The Golden Step (25 page)

The beauty of these harsh highlands was breathtaking, and so was their isolation, more than 7,000 feet above the sea. We followed the red blob waymarks of a shepherd's track due north below the pale heights of Pachnes, summit of the Lefka Ori range, a mountain that tops out at 8,048 feet – just ten feet lower than mighty Psiloritis. The locals, naturally, are having none of that, said Jean; it is practically a duty for every true Sfakiot to carry a stone with him when he climbs Pachnes, in order that the summit cairn shall one day look down on that insignificant little anthill away in the soft and spineless east.

Three figures appeared ahead on the track, dark blobs in the pale landscape – a shepherd carrying a long-barrelled rifle, his big bristling sheepdog, and a black mule slung with panniers full of this summer's cheeses. The shepherd passed us with a gruff ‘Kalimera, good morning,' and a sharp glance out of the corners of his eyes. These solitary men still live the hard mountain life, seeing few others than fellow-shepherds in the high desert, pasturing their flocks and boiling milk in the mitato to make superb graviera cheese. One sees them squatting on the rocks with a gun across their knees, or at a great distance striding the vast mountainsides with their weapon held across the shoulders and behind the neck in the crooks of both elbows, their dark figures indicated by the bright scarlet dots of their sakoulis or woven wool haversacks. The path that Jean and I were following is one of their main routes to and from Anopolis. Nowadays scarcely distinguishable to the untrained eye from the dusty land through which it runs, it was the chief trade route between the Sfakian coast and the north-west of Crete until all-weather motor roads made it redundant. Snow falls thickly and lies long up here, and the heartlands of Lefka Ori are only really viable for pasturing between May and October, even in these days of 4×4s and heavy-duty tyres. Those can only get you so far up the mountains; after that, as for all the bygone generations, it's mule-back or Shanks's Pony.

In the heart of the hills the trail dipped down through a gorge to reach Katsiveli, a cluster of mitata at a crossing of tracks. The cheese huts were round and stone-built, their doors now locked against the oncoming winter. On the ridge above stood a small mountain refuge, also locked. ‘You have to bring the key with you from the EOS, the Alpine Club in Chania, if you want to use the refuge,' commented Jean, ‘but usually the people who need this hut most are the ones who haven't planned a stay – walkers who get caught out by a storm or by nightfall. Especially when they're trying to follow E4, naturally!'

Beside the mitata the north-south track meets the one that I had hoped to follow with George and Iannis seven years before, the 22-mile E4 route through Lefka Ori from Askifou in the east to Omalos at the head of the Samaria Gorge in the west. Here stood a familiar object – an E4 waymark pole, its tin plate sign shot to ribbons. ‘Shepherds,' shrugged Jean, ‘they're not into pleasure hiking, and they don't like strangers.'

A glance at the maps showed the problems of following E4 through these barren and all but deserted regions. The dodgy old 1:100,000 that I'd used during my long walk simply ran its familiar scarlet line blandly across the mountains. Only the scrawly legend ‘Achtung! Weg ohne Markierung! (Warning – unmarked path)' hinted that something might be tricky here. The second map I'd brought today, a 1:25,000 sheet by Anavasi, was a lot more realistic, with notes on sources of water in summer and advice on how to negotiate or sidetrack the most tiring, obscure or downright dangerous parts of the route. The high desert of Lefka Ori is a place of unearthly beauty, but far and away the wildest part of Crete – in fact, although it is only just over twenty miles from east to west, it's one of the wildest places in all Europe. On a clear day like today, in the company of a guide so experienced in these mountains that even the local shepherds ask him to bring them news of their sheep, the traverse of the high desert looked formidable but feasible. On one's own, in snow or fog, it would be tantamount to begging for trouble.

Sitting in the square at Anopolis on that hot spring morning in 1999, I found it hard to tear my eyes away from the simple majesty of the White Mountain peaks. Eventually I got up and followed the road out of the village through the olive groves where a young shepherd, busby-bearded and saturnine, stood chin on crook contemplating his flock in a timeless pose. He looked every inch the same stock as the fierce andartes one sees in old Second World War snapshots, or those etchings of such leaders as Daskalogiannis that hang half obscured by dusty glass behind kafenion counters.

The road led west to Aradena, an abandoned village on the lip of the gorge I was aiming to follow back down to the sea. A splendidly maintained kalderimi brought me down to the gorge floor in a series of sharp hairpins, and once down there between rock walls hundreds of feet high there was only one choice of path. Goat corpses and fallen prinos trees littered the bed of the chasm, and almost at once an appalling crash of noise rumbled overhead as if Poseidon the Shaker had decided to pull the whole thing down and start again. I ducked, instinctively, and waited for the boulders to come tumbling. But it was only the sound of a car passing over the wooden slatted decking of the bridge that spanned the gorge.

From here on it was pretty much plain sailing, until the sides of the gorge closed together and became impassably choked with a huge boulder fall. There seemed no way through. But red splodges of paint indicated a pathway down across the boulders, a slip-and-slide progress that ended at the rim of a hundred-foot drop. I peered over. A flimsy iron ladder forty feet high ran down the face of the fall, and another halfway down continued to the bottom. Not exactly a Health and Safety exemplar, but it was all there was. Do it now, or go back the way you came. Hanging the katsouna on the ladder a few rungs down, and gripping the plastic bag containing water bottle and map in my teeth, I lowered myself over the edge and proceeded downwards, face to the ladder. Memo to self: bring a bloody backpack next time you do a day walk, you fool. I managed the first ladder all right, but halfway down the second one my hands, greasy with sweat and suncream, slipped off their respective rungs. Both feet slipped, too. A nasty moment. I found myself, ludicrously and improbably, reaching with outstretched lips for the rung in front of my face as it shot upwards and I fell downwards. Plastic bag, map and water bottle tumbled from between my teeth to the ground below.

