The Golden Step (20 page)

While milking continues we wander off across the slopes of Psiloritis. Lambros pulls us up on the brink of a fearful slot in the limestone that opens grey lips ten feet wide. ‘Sink hole,' he says, ‘throw in a stone, Christopher.' We hear it bounce once, twice and three times, then no more. Glancing in, I see a black rock funnel chuting away into darkness. A gleam of old snow lies at the bottom. A hundred feet down? Two hundred? I begin to realise that Iannis Pantatosakis had meant what he said about the dangers of sink holes in the White Mountains, covered in a treacherous crust of thin snow through which the lightest walker might plunge. Once at the bottom of a funnel like that, you could shout all year long and never be heard.

Back at the mitato we are invited within. A roaring fire of thorns burns on the hearth. The cheese-hut is a single plain room with light bulbs drooping from a wire that crosses the low ceiling. There's a bed by the fire, a table, a store cupboard. The bare necessities. Here Iannis the shepherd has to stay all summer, from the arrival of the sheep after snowmelt to their departure for the valley before next snowfall. Why? asks Lambros. The shepherd gives a one-word reply. Lambros translates: ‘Sheep stealers.'

At last it's time to go. We stumble out onto the mountain in a windy, cloudy night. Jolting down the dirt road with its endless hairpin bends, the pickup develops a squeak that Lambros has never heard before – ‘new music,' he calls it – to go with the symphony of rattles, clunks, splutters, shudders and ominous grinding noises that are its normal accompaniment. Second gear fails halfway down the mountain. Then the headlights falter and go out. It is ten o'clock at night when we eructate to a stop outside the Taverna Aravanes where Maria and Patricia have been chewing their nails on the doorstep since sundown, convinced we have gone over some precipice and are lying in pieces at the bottom, never to be found again.

My last day of Amari idling. Patricia, Doug and I take a box of fancy biscuits and pay a call on Nikephoros, the healer of Thronos, and his wife Aretousa. Nikephoros in his mid-seventies cuts a splendid figure, in looks rather like one of those heraldic Chinese dragons, with a halo of white hair and a splendid white beard swept back from a face seamed with wrinkles and tanned by all weathers. A pair of extremely sharp eyes looks out between a snub nose and bushy dark eyebrows. His hands are those of an artist, delicate and expressive, the fingers tapering to a leaf-shaped point.

Nikephoros is a maker of lyras, like his father and grandfather before him, seeking out asfendos trees on the slopes of Psiloritis to make the boat-shaped bellies of the instruments. He shows us a couple of his lyras, each with a bull of Minos poker-worked into the back. The instruments shine with a dull lustre that enhances every knot and whorl of the asfendos wood. It's produced by applying
enopnevma me to propoli
, a mixture of raki-like spirit and the sealant that bees use to construct their waxy combs. So says Nikephoros, pouring a dark red drop onto the lyra from a tiny bottle. It is just one of dozens of cures, potions and healing plants that he brings out for our instruction over the next couple of hours, as Patricia questions and takes notes. The healer is a bit of a showman, too, delighting his audience by striking sparks from a piece of granite with a flint and setting fire to a chunk of
mikita
, tinder fungus.

Aretousa, a humorous woman with eyes as bright as her husband's, brings a basket of herb-baked
paximadia
and dishes of soft
misithra
cheese, beans and olives. The wine and raki bottles are uncorked. Nikephoros drinks his raki from a tiny screw-top jar. Soon the lyra is tuned and played, and the table in the long, narrow front room becomes littered with flower stems, crushed leaves, bunches of herbs, olive stones, shot glasses, lyra bows and bits of scribbled-on paper. The air smells of warm bread, strong spirits, beeswax, herbs and burnt mikita, a savour that we carry round with us for the rest of the day.

