. To the north the sugar-lump sprawl of Rethymnon at the edge of the Cretan Sea. Down in the south the glinting strips of a thousand greenhouses reflecting the sun from the Mesara Plain, the twin humps of the Paximadia islands lying in Timbaki Bay. Fifty miles off on the southwestern sea horizon, the hunched cloud-like form of Ghavdos Island. And dominating the view to the west, straddled sternly across my future, the craggy white peaks of Lefka Ori, the White Mountains, bunched formidably together like turrets rising from a dour castle wall. A breathtaking panorama. I felt the breath actually leave my body in a rushing gasp. I took off my hat and faced the White Mountains bareheaded, an instinctive gesture, part propitiation, part admiration.

‘Come on,' called Pantelis, ‘let's eat.' We crouched against the cairn in the lee of the stones where the wind could not get at us, nibbling goat cheese and olives, speculating on the identity of villages seen far below. Something was puzzling me. Where was Timios Stavros, the chapel of the Holy Cross that was said to sit like a jewel on the crown of Psiloritis? I had been treasuring in anticipation the moment of pushing open the door of the little summit church to see the flagstones on which Nikos Kazantzakis had surrendered his virginity in the clutches of an Irish girl, under the furious gaze of Christ from the iconostasis.

‘Here it is,' said Pantelis, puzzled by my question. He slapped the rough stones of the cairn. ‘Timios Stavros, the Holy Cross.' I stared at the stone pile. It did not look like a building, let alone a church.

‘But – how can I get inside? Where's the door?'

Pantelis grinned and poked a finger into the snow where we were sitting. ‘You'd better start digging, Christopher. The door is down there, two metres.' Light dawned. The winter's snows had completely buried the little church, and the spring melt had so far done no more than expose the topmost stones of the structure. We had been eating our picnic on the chapel roof.

It was too goddamn cold and windy to stay on the roof of Timios Stavros, let alone that of Crete, for more than a couple of minutes. The wind literally blasted us off the peak and down the west face of the summit, chasing us down the contours until the angle of the slope shut its howling away. We descended a long, slippery valley where I had to learn the heel-and-toe technique all over again, in reverse this time. Drive in the heel, stamping out a little step in the snow; balance on the katsouna; a step down with the other foot. Repeat. Repeat. And repeat. Ever been tobogganing on your arse with your back hair in the snow? It's a curious sensation. After a couple of hundred feet of acceleration I fetched up against Pantelis. Once I'd reasserted sphincter control, vast amusement all round. Back to the old one-step. Could this careless snow-stamper and involuntary glissader of the slopes be the old anxious me? It seemed so – for the present, at least.

At last the snow lay behind us, and we descended through woods of maple and prinos trees, following a zigzag shepherds' road. The shepherds of Psiloritis had spoken for centuries of a wild cat, a fourokattos or ‘fierce cat', glimpsed by them from time to time in these mountains. Nonsense, scoffed the scientific community; Crete could never support such an animal. Sheer old wives' tales. Then in 1996, only three years before I walked through Crete, an Italian research team found a
fourokattos
in their trap cage one morning – five and a half kilos of spitting, snarling, tawny-coated ferocity, according to their understandably awestruck report – not far from the mountain slope that Pantelis and I were descending. The Cretan mountains, evidently, still held signs and wonders.

Down at last in the village of Kouroutes, eight hours after setting off from the Nida plain (‘Kalo tempo, poli kalo,' said Pantelis), we sat on the terrace of a kafenion and drank
hypovrichio
, ‘submarines' – a lump of icing-sugary vanilla paste apiece, sunk in a glass of water and clinging to a spoon whose handle rose like a periscope above the surface. Deadly sweet, and deadly good. We chatted and dozed above the empty, sunny street. A taxi staggered by eventually, and we headed off up the valley to Thronos and the Taverna Aravanes.

Here Pantelis and I said goodbye. In prospect for me, a week at least of lotus eating in the Amari Valley, the Shangri-La of Crete. For the tireless aegagros Pantelis, a bus ride back to Iraklion, ‘and a little training at the stadium tonight, Christopher. Only one-two hours – and of course a little run also. I am quite tired, so maybe just up Mount Iouchtas and back. Or maybe
little
further …'

Lotus Land: Amari interlude

I groan, swear, turn over and thump the hard pillow to make a barrier between me and the dawn choristers outside. In the rooms along the balcony each side of mine I can hear Patricia Clark and David and Wanda Root doing much the same thing. Snoring resumes on both flanks. But it's no good as far as I am concerned – now the bloody finches have noticed the first flush of morning light touching the horn-shaped apex of the mountain of Katsonissi that stands opposite the village, and they, too, begin to chip their four eggs in. More groaning, more swearing, and I slop out of bed and go out on the balcony, scratching and yawning like a tramp.

Of course it's beautiful out there. The light is between pearl and peach, the air cool but holding the promise of a warm spring day. There's a hint of wild sage and a breath of wood-smoke. Beyond the balcony, the picnic terrace and miniature vineyard of the Taverna Aravanes give way to an enormous prospect. The whole of the eastern side of the Amari Valley is in view, sloping away south-eastwards for the best part of ten miles. To my right, across the donkey's hillside and a steep little valley beyond, rise Katsonissi and other hills nameless to me, the dawn light broadening across their slopes, their ridges marching down towards the bulgy and ill-shaped lump of 3,300-ft Mount Samitos which hunches like an island to split the smooth south-eastward flow of Amari. It's all green and pleasant enough over there, as it is far below along the valley floor where well-watered meadows and pale green cornfields lie among the trees. But my gaze, as always, is drawn towards the east, high above the villages scattered on the slopes there, over the tight white huddles of Kalogeros and Vistagi, above Platania and Fourfouras beyond them, way up over the zigzag dirt roads and the dark forests of pine and prinos, up 6,000 feet by bare rock canyons and the skirt of the snowline to the twin-horned head of Psiloritis, still velvet dark with its back to the sunrise, outlined against the last of the night's stars.