The Greek Islands (29 page)

I admire solitariness and realized then that in the heart of every Greek there is a buried monk, waiting to emerge when fortune fails and when youth is spent; it is not only the bandits who dream of retirement in some distant monastery. It is to Stephan that I owe my first visit to Mykonos and, by the same token, to Delos, where he made me free of two tiny beaches which are still there, still untenanted. They are hardly bigger than a concert-grand, it is true, but there is some undercut rock, where you can hide provisions in the coolness of wet sand; and the little shelving beach slopes quickly into deep water where, while you paddle, you can watch the island of Hecate glowering at you across the way.

I re-discovered this tiny corner in 1966, using the same
technique
that Stephan had shown me in 1939. I think it would work even today. Get hold of Janko or Pavlo or any of his descendants and strike a price for a boat – quite a small
benzina
will do. Ask him to borrow a sack and place therein twenty bottles of beer, some ham, a tin of butter, a chunk of bread and some fruit, all separately wrapped. Bid him take you to the bay of Phourni and decant you below the old site of the abandoned Aesculapion. It is technically forbidden to camp on Delos, but Apollo made an exception for my wife, who was recovering from a grave operation, and even welcomed her with an
evening
calm and a special sunset. I practised a slight deception, knowing that the guardians retire early (there is nothing to steal on Delos; everything is either smashed or too big to lift). Janko came back in the evening, ostensibly to take us back to Mykonos, but in fact to bring us some welcome Thermos flasks of hot coffee and soup. Then he returned to base, and the guardians presumably thought we had gone with him; but no,
we unpacked sleeping bags and waited for the moon to rise. How silent and ominous Delos is at night, with the slither of snakes and huge green lizards among the stones.

We swam by the rising moon, the old Apollo therapy, and came back dripping and shivery to our warm soup, bully beef and coffee. At about midnight, the moon was so flaring white that we both awoke with a start, thinking we had heard a cry, perhaps from some wild seabird. We took a prowl among the ruins. There was a hole in the barbed wire which gave access to some proconsular villa, built by some long dead Roman
magistrate.
The tessellated floor had a fish or dolphin design, I don't remember which now; but the salt and dust had dried over it and obliterated it. At any rate (we did not need the torches we had brought; you could have read a Greek newspaper by the moon's light), I filled a pail with seawater and swished it over the floor and suddenly the whole design printed itself like a photograph does in a developing-tray. I still remember the way the eyes emerged, even though I do not recall if they were dolphin's or fish's. Fish, I think.

Mykonos at that time was little frequented because of faulty and haphazard communications with Athens; but it was a choice and secret place which Athenians loved, and which they kept very much to themselves. It was a compliment to be made free of this little club of Mykoniots
d'élection
, and I have never ceased to be grateful to Stephan Syriotis for tipping me off about it.

It is strange to remember how shaky the communications were in those days – now one can telephone for a room! Because of the lack of a safe anchorage and the tremendous bustle of the wind, one was pushed ashore in a bumboat, and, in default of any hotel whatsoever, one had to lodge
chez
l'habitant
as the French guides have it. This led at once to spirited wrangling and enjoyable encounters. In my case, I was adopted
by a huge wall-eyed goddess called, strangely enough, Poppeia, who looked like a Sicilian mama fresh from the crater of Etna. But first I was processed and beaten to my knees by her
husband
Janko, who stood me an
ouzo
to steady my nerves before leading the way to his little house. After all that flurry and argument I found later that, in an excess of cleverness, he had cheated himself, and I made up the difference. Actually, I lodged among his scrawny chickens in a clean comfortable cot, eating at the tavern under a spreading mulberry tree. It was his boat I used, and his complicity I enjoyed in the Delos connection.

This huge couple lived in harmony and happiness, shouting and yelling at each other the livelong day. When their paths crossed as they went about their various tasks, which was often for the house was small, they never failed to smack each other resoundingly on the behind with a calloused palm. So Zeus must have lived with Hera in ages past. Their laughter and exultation was infectious; the whole neighbourhood resounded with their chuckles and chortles. It was what Shakespeare has so justly called the ‘marriage of true mounds'. This marvellous couple has alas vanished, and nobody knows what became of them. After the war their house fell down and they never came back. I hunted for them in '66 but had to make do with a younger and more agile Janko for my illegal Delos run. The spreading mulberry tree was still there, and the tavern had
blossomed
into quite a big establishment with excellent fare, though under new ownership.

Of Delos itself, it is hard to write because it is more than one island. Half bank and half shrine, it corresponds to the
inimitable
Greek spirit, which manages to combine enlightened self-interest with fire-insurance. Moreover, it seems different at different times of the day; when the bankers go home, so to speak, the ancient gods come out to enjoy the moonlight. Delos
was the Wall Street of the ancient world, and the first thought a visitor has is one of marvel that there exists no real harbour for such a great maritime
entrepôt
, such a critical staging-post between Europe and Asia. I must confess that none of the explanations I have heard concerning the preeminence of Delos as a maritime centre really holds water; the absence of a good harbour really is a great mystery. The French have been picking away at the island since before the turn of the century and, with their diligence, have unearthed and almost completely
identified
the separate buildings and temples of this great harbourless complex of trading houses. Of its commercial importance there is no doubt; but how could such a volume of merchandise be brought ashore, stored, re-freighted and re-dispatched?

