The Greek Islands (4 page)

Not far to seek. All the sacred writings emphasize how
delicate
and how dangerous this procedure is. When it fails, as perhaps it has done very often in the past, because the stress on human nerves is too great, or the techniques perhaps faulty – the result must have been madness. On the distorted face of the
Gorgon we see something like an attack of acute schizophrenia. (She foundered in the ocean of the subconscious as symbolized by her love affair with Poseidon.) The hissing hair symbolizes a short circuit, a discharge of electricity – ideas which have
overwhelmed
her mind. In fact the mask of Medusa is something to propitiate, to conjure away, a dreadful failure of this yogic
process
. The scared boy hero, Perseus, head turned away, performs a clumsy act of exorcism; today they try electro-convulsion therapy for such terrifying hypomanias. But the old fear of madness is still there, still rivets us; the glare of a lunatic still turns us to stone. Can we see her then as something like our modern charms against the Evil Eye – the blue beads we find affixed to the dashboards of taxis or the prams of small children? It is suggestive too that in Medusa’s case Athena received not only the head and skin, but also two drops of blood – one of which caused instant death, and the other of which was
life-giving
. The latter found its way into the hands of Aesculapius the healer, and with it he performed wonders, even raising the dead. We see then that certain notes are struck which chime with the ideas of duality, and healing. The old Gorgon reminds us of the ancient methods men chose to perfect themselves, and of the dangers which must be faced in order to achieve full selfhood.

Weighed down with these thoughts and quite unprovable theories, one sits in the little museum and allows the
emanations
of the Gorgon to sweep over one. The first shock of the insane grin is over. She is there not to cause madness but to avert it. And in the greyness of the approaching evening her smile hangs upon the wall full of tragic resonance. The severed head found its place on the shield of Athena, and was used in battle to shock and dazzle the foe. The skin, like the skin of the snake in all ancient beliefs, was a symbol of renewal after death, a symbol of immortality.

There are other good things in the little museum but nothing which has such a strong vibration; Medusa is indeed the second warden of Corfu, and her existence provides an insight into the nature of the ancient Greek world which one continues to encounter as one journeys on among the islands. In all the various extant versions, her attributes are rather stylized – there are versions of the head in Sicily (from the temple of Selinus) and also among the sculptures of the Acropolis. The little horse, Pegasus, the winged fancy of the creative spirit, was the only creature to escape the general carnage and take refuge among the Olympians; dare we suppose that it represents, as a saving grace, that part of her gift which (all madness purged or refined away) realized itself in high poetry and invention? We cannot be sure, but it seems a likely interpretation.

Yes, it is here, face to face with the Corfu Medusa, that you begin to realize the almost unimaginable antiquity of the Greek land and the Greek tongue. The roots of key words like
anthropos
are lost in the mists of the past, all interpretations remain tentative, halting. Presumably one day it became necessary to define the sort of ape which no longer walked on all fours, no longer sported a tail. The ‘man who looked upwards’ must have been the ‘man who walked upright’. From this sudden shift of the spine came the whole of a new sky-piercing attitude for man – the best and the worst features, but everything vertical, like architecture, astronomy, tomb building and temple
building
. The birth of a new consciousness, no less. The cave, the burrow, the barrow yielded place to constructions made of clay and stone. The arts followed, with leisure …

Modern Greece is only one hundred and fifty years old by today’s reckoning; the three hundred years of Turkish rule seem to have had only a superficial effect. But what a very ancient modern little country it is – for one can see the shadow of the ancients shining through the fabric of modern Greek life. The
Romans for all their marvellous engineering could not help feeling that they were hollow copies of something better. They became antiquaries rather than historians, and we are glad of it. How much of our knowledge of Greece do we owe to Pausanias who documented all he saw as late as the second century
AD
? But by the time he came on the scene, how much had
disappeared
? We do not know, but what vestiges remain speak
eloquently
of origins as remote as India (the metaphysics of Pythagoras?). In this earthquake-ridden land the inhabitants seem to reflect all the calamitous instability of the nature around them. Nothing lasted more than a few generations; ruin overtook whole cultures, whole continents, whole towns. In a flash.

