The Moonspinners (2 page)

‘Too good to be true,' I had said. ‘All right, I'll buy it, what are the snags? Where do we have to sleep? Over the taverna, with the genuine Doric bugs?'

But no. This, it appeared, was the whole point. All the other attractions of Agios Georgios could be found in a score of similar villages, in Crete or elsewhere. But Agios Georgios had a hotel.

This had, in fact, been the village
kafenéion
, or coffee-shop, with a couple of rooms over the bar. But this, with the adjoining cottage, had been recently bought by a new owner, who was making them the nucleus of what promised to be a comfortable little hotel.

‘He's only just started; in fact, I was their first guest,' said my informant. ‘I understand that the authorities are planning to build a road down to the village some time soon, and meanwhile Alexiakis, the chap who bought the taverna, is going ahead with his plans. The accommodation's very simple, but it's perfectly clean, and – wait for it – the food is excellent.'

I looked at him in some awe. Outside the better hotels and the more expensive restaurants, food in Greece – even the voice of love has to confess it – is seldom excellent. It tends to a certain monotony, and it knows no variation of hot and cold; all is lukewarm. Yet here was a Dane, a well-rounded, well-found Dane (and the Danes have possibly the best food in Europe), recommending the food in a Greek village taverna.

He laughed at my look, and explained the mystery. ‘It's quite simple. The man's a Soho Greek, originally a native of Agios Georgios, who emigrated to London twenty years ago, made his pile as a restaurateur, and has now come back, as these folk do, and wants to settle at home. But he's determined to put Agios Georgios on the map, so he's started by buying up the taverna, and he's imported a friend of his from his London restaurant, to help him. They've not seriously started up yet, beyond tidying up the two existing bedrooms, turning a third into a bathroom, and cooking for their own satisfaction. But they'll take you, Nicola, I'm sure of that. Why not try? They've even got a telephone.'

I had telephoned next day. The proprietor had been surprised, but pleased. The hotel was not yet officially opened, he told me; they were still building and painting, I must understand, and there were no other guests there; it was very simple and quiet . . . But, once assured that this was exactly what we wanted, he had seemed pleased to welcome us.

Our plans, however, had not worked out quite smoothly. Frances and I were to have taken Monday evening's flight to Crete, stayed the night in Heraklion, and gone to Agios Georgios next day, by the bi-weekly bus. But on Sunday she had telephoned from Patras, where her friends' boat had been delayed, and had begged me not to waste any of my precious week's holiday waiting for her, but to set off myself for Crete, leaving her to find her own way there as soon as possible. Since Frances was more than capable of finding her way anywhere, with the least possible help from me, I had agreed, swallowed my disappointment, and managed to get straight on to Sunday evening's flight, intending to have an extra day in Heraklion, and take Tuesday's bus as planned. But chance, in the shape of the Studebakers, had offered me a lift on Monday morning, straight to the south-west corner of Crete. So here I was, with a day in hand, set down in the middle of a landscape as savage and deserted as the most determined solitary could have wished for.

Behind me, inland, the land rose sharply, the rocky foothills soaring silver-green, silver-tawny, silver-violet, gashed by ravines, and moving with the scudding shadows of high cirrus which seemed to smoke down from the ghostly ridges beyond. Below the road, towards the sea, the land was greener. The track to Agios Georgios wound its way between high banks of maquis, the scented maquis of Greece. I could smell verbena, and lavender, and a kind of sage. Over the hot white rock and the deep green of the maquis, the judas trees lifted their clouds of scented flowers the colour of purple daphne, their branches reaching landwards, away from the African winds. In a distant cleft of the land, seemingly far below me, I saw the quick, bright gleam that meant the sea.

Silence. No sound of bird; no bell of sheep. Only the drone of a bee over the blue sage at the roadside. No sign of man's hand anywhere in the world, except the road where I stood, the track before me, and a white vapour trail, high in the brilliant sky.

I picked my case up from among the dusty salvias, and started down the track.

A breeze was blowing off the sea, and the track led downhill, so I went at a fair speed; nevertheless it was fully fifteen minutes before I reached the bluff which hid the lower part of the track from the road, and saw, a couple of hundred yards further on, the first evidence of man's presence here.

