The Golden Step

The Golden Step

Copyright © Christopher Somerville 2007, 2012

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by
Haus Publishing Ltd

This edition published in 2012 by
The Armchair Traveller
at the bookHaus
70 Cadogan Place
London SW1X 9AH
www.thearmchairtraveller.com

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978 1 907973 33 8

Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd
[email protected]

CONDITIONS OF SALE
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Talking to myself

Out East (Kato Zakros to Kritsa)

Upcountry Village: Kritsa Interlude

The Plains of Plenty (Kritsa to Asites)

Across the Roof of Crete (Asites to Thronos)

Lotus Land: Amari Interlude

To Sfakia: A Rock and a Hard Place (Thronos to Chora Sfakion)

The Gorges of the West (Chora Sfakion to Paleochora)

Of Earth and Dreams (Paleochora to Hrissoskalitissas)

Author's Note

Acknowledgements

For Jane, with love and thanks

Talking to myself

I
n the bus to Sitia, staring out of the dusty windows at the lumpy landscape of eastern Crete, I gave myself a proper talking-to. It was dog trouble once more, revisiting me like an ominous dream – bloody big shepherds' dogs, three of them, hunting me like wolves up a nameless dirt track. I had beaten off this evil trio many times in the week since my arrival in Crete, but still they rode my waking hours. Other apprehensions slipstreamed behind – staggering into a darkened village where every door was locked against me, tumbling headlong down the gorge side, lost on the mountain at nightfall. Yet at the same time raw excitement kept turning my heart over in my stomach.

Along with the diesel stink of the bus, this swerving between fear and elation, as if shuttling in an express lift, was making me feel physically sick. I unfolded my two maps of Crete, east and west, across the worn plush seat, and had a steadying look. Already their flimsy coloured paper, printed in Germany, was fraying at the seams. At a scale of 1:100,000 their uselessness to a walker intending to cross the mountainous island from end to end was only too evident. But in this year of 1999 they were the best on offer. They showed the bull-shaped island, familiar to me from many visits over the years, lying between the Cretan and the Libyan Seas. The stumpy hindquarters stretched east to terminate in the little cocked-up tail of the Sideros promontory. The blunt head with its three peninsulas – Akrotiri representing the rounded ear of the bull, Rhodopos and Gramvousa the twin horns – pushed west. Actually Crete looked less like a bull than a rather scrawny and etiolated rhinoceros. Dotted along its north coast at regular intervals were the chief towns of the island – Chania and Rethymnon the elegant Venetian queens of the west, Iraklion (where I had boarded this bus a couple of hours ago) the dusty and noisy capital city in the centre. A little further east lay Hersonissos and Agios Nikolaos, the play-towns of, respectively, more and less downmarket tourism. Out towards the far east the map showed the compact regional centre of Sitia, where the bus driver would be putting me down in an hour or two.

Two other places stood out. I had ringed them round in black ink. Below the Sideros promontory, tucked into a bay at the easternmost end of the island, was the seaside hamlet of Kato Zakros. By the road into the village the cartographer had placed a symbol, a little red classical column. ‘Antique Place,' said the key. The 4,000-year-old palace of Zakros lay here, one of the greatest treasures of Crete's Golden Age of Minoan civilisation. At the western tip of the island, about 200 miles away as the crow flew, sat a tiny black square topped by a cross. ‘Moni Hrissoskalitissas' was printed alongside in scarlet – the Monastery of the Golden Step. Legend said that one step in the flight of 62 that leads up to the monastery was made of gold; but only the pure in heart could see it.

I stared along the map, holding it still against the jolting of the bus. Between the eastern and western extremities of Crete lay four ragged areas where the gentle green of lowland country changed colour to a drab olive brown and the contours ran together in bunches. These were the four mountain ranges that made up the lumpy spine of the bull island – Thripti, Dhikti, Psiloritis and Lefka Ori. The latter and more westerly pair were generously overspread with paler patches where the land rose over 7,000 feet above sea level. From previous climbs and dirt road drives I had gathered a very rough impression of these mountains – their fierce gorges, their spiny vegetation and rubbly limestone paths, their overhung cliffs and great scrubby slopes falling into shadows; above all, their lonely stretches of mile after rocky mile with no other human in sight. The map breezily ignored these realities. It showed a footpath running from east to west across the whole island, a red wriggling line about 300 miles long, labelled ‘European Hiking Route E4', marching confidently all the way from Kato Zakros to Hrissoskalitissas with never a doubt in its head, hurdling mountains and striding across lowlands with equal nonchalance. Just follow me, it seemed to say. Bob's your uncle. What's the problem?