These are thoughts to be pondered as you wander about in the soft dusk of the old Venetian town, with its odours of
magnolia
and sudden draughts of garden scent. The little capital is most bewitching at dusk, and a walk about the battlements will end at some café where you can dine and watch the moon rise over the mainland – as brilliant as it is serene. It will be shining through the toplights of the museum on to the staring face of the Gorgon and her two watchful lions.

Yes, this is Greece!

Moreover, the scale of things is reassuring: within the span of three or four days you have visited all the chief beauty spots in the island and all the principal monuments. Tomorrow your journey will be resumed; but already you will have drunk a glass from the famous fountain.

The days dawn fine and cool at this time of the year, and the memory of countless Greek dawns over the land and sea are something which every traveller will value and treasure long after he has returned to the mists of the north. Their crisp, dry felicity is almost shameful. Wilde would have said something nasty about nature imitating art; but in truth the Greek dawn puts words to flight, and throws painters out of business. I am not the first writer to ask whether it is the vertigo caused by this light which bequeathed a sort of colour-blindness, or at least a loss of plastic sense, upon the ancient Greeks. Could a nation which painted its statues really have a sense of plastic values such as we understand them in our modern world? For us the lust of the eye comes from the able manipulation of matter; to paint statues seems supererogatory, almost an insult. But
perhaps
the old Greeks were content with the sense of anecdote? These are questions to ponder as the old steamer wobbles and dawdles across the green crescent of the bay towards the
southern
opening, where the marshy end of Lefkimi points out the channel, to the open sea beyond.

One moral injunction must be made, however, for the
benefit
of future travellers. Do not take a camera nowadays – the photos you can buy are better than any you can take. Instead take a keen pair of binoculars; they are really worthwhile. Even now, standing at the rail, you can turn your eyes on the far lagoons where the Battle of Actium was fought, and see herons flapping about, or the white star of a rising pelican, or the shape
of a family of golden eagles moving in slow gyres on the blue. On the other side of you there are two islands of little note – Paxos and Antipaxos. Corfu is falling away to the right, and the thud and swing of the open sea begins to make itself felt. It is here, though, in mid-channel, that a momentous historical event took place.

We owe the anecdote to Plutarch in
The Moralia
, which is an essay on oracles and gods and their habits – ideal holiday
reading
, by the way. Our Elizabethans must have known the name of Paxos from this text. A ship carrying both freight and many passengers found itself becalmed off Paxos, with night falling. Everyone was awake, and many were lingering over their
dinner
. Suddenly they all heard a voice coming vaguely from the direction of Paxos, which called upon the ship's pilot, one Thamus, an Egyptian. He was called twice, but he did not answer, presumably disbelieving his ears; the third time he was told in a louder voice: ‘When the ship comes opposite Palodes you must announce the death of the Great God Pan.' At first Thamus thought he would not do it; he would sail right past Palodes. But there they lay, becalmed, and finally at the
indicated
spot he shouted out the news, at which a great wail of lamentation arose out of the sea.

‘Momentous' is the
mot juste
– for the heart of the ancient world had stopped beating. Later the mystagogues were to claim that this moment marked the very moment of the
crucifixion
– the reader is free to believe or not. But from this point the pulse-beat of human civilization changed its epicentre, and the vitality of the ages flowed out of Greece into Rome.

The only other interesting piece of history concerning this tiny spot is probably fiction – though it is pleasant to think it might have been true. Antony and Cleopatra are said to have had a dinner party here on the eve of Actium – where so many of their hopes were destroyed.

What else? The little, flat-roofed villages have water trouble in common with so many Greek islands; they live on cisterns and try to hoard winter rain. But the summers are fierce. There are good little harbours for small-boat owners.

It is in this channel that I have seen, on more than one occasion, the huge plate-like form of the hawksbill turtle
spinning
languidly about in the wake of the vessel. It can reach a metre in length, this strange animal, and is astonishingly agile in the water. It is only one of a variety of sea-creatures which you may be lucky enough to glimpse as the boat furrows its path on down towards the Lefkas Channel. The land has become poorer towards the east, mountains melting to lowlands.