Here is the explanation offered by the sailor-scholar, Ernle Bradford:

This is fairly spoken, but when you are actually anchored in the tiny harbour of Delos, alongside the ancient mole, whether in a
caique
or cruise ship, you realize that you could not funnel a quantity of merchandise ashore with any regularity or safety –
at least not a quantity which might correspond to the extensive and elaborate storage complex of the ancient town. The whole strait between Rhenia and Delos is a chancy affair, and one constantly looks for the huge harbour which alone could accommodate such a volume of trade, store and re-expedite it. It is all the more mysterious when one thinks of the marvellous harbours available in the surrounding islands – almost
anywhere
would be surer than Delos. People who have wintered in Greece and snaked about on island craft will also wonder what used to happen to Delos port in winter, when Boreas hurtled down the Rhenia channel and curdled the sea into a mass of white-caps? Even in summer one can be held up for a day by wind in Mykonos.

Also bewildering is the mythology connected with the island; in particular the birth of Apollo whose mother, Leto, flying from the wrath of Hera, finally took refuge here – or, if not here, in Rhenia hard-by which, like Delos, has been identified with Ortygia (Quail Island) – a name that keeps turning up in Greece and Sicily. ‘Then Leto clasped a palm tree in her arms' (thus the Homeric hymn) ‘pressed the soft ground with her knees, and the earth beneath her smiled and the child leaped into the light. All the goddesses cried out with joy. Then, O Phoebus, the goddesses washed thee in sweet water, limpid and pure, and they gave thee for swaddling clothes a white veil of tissue, light and fresh, which they tied with a golden girdle.'

It is unsatisfactory really, for the attributes of Apollo
proliferate
to such a degree that you can hardly feel proprietary about him in Delos, however much you may sympathize with poor Leto. He was an all-purpose god. One connects him with the powers of divination, and therefore, usually with Delphi; yet he
was
also the god of light
par excellence
, and when Delos was chosen (it means ‘the Brilliant') as a name to replace Ortygia, it was to suggest that the god's burning ray had fallen upon the
island. Then, as if to irritate us, the scholars say that there was a sacred grove called Ortygia near Ephesus, and in some versions of the legend his birth occurred there … At any rate he was a sun-god, though he was not actually the sun himself – that was Helios. Phoebus = brilliant, Xanthus = fair, Chrysosomes = golden-locked – these epithets justify his marvellous youthful looks in all sculptures connected with his name. There was perhaps a vein of introspection and sadness in him too for ‘he delighted in high places, the frowning peaks of high mountains, wave-lapped beetling promontories'. This was part of the prophetic side of his protean nature – after all, he was a
love-child
.

His light ripened the fruits of the earth, and in Delos the first crops used to be dedicated to him; they are still dedicated, though nowadays to the Virgin or the village saint. (You will find offerings of first fruits, and of oil for the lamp, at every tiny wayside shrine in Greece today.) But Apollo was as good as any modern saint – he destroyed both mice and locusts when they endangered the crops. Strangely enough, even today incursions of locusts are blown over from the African deserts, though not on any great scale. I have seen two such small invasions, one in Rhodes, which cost several acres of burned grass to control and caused some alarm. Just how Apollo went about their
destruction
in default of kerosene oil is not recorded in the Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology
, that indispensable work of reference, in which the enumeration of his gifts takes up several pages of close print.

Little Mount Cynthus, so charming by the light of the moon, seems artificial by daylight – as if it had been fashioned by man for some mysterious purpose as yet unknown.

As for the lake, the less said the better, for it has dried up; though the guardian once told me that after the rare winter rain, one can hear the croak of green tree frogs in the ancient
cisterns. The lizards are huge, and vivid emerald, and strut and scuttle about the stones as if they owned them. The sacred birth took place on the north side of Cynthus under a spreading date palm; immediately, the barren land burst forth in springs, flowers and fruit, and the sacred swans wheeled across the
sacred
lake. Was a date palm such a rarity in ancient Greece, one wonders when one reads that after this episode the palm became sacred to Apollo? It is true that Odysseus compares the beauty of Nausicaa to ‘a young palm tree which I saw when I was in Delos, growing close to the altar of Apollo'. The sacred geese have also departed today.

The usual landing for the Mykonos visitor is the sacred port. This is a trifle to the north of what is known as the ancient commercial harbour, whose amenities are picked out in clear detail by the ruins of warehouses, granaries and quays. The old site of the Apollo Temple lies two hundred yards inland from the little jetty, and shoulders the old
agora
of the
Competaliastes
which is nearer to the old port. The layout of the square is authoritative, and it must have had great atmosphere when all the statues were upright. Among these was the giant statue of Apollo which was of Naxian provenance, and must have been accounted a technological wonder, for the inscription on its base announced: ‘I am of the same marble, both statue and base.' Has one a right to feel there is something a little
nouveau riche
about the sentiment? Was the statue offered by the Bankers' Guild of Naxos? At any rate, ruin has overtaken it, along with everything else. It has been hacked to pieces; one chunk lies near the temple of Artemis, a foot is in London, a hand in the Museum of Delos. ‘It needs an effort of the
imagination
to reconstruct the sanctuary as it once was,' says a
modern
writer; it does indeed, especially the soaring bronze palm tree which overshadowed the huge figure of the god.

If you find something unsatisfactory about the relics and
associations of the principal hero-god of the place, your sense of wonder and delight will come back if you go directly north from the site of the sacred lake to the little group of lean Mycenean lions, which pose themselves for a leap in the harsh glare of the sun. They have an archaic style that suggests they have been crossed with a Persian cheetah, and though their numbers have been depleted by time and vandalism (there were once nine), five of them still remain in a row, poised and silently snarling, to greet the approaching visitor. At once the poetry and the harmony of the place seem restored, and you forget the guilds of bankers that perhaps commissioned them to be carved – for they are made of Naxian marble, like the statue of the god.