No problem – except that I had been doing a little checking up online and among personal contacts, and was pretty clear that European Hiking Route E4 was in truth a poorly way-marked, barely visible apology for a path, a fickle companion liable to sneak away and hide when the going got rough in the wild uplands of Crete. It was up in such high and lonely places that my overactive imagination had set all those troubling scenarios of dog attacks and inaccessible crags I had improbably scrambled to. Yet paradoxically it was the mountainous interior of Crete that had called to me from the very first day I had set foot in the island many years before.

The coasts of Crete are famous for their beauty. Each sandy bay looks as if it has been arranged by an exterior designer for the exclusive appreciation of discerning persons. The seas are warm and of an irresistible inshore turquoise that shades out into inky blue. Mountains slope seductively to cliffs and coves. The bathing, sun-worshipping, beer-sipping life never seems more seductive than in the coastal havens of Sougia, of Xerokambos, of Falassarna and Tholos. But my Cretan eyes, somehow, were always lifted to the hills. This must have been largely thanks to George Psychoundakis and his wonderful book
The Cretan Runner
. I'd first devoured this classic account of the Second World War resistance in German-occupied Crete as a teenager, reading my father's battered old copy. Psychoundakis was a shepherd boy from Asi Gonia in the eastern skirts of Lefka Ori, otherwise known as the White Mountains. In his late teens in 1941 when the Germans invaded and took over his native island, he joined the
andartes
or resistance fighters as a runner and carrier of messages. He ran, climbed and walked all over Crete in his cracked shoes. The book he wrote about his experiences among those incredibly brave and hardy men and women of the Cretan Resistance, translated after the war by his field commander Patrick Leigh Fermor, filled me with passion for the mountains of Crete and gave me a goal – to walk one day in the footsteps of George Psychoundakis.

I loved wandering the high back country of the island, stumbling on village dances and church feasts, watching people take the kind of time and care in the steep mountain fruit and vegetable gardens that most coastal places with their tourist money seemed to have turned their backs on. In the upland villages of Kritsa and Thronos I made local friends who took me hiking among the hard clinkery hills, orange and white limestone wildernesses splashed with a brilliant palette of small flowers, sun-baked villages on dirt roads that snaked among olive and citrus groves. One evening in the Taverna Aravanes at Thronos when friends were singing
mantinades
, pungent little verses that fly back and forth across the table to tease, provoke and point up the singer's cleverness, someone – it was a stranger, and I never found out anything else about him – produced a phrase as he tried to translate one of the mantinades into English for my benefit. ‘They are singing,' he said, ‘that Crete is a place of earth, and it is also a place of dreams.' I never heard that mantinade again, but the phrase stuck fast in my mind as entirely apt, complete in itself. I told myself that I'd learn more and better Greek than my few rudimentary ‘yes-no-please-thanks-hello-goodbye' phrases, and I'd set out one day to explore the island of earth and dreams on foot in one continuous end-to-end burst, with a walking stick in my hand.

A nice romantic pipe-dream, not to be taken seriously for a moment. And there it would probably have rested, if it hadn't been for the advent of my 50th birthday and the present that my wife had secretly decided to give me. It was a wise gift, a loving and a generous one. ‘I don't want to give you any
thing
,' Jane said. ‘What I want is to give you a stretch of free time. Two months, say. I'll hold the fort at home, I'll look after the children and pay the bills and all that stuff. Just go and do something wonderful, something you've really longed to do. Something for yourself.'

Middle-aged men in the midst of their working lives don't get offers like this. We push our ostrich heads down the burrow labelled ‘too busy to live', and the other one signed ‘time running out', and there we stay, pinned to the ground by our own lethargy and fears and nice comforting tunnel vision. Now I was to be jerked out into the open – a scary prospect. What on earth should I do with this unlooked-for slice of freedom? Something that would take about two months; something entirely selfish, something for myself. There was only one answer, really. I'd do the Cretan mountain walk. And I'd do it as much in the spirit of George Psychoundakis as I could, with as little technology as possible. I didn't want buttons and switches and batteries to get between me and the raw experience, and anyway machines always fell to pieces if I tried to employ them. I wouldn't take a Global Positioning System device – partly because I'd have to learn how to use the wretched thing, but mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness. Map and compass would do. No mobile phone to help me if I got into difficulties; I'd rely on any common sense I might discover in my possession, and on any Greek I could manage to scrape up along the way. No collapsible walking poles or high-tech trainers or other fancy-dan apparel to distance me yet further from the shepherds and farm women and village children I'd be talking to. I'd wear ordinary boots and clothes and I'd carry the
katsouna
, the white figwood walking stick, that I'd been given by friends in Kritsa. Just how much of an ice-breaker that katsouna was to prove, I did not then imagine.