The heavy-jowled Albano-Epirote mountains have steadily given place, first to bony scrubland, and now to marshlands which dwindle away among malarial lagoons – all very fine for winter snipe-shooting and even the occasional boar – but
pestilential
in summer, indeed unbearably sad in their desolation, especially after a taste of Corfu. Arta, Prevesa, Missolonghi – they seem to belong to another circle of the Inferno, but of course they are not island towns. Rancid green lakes where water-snakes, flies and green terrapins squirm about – and
solitary
birds unused to the gun. Trelawny, the keen hunter, found a new Italian Maremma here; Byron skulking about, hunting for remains of the city which was built to commemorate Actium, found a few bits of broken wall. Nobody who visits Missolonghi can help wondering whether it was not an acute malarial fever which carried off Byron. But we ourselves are still at sea, thank heavens.

One should recall another not infrequent visitor to these caves and quarries among the deserted islands; it was once quite a usual sight, but has now become increasingly rare. The little monk seal – a brownish mammal (
monachus monachus
) whose
fur is not particularly fine but which has, or had, a delightfully unconstrained manner, presumably because it always found secret coves to breed in and to fish from, and was relatively unmolested. When I was a small-boat owner, I saw the little creature on several occasions, usually in a still summer sea, where it gives the impression from a distance of being a
swimmer
; but it was always surprising to see one so far out in
mid-channel
. One seal allowed me to come to within four or five metres of it; of course, I had switched off the motor and approached with oars. Then it submerged, but very slowly, and with an apparent reluctance. Before World War II a small
colony
of them was reported from the deserted islet north of Corfu, called Errikusa, where they sunbathed on the flat rocks like nymphets, or emanations from some ancient Greek myth. What happens today, I wonder? The fishermen say that mostly they have been destroyed because they had the bad habit of tearing the nets after emptying them of their catch. Perhaps they have disappeared for good? I hope not.

The sad little island of Lefkas (or Santa Maura) has little to interest the modern traveller at its northern end, where its position
vis-à-vis
the mainland suggests a vermiform appendix. The little canal is always silting up, and there has been some learned controversy as to whether it is really an island at all. It has, however, always been taken for a member of the Ionian group, though it cannot vie in natural interest and beauty with the others. There is some pretty inland scenery, but movement is hampered by a defective road system, and nowadays the
passenger
boats normally do not call in very often. The visitor who really wants to explore it must be prepared for long and stony trudges and longish, bumpy drives.

Whatever the limitations of Lefkas, it has one feature which commands the attention of the world – the White Cliffs from which the poetess Sappho made her ill-fated leap into eternity.
Was it accident or intent? We shall presumably never know, and the ancient authorities are as usual not ancient enough, and somewhat vague in their descriptions of what went on. There was, on the penultimate crag by the lighthouse, a temple of Apollo, and the jump itself was one of something like
seventy-two
metres from a deeply undercut cliff. Confused legends
suggest
that the ancients believed that one could leap straight down into the Underworld from here – or at least link up with the River of the Dead, the Acheron. Other traditions say that one could cure oneself of the pangs of disprized love by making the leap, and that this is what Sappho had in mind. The
question
of intent must rest vague, but the actual leap (unless the whole thing is simply a legend) has struck the imagination of the world. It seems appropriate to the greatness of the poetic star – just like the leap of Empedocles into the crater of Etna. At any rate, it struck a spark in the imagination of young Byron when he was among the islands, and his interest makes one wonder whether he did not have in the back of his mind some idea of emulating Sappho. He was extremely puffed-up by his triumphant swim across the Hellespont, and on the look-out for other deeds as picturesquely suitable to the foremost
profligate
and love-poet of the day. Suitable or not, he did not risk repeating the Sapphic jump.

As far as Sappho is concerned, it seems that something went wrong. For in the time of Cicero and Strabo the jump was often, and quite safely, accomplished. The priests of Apollo
performed
it regularly without hurting themselves, and boats were organized to recuperate jumpers. Sometimes plumes and wings were attached to the shoulders of those who chose to leap. The jump itself was called
Katapontismos
, and one wonders if it did not have some ancient propitiatory function. For example, when a whole village had to expiate a sacrilegious act or avert some bad luck, a scapegoat might be chosen – usually the
village idiot – who was symbolically beaten with rods and made to repent, before being shoved over the cliff into the sea. If he did not die, he was fished out and from thenceforth treated as if dead; he must choose another village to live in. One of the functions of the temple was probably something of this kind. But the puzzle of Sappho remains – what sort of accident was it?