This was a bridge, a small affair with a rough stone parapet, which led the track over a narrow river – the water supply, I supposed, on which Agios Georgios lived. From here the village was still invisible, though I guessed it could not be far, as the sides of the valley had opened out to show a wide segment of sea, which flashed and glittered beyond the next curve of the track.

I paused on the bridge, set down my case and shoulderbag, then sat down on the parapet in the shade of a sycamore tree, swinging my legs, and staring thoughtfully down the track towards the village. The sea was – as far as I could judge – still about half a mile away. Below the bridge the river ran smoothly down, pool to pool dropping through glittering shallows, between shrubby banks lit by the judas-trees. Apart from these the valley was treeless, its rocky slopes seeming to trap the heat of the day.

Midday. Not a leaf stirring. No sound, except the cool noise of the water, and the sudden
plop
of a frog diving in the pool under the bridge.

I looked the other way, upstream, where a path wound along the waterside under willows. Then I slid to my feet, carried my case down below the bridge, and pushed it carefully out of sight, into a thicket of brambles and rock roses. My canvas bag, containing my lunch, fruit, and a flask of coffee, I swung back on to my shoulder. The hotel was not expecting me; very well, there was no reason why I should not, in fact, take the whole day ‘out'; I would find a cool place by the water, eat my meal, and have my fill of the mountain silence and solitude before going down later to the village.

I started up the shady path along the river.

The path soon began to rise, gently at first, and then fairly steeply, with the river beside it rockier, and full of rapids which grew louder as the valley narrowed into a small gorge, and the path to a roughly trodden way above a green rush of water, where no sun came. Trees closed in overhead; ferns dripped; my steps echoed on the rock. But, for all its apparent seclusion, the little gorge must be a highway for men and beasts: the path was beaten flat with footprints, and there was ample evidence that mules, donkeys, and sheep came this way daily.

In a few moments I saw why. I came up a steepish ramp through thinning pines, and emerged at once from the shade of the gorge, on to an open plateau perhaps half a mile in width, and two or three hundred yards deep, like a wide ledge on the mountainside.

Here were the fields belonging to the people of Agios Georgios. The plateau was sheltered on three sides by the trees: southwards, towards the sea, the land fell away in shelving rock, and slopes of huge, tumbled boulders. Behind the fertile ground, to the north, soared the mountainside, silver-tawny in the brilliant light, clouded here and there with olives, and gashed by ravines where trees grew. From the biggest of these ravines flowed the river, to push its way forward across the plateau in a wide meander. Not an inch of the flat land but was dug, hoed and harrowed. Between the vegetable fields were rows of fruit trees: I saw locust trees, and apricots, as well as the ubiquitous olives, and the lemon trees. The fields were separated from one another by narrow ditches, or by shallow, stony banks where, haphazard, grew poppies, fennel, parsley, and a hundred herbs which would all be gathered, I knew, for use. Here and there, at the outlying edges of the plateau, the gay little Cretan windmills whirled their white canvas sails, spilling the water into the ditches that threaded the dry soil.

There was nobody about. I passed the last windmill, climbed through the vine rows that terraced the rising ground, and paused in the shade of a lemon tree.

Here I hesitated, half inclined to stop. There was a cool breeze from the sea, the lemon blossom smelt wonderful, the view was glorious – but at my feet flies buzzed over mule-droppings in the dust, and a scarlet cigarette-packet, soggy and disintegrating, lay caught in weeds at the water's edge. Even the fact that the legend on it was
ΕΘΝΟΣ
, and not the homely
Woodbine
or
Player's Weights
, didn't make it anything but a nasty piece of wreckage capable of spoiling a square mile of countryside.

I looked the other way, towards the mountains.

The White Mountains of Crete really are white. Even when, in high summer, the snow is gone, their upper ridges are still silver – bare, grey rock, glinting in the sun, showing paler, less substantial, than the deep-blue sky behind them; so that one can well believe that among those remote and floating peaks the king of the gods was born. For Zeus, they said, was born in Dicte, a cave of the White Mountains. They showed you the very place . . .