Late that evening Lambros takes off for Rethymnon, leaving the imprint of his stubbly cheeks on mine. I feel quite bereft for a few minutes. Then the Kalogeros lyra-player Kosti turns up at the taverna. Free from all constraints, he lets himself rip. Mantinades pour out of his mouth. Long extracts from Kornaros's epic 17th-century heroic poem
Erotokritos
are accompanied by the wildest of clashing, scurrying, screeching lyra. Kosti's head pushes forward, his mouth extended into an abstracted ‘O', eyes alternately shut, rolled ecstatically ceiling-wards, or fixed unnervingly on and at the same time beyond each of his listeners in turn. It's a breathtaking display of unbridled musical ferocity. Kosti plays until the dawn is almost on us, and only goes away when the wine runs out.

Next morning I say goodbye to Patricia and Doug, and eat my final breakfast in Lotus Land – another palikare-style one of dictamos tea and special spicy paximadia – under Maria's tearful gaze. I give her a big hug and kiss. ‘Farewell, Lady Maria. I am so grateful for all your kindnesses.' ‘No, no, Lord Christopher, the pleasure has been entirely ours. May you go to the good! May God travel with you!'

I take a quick look at the map, trying to make a rough calculation of distances. I reckon I have covered some 170 miles, give or take. Maybe 130 to go? 150? In my current state of mind and body, after a fortnight of lazy hedonism, I really couldn't give a monkey's. I shoulder the pack (how awkward and heavy that feels after two weeks' respite!), give the figwood katsouna a preparatory twirl, and walk out of Thronos. At the top of the rise under Katsonissi I take a last look back at the little huddle of white houses at the head of the valley. A couple of strides and it all passes out of view.

To Sfakia: A Rock and a Hard Place

(Thronos to Chora Sfakion)

Along the mountain road beyond Gerakari I stopped at a little kafenion for a glass of lemonade. The owner, a big slow-moving woman, was shelling broad beans into a bowl at a table outside. Are you from Germany? Where are you going? Where have you come from? The heavy local accent and clipped-off phrases struck oddly on my ear after my fortnight among friends and English-speakers. I was going to have to get used once more to being the stranger, the odd man out.

‘You look very hot and sweaty,' remarked the woman with concern. I was feeling hot and sweaty, yes. The bloody pack, raki and all, was bowing me down. The old sins of commission – too much of Lambros's wine last night; too much of everything nice but naughty, in fact, during the interval in Thronos. Well, I was heading away from all that now. I kicked a rush-bottomed chair to the table, sat down and helped my hostess finish her bean shelling. My reward: a good double handful of the long green pods, for later consumption with a lick of salt and a snifter of Château Kostas.

The mountain road led upwards for mile upon mile. In spring a walker tastes the Cretan countryside – the abundant birdsong, the scent and colours of the wild flowers, the tingle of clear spring water on the palate, the rippling grasses – with a pleasure that has vanished from the over-farmed and polluted land of Britain. In the rocky uplands between the hills of Mavro Soros and Mouri I caught and hugged to myself the kind of ecstasy which inspired all those generations of folk songs that began: ‘As I roved out one May morning, to view the valleys and the sweet flowers of spring …'

At the western edge of the plateau the road dipped in a series of loops and contortions into the lower country around the big regional town of Spili. Paved alleyways and mazy lanes took me down under the huge cliff that rises at the back of the town, depositing me at last in the main square by a gorgeous Venetian fountain – nineteen lion heads all in a row, their snarling mouths gushing water from the hills. The Green Hotel proved to have a room, and a balcony for drying my clothes. The taverna I chose for my evening meal had a problem with its wood-burning grill, but Mr Stratidakis the owner, nothing daunted, fetched his wife's hair dryer and soon had the fire blown to a roaring heat.

A French couple paused by my table. A very, very fit-looking couple. The man eyed my plate of chops and spuds, my jug of village wine. Are you walking? Really? This is not good food for a walker! It is necessary to train properly. He patted his washboard stomach, lightly, with satisfaction. I was 60, three years ago, and to celebrate the fact I walked all the way from Le Puy-en-Velay to Santiago de Compostella. 1,500 kilometres – 50 days! All on foot! All alone! Thus one should celebrate an anniversary, and not, if you will permit the observation … Well, at all events, goodnight to you! ‘And
bonne nuit
to you,
salaud
,' I allowed myself to mutter through a mouthful of hair-dried and delicious chips. Back at the Green Hotel I discovered that the French couple were my next-room neighbours, and enthusiastic snorers to boot. Well, bollocks. Just a nip of Château Kostas, why not …?