The fact remains that it is a breathless and bone-cracking excursion up to St Nicholas, where the White Cliffs are. You can see the leap, however, if you have good glasses when the Athens-bound steamer passes
outside
the island. It is perhaps not as distinctive a feature as the White Cliffs of Dover, but nobody celebrated has ever jumped over them and into the Channel.

From the point of view of Homeric references, the cliffs find a recognizable place in the
Odyssey
– figuring, as would be quite reasonable, as a celebrated navigational aid to seamen, rather like the Erice headland in Sicily, or the temple of Sunion. Is it worth mentioning that despite the clearest of textual
indications
to the contrary, some archaeologists have argued that Lefkas is really the Ithaca of Homer? This ivory-skulled and contentious race of men, each determined to be original, is responsible for almost as much confusion as the ambiguities of history, the intrusions of myth, the disappearance of sources; the poor traveller is bedevilled by their squabbles. One excepts, of course, great seminal dreamers like Schliemann who turned a great poem into a greater reality by proving that it was no invention but a historic fact; one excepts also Evans, with his extraordinary dream-vision of a whole civilization which came true. And we are lucky that in the Ionian there are relatively few bones of contention, so clearly has the terrain been mapped by Homer. A few dates may creak when it comes to the Corinthian War in these waters, or the distinct traces of a flourishing
Mycenean civilization in the form of rich tombs; but relatively speaking it is plain sailing for the most part.

But up there on the white cliffs of poetry, the wind blows with a steady cool drumming on the ears, and the asphodels tremble and nod among the barren rocks with their savage thistles. I once knew an Austrian botanist who spent some time camping upon the central spine of the island – for there are three small mountains in a line, like vertebrae. He was in search of a particular rock plant; he described vividly how, while he was sitting gazing down over the famous leap, he suddenly found himself enveloped in a white mist which had risen from the sea. It was quite a distinct emanation, and condensed into a shape with definite outlines. Inside it, he heard the mewing of seagulls and also the calling of human voices. The phenomenon was so strange that he became afraid and, rapidly packing up, took to his heels. Egon Kahr was his name. A few months later he fell from a high apartment building in Athens and was killed; he was holding a telephone in his hand which had been wrenched from the wall. There was no explanation
forthcoming
. Should there have been? In Greece, stories like this hang about in the air, somehow pregnant with a meaning that never becomes clear. They seem legendary, undisturbed, complete, meaningless as an echo.

To what point are we the dupes of history and of fashion? After all, there are islands every bit as beautiful as Greek islands off the coast of Yugoslavia, off Scotland, in the Caribbean. Is one just a prey to a facile, poetic self-indulgence? The question will not hang in the air for long, and the answer will be an almost certain ‘No'. There is a special kind of presence here in this land, in this light; it is not uncommon for visitors of
sensibility
to have the almost uncomfortable feeling that the ancient world is still there, at their elbows, just out of sight. It is not the kind of ‘feyness' of the Irish; it is not a belief in kelpies; it is
something much stronger, akin to panic. Indeed, panic is the very word, and Pan the very person involved – albeit he is supposed to be dead now. The peasants still refuse to sleep in the shade of certain trees at noon, for fear of having their wits stolen away. There are spaces among the noonday silences, while the rough hand of the wind caresses the dry grasses of Delos or Phaestos when you almost overhear the little god breathing. Woe to you if his siesta is disturbed, for he goes on the rampage and sows a Panic fear in all who come his way.

Pan has a strange history, and, as Lawson points out, in his role of patron god of Arcadian shepherd-life, he would have seemed rather an uncouth being to the average cultured
Athenian
of the fifth century; if it hadn't been for his miraculous intervention in the battle of Marathon, he might never have become elevated enough to have a temple built for him. But on the whole the noontide is his hour. Theocritus writes: ‘Nay shepherd, it must not be; ye must not pipe at noon for fear of Pan.' The amusing thing is that he was still active enough to influence the superstitious translators of the Septuagint, for he appears in the Psalms as ‘the destruction that wasteth at
noonday
'. It is not possible to reside long in Greece without coming across peasants who have actually seen the little god; and some feeble-witted children are supposed to have encountered him when walking in the woods.