At that moment, on the thought, the big white bird flew, with slow, unstartled beat of wings, out of the glossy leaves beside me, and sailed over my head. It was a bird I had never seen before, like a small heron, milk-white, with a long black bill. It flew as a heron does, neck tucked back and legs trailing, with a down-curved, powerful wing beat. An egret? I shaded my eyes to watch it. It soared up into the sun, then turned and flew back over the lemon grove, and on up the ravine, to be lost to view among the trees.

I am still not quite sure what happened at that moment.

For some reason that I cannot analyse, the sight of the big white bird, strange to me; the smell of the lemon flowers, the clicking of the mill sails and the sound of spilling water; the sunlight dappling through the leaves on the white anemones with their lamp-black centres; and, above all, my first real sight of the legendary White Mountains . . . all this seemed to rush together into a point of powerful magic, happiness striking like an arrow, with one of those sudden shocks of joy that are so physical, so precisely marked, that one knows the exact moment at which the world changed. I remembered what I had said to the Americans, that they, by bringing me here, had given me a day. Now I saw that, literally, they had. And it seemed no longer to be chance. Inevitably, here I was, alone under the lemon trees, with a path ahead of me, food in my bag, a day dropped out of time for me, and a white bird flying ahead.

I gave a last look behind me at the wedge of shimmering sea, then turned my face to the north-east, and walked rapidly through the trees, towards the ravine that twisted up into the flank of the mountain.

2

When as
she
gazed into the watery glass

And through
her
brown hair's curly tangles scanned

Her
own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass

Across the mirror . . .

WILDE
:
Charmides

It was hunger, in the end, that stopped me. Whatever the impulse that had compelled me to this lonely walk, it had driven me up the track at a fair speed, and I had gone some distance before, once again, I began to think about a meal.

The way grew steeper as the gorge widened, the trees thinned, and sunlight came in. Now the path was a ribbon along the face of a cliff, with the water below. The other side of the ravine lay back from it, a slope of rock and scrub studded here and there with trees, but open to the sun. The path was climbing steeply, now, towards the lip of the cliff. It did not seem to be much used; here and there bushes hung across it, and once I stopped to gather a trail of lilac orchids which lay, unbruised, right at my feet. But on the whole I managed to resist the flowers, which grew in every cranny of the rock. I was hungry, and wanted nothing more than to find a level place in the sun, beside water, where I could stop and eat my belated meal.

Ahead of me, now, from the rocks on the right, I could hear water, a rush of it, nearer and louder than the river below. It sounded like a side stream tumbling from the upper rocks, to join the main water course beneath.

I came to a corner, and saw it. Here the wall of the gorge was broken, as a small stream came in from above. It fell in an arrowy rush right across the path, where it swirled round the single stepping stone, to tumble once again, headlong, towards the river. I didn't cross it. I left the path, and clambered, not without difficulty, up the boulders that edged the tributary stream, towards the sunlight of the open ground at the edge of the ravine.

In a few minutes I had found what I was looking for. I climbed a tumble of white stones where poppies grew, and came out on a small, stony alp, a level field of asphodel, all but surrounded by towering rocks. Southwards, it was open, with a dizzying view down towards the now distant sea.

For the rest, I saw only the asphodel, the green of ferns by the water, a tree or so near the cliffs, and, in a cleft of a tall rock, the spring itself, where water splashed out among the green, to lie in a quiet pool open to the sun, before pouring away through the poppies at the lip of the gorge.

I swung the bag off my shoulder, and dropped it among the flowers. I knelt at the edge of the pool, and put my hands and wrists into the water. The sun was hot on my back. The moment of joy had slackened, blurred, and spread itself into a vast physical contentment.

I stooped to drink. The water was ice cold, pure and hard; the wine of Greece, so precious that, time out of mind, each spring has been guarded by its own deity, the naiad of the stream. No doubt she watched it still, from behind the hanging ferns . . . The odd thing was – I found myself giving a half-glance over my shoulder at these same ferns – that one actually did feel as if one were being watched. Numinous country indeed, where, stooping over a pool, one could feel the eyes on one's back . . .