I woke to find sunlight on my face. Eleven o'clock in the morning. I was lying on the bed fully clothed. Realisations: (a) Lotus-eating is as tiring as walking. (b) Raki is a tricky friend, and a subtle enemy. I left the rest of the bottle in the room, and hoped the next guest would investigate and appreciate the master craftsmanship of Kostas Raki.

By the fountain I met an old man with a rubber-tipped and knotty stick. ‘Orea katsouna,' I ventured. With snippets of Greek, and a lot of pantomime, we compared stick notes. So yours is from Kritsa, eh? Well, well! May I have a look? Yes, this is really fine. Who gave it you? Aphordakos? Can't say I've heard the name – unless it's the same family as that young runner in the mountains. It is? Well, isn't that good? Mine is only a
European
stick, I'm sorry to say. Hardly a stick at all, in the real sense of the word. But this one of yours – now this is a proper Cretan katsouna! I wish I had one. Wouldn't care to swap, I suppose? No – well, I'll just have to get someone to go to Kritsa and fetch me one, won't I? Here it is, sir. Look after it! Goodbye, now!

The youth of Spili's secondary school, outside the gates on their lunch break, were not so courteous. In fact they ran me out of town with some shouts and a shower of small playground pebbles. News from Kosovo? Or just smalltownitis?

E4 came sidling up outside Spili, tugging at my elbow like an ingratiating lover. Oh please, forgive me for my lies and my deceptions. I promise I'll be good, really I will. Let's just go down this nice flowery lane, why don't we, and see if we can't start over. We kept company together, gingerly, for a few miles, not exactly in close communication but not entirely estranged, through Agia Pelagia and Koxare, Angouseliana and Paleoloutra. Here I discovered with a thrill that I had just walked into the final side of the map. Now, where to stay tonight … E4 seemed to offer nothing for the next seven or eight miles. How about Kanevos, an hour's walk to the west? As if miffed that my attention had strayed, even for a second, E4 upped and offed, disappearing into the ether without a backwards glance. Decision made, then.

Rent Rooms Iliomanolis stood at the head of a most beautiful gorge, Kotsifou. I took a stroll down there from Kanevos in the late afternoon under towering and spectacular rock walls. Their opposing curves, if the canyon should happen to have snapped shut, would have fitted as neatly together as a pair of spoons. A clonking of goat bells drew my binoculars to a cave hundreds of feet above, where a couple of goats were nonchalantly browsing. Swifts on passage north from Africa darted about on their evening feeding flight. Above in the blue sky a gryphon vulture wheeled, no doubt waiting (bleached bones on the gorge floor suggested) for one of the goats in the cave to try for a juicy tuft of greenery just that bit too far out of reach. And a dove with pink-grey plumage and a barred tail sat shrilling out a trembling, silvery call on a prinos branch near the top of the cliffs. There were many prinos around the gorge, hunched into clefts, crouching on the skyline, clinging to cracks with contorted roots. I realised how much I had come to admire these mountain trees with their eternal strength, their subtle adaptation to circumstances and their capacity to put up with and even thrive in the harshest of conditions. If ever there was a tree to symbolise the Cretans, it would have to be the prinos.

In the early evening a young boy with a katsouna big and curly enough to put mine to shame drove a great herd of goats down from the pastures at the rim of the Kotsifou Gorge to be milked, their neck bells making a beautiful melodious ringing – the music of the Cretan highlands. My host Manolis and his wife sat at their kitchen table, stripping the spiked leaves from a vast mound of artichokes. It took them a good couple of hours. I offered my help, but only succeeded in jabbing my fingers so badly that I got blood all over the artichokes and my one clean shirt.