Have you seen a three-toed sloth clinging to a cecropia tree? That was the embrace I bestowed on the ladder when I reconnected miraculously with it a few feet further down. The impact gave my arm sockets a wrench, but other than that all was well. Once I'd got to the bottom it took a few minutes to stop trembling. After a drink of water and a quick damage inspection I felt fine, and negotiated several more boulder sides (none as scary) lower down the gorge with a fair pretence at nonchalance.

Down at the beach I found a taverna and sat quaking. Still a bit shook up, are we? Yes. All right – before the coast walk back to Loutro, I prescribe a cold beer, a kebab and a bit of a sit. Thank you, doctor. Just tell me straight – will I ever play the fool again?

Off from Loutro at first light next morning, on the last leg of the journey. I found it strangely hard to get going again. The route of the coast path held no difficulties, but the path itself proved something else again, by far the worst surface I had encountered in Crete, a horrible rubbly mass of awkwardly shaped stones that skidded and stood on end underfoot. When I got to Agia Roumeli I sat down on a beach rock and had a good look at my boots. The scale of mutilation was astonishing. The rubberised seal round the toes had entirely worn away, making them leak like Liza's bucket. The stout leather uppers had been cut, scored and cracked into crazy paving by 250 miles of Cretan limestone. As for the soles, the constant jarring, abrading and digging in of hard dry stones had smoothed their hi-tech corrugations all but flat. They'd serve me as far as the end of the road, with luck, but after that they'd be fit only for the knacker's yard.

To Agia Roumeli my father had come in
Hero
on the night of 22 May 1941 to assist fellow destroyer
Decoy
in retrieving George II, King of the Hellenes, and his small entourage, after their desperate and difficult journey by mule over the still snowy upper regions of the White Mountains. The capture of the King would have been a splendid coup for the Germans if they could have caught up with him, but in the event the royal party arrived safely on the beach and was taken out by small boat to
Decoy
and a night passage to Alexandria. Dad didn't get to embark the King of the Hellenes in his own ship, but he never forgot the drama of the approach in the darkened
Hero
to the mountainous coast looming in the night, the tension of waiting offshore, and the relief as the two destroyers turned and made steam for the Egyptian coast with their precious cargo. The Psalmist's daily commentary, as I read it on the ferry slipway at Agia Roumeli almost sixty years later, had never seemed more apt: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.'

In Agia Roumeli I couldn't find a room for love nor money. This small, roadless village at the foot of the Samaria Gorge is entirely concerned with catering by day for the tens of thousands of walkers who pour out of the gorge each afternoon from April, when the flood waters have subsided far enough to make things safe in the canyon, until October when the Samaria Gorge National Park authorities generally take the decision to close the gorge to walkers until the following spring. By nightfall almost everyone has caught the ferry to Chora Sfakion and their bus back to Chania, so that there's little incentive to provide accommodation. This proved a blessing in disguise, since I was obliged to catch the ferry to the next place down the coast, Sougia, and from the deck was able to get a really close and lingering look at what I'd ducked by choosing the gorge route over the coast ‘path'. The coast of Selinos did look absolutely daunting, wildly rugged, slashed with two cruel gorges and many smaller ravines, rock stacks and pinnacles, and countless mountains great and small that hid modestly away until the ferry, turning some lonely cape or promontory, opened up a view to reveal them in all their pale grey and green splendour. Where E4 lay among these savage scenes I could not guess, and neither, I felt sure, could anyone venturing in this coastal wilderness.

A quiet night in Sougia and a ferry first thing in the morning back to Agia Roumeli, plying the same route in reverse, gawping anew at gorges and mountains lit by the eastern sun to reveal beauties and terrors that had been concealed by dusk and the westering sun the previous evening. I set off at mid-morning up the flood valley of the Samaria Gorge. It was an eerie sensation to have the most celebrated, the most crowded gorge in Europe all to myself. Things were so quiet that when the ticket man's dog took exception to me at the lower kiosk and demanded a pound of flesh with menaces, it was almost a relief to employ my pet phrase at pigeon-wakening volume: ‘Pare ta skiliaaaaa!'

I came to the tremendous cleft of the Sideroportes, the Iron Gates, and stretched out my arms to their fullest extent as I walked through. You just can't help yourself, even though you can see clearly that you're not quite going to be able to touch both walls at once. Beyond lay the luck stone, covered as usual with tiny pebbles. I added one and walked around the boulder three times in prescribed fashion, making my wish as I did so. Around here, halfway to the abandoned gorge-bottom village of Samaria, I met the first of the walkers coming down. From now on it was hello and how are you, guten tag mein herr and bonjour madame, ciao bella and kalimera, excuse me sir and would you mind awfully, thank you very much, no, after you, every few seconds till I was nearly at screaming point. What can you do? Duck your face and play the miserable bastard? Then I hit on the solution: don't climb on like a prat with a thistle up his whistle. Lie down under that fig tree by this little run of water, put your hat over your face and catch forty winks. Eighty if you like. What on earth is your big rush?

When I woke towards mid-afternoon, the Samaria Gorge had reverted to eerie silence. Climbing it became a pleasure again, at least until I reached the foot of the
xiloskala
. The name means ‘wooden stairway' but the old steps of wood have long been replaced by a good if very steep zigzag path. For downward walkers the xiloskala means a sharp and slippery 2,000-ft descent on skiddy stones into the upper regions of the gorge. For those coming up with a 40 lb pack on their back and flat boot soles, it's simply one sod of a climb. Near the top I heard the bubble and splash of the Neroutsiko fountain, sank my hot face into its blessedly cold waters and drank as if I'd never stop.