Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (16 page)

A little sadly I joined Gaithuri in the cold open spaces alongside an army barracks and unfolded my bed and sleeping bag. I did succeed in wasting a couple of hours in a restaurant along the road over a long drawn-out supper. Back at my camping place I kept tripping over a long piece of wire which seemed to be everywhere I put my feet. Finally I gave it an irritated kick, which achieved the desired effect.

Twenty minutes later, while I was still trying to adjust to the flashing of the airport beacon before sleep would come, I saw Gaithuri wheel round with alert head and ears. She was an excellent watchdog and I looked quickly in the direction in which she was pointing. Two figures were approaching in the darkness, silhouetted intermittently against the beacon light. I reached for my walking stick. And my trousers.

As the two figures drew nearer I saw that they were soldiers and, to my shock, that one of them was advancing on me with fixed bayonet. The other seemed
to be pulling something along with his hand. Immediate action was obviously called for.

I sat up on my bed with my hands in the air and said in rapid Greek: “Good evening. I am an English tourist.”

I sensed some of the tension going out of the situation but the end of the bayonet was uncomfortably close. I also sensed the ridiculousness of my own situation and put my arms back under the blanket.

“It is cold,” I explained.

The second man came closer and flashed a torch. I did not look like a desperado and he seemed satisfied. He switched the beam of his torch to his hand and revealed the end of a piece of wire which trailed behind him in the darkness.

“Our telephone,” he told. “You have broken it.”

He offered a lot of other information, from which I gleaned, though I was not sure how correctly, that it was a field line from one guard post to another some distance away. It was this that I had kicked in half. I was as profuse in my apologies as my Greek enabled me to be, and they wandered off into the night along the course of the wire talking volubly.

By 4.30am the next morning I was out of the sleeping bag and astonished Gaithuri by proceeding to saddle and load her. But, as always, as soon as the bit was in her mouth, she resigned herself to her fate. Before five we were going clippety-clop through the dark and silent streets, only an occasional cafe neon, with the day's first coffee-sippers, casting a square of light across the pavements, while the occupants lowered their cups to watch this apparition pass across their narrow world.

Two hours later, I was through the maze of Heraklion and on the high road to Chania, huddling
Gaithuri to the edge of the road as the first buses began to thunder by with their daily freight of eight-to-five workers.

This was the day I broke my walking stick into three pieces. In a fury. It was a beautiful morning as mornings can only be when the sun comes up clear and warm after a rain-filled night. There may have been just a little too much wind, but when that wind was full of the smell of mown hay and fresh-turned earth where the peasants were tilling their vineyards and when the sun was hot on your back, then wind was welcome.

I was walking along what might in England be called a country lane. But there was no country lane in England like the one I was walking along the day after passing through Heraklion. On either side were vineyards.

In between the vineyards were rectangles of artichoke and onion and more familiar wheat and barley. These latter were grown in this locality chiefly as animal feed; that is, the animals grazed on them while it was still green and growing. Sheens of apparent water lay everywhere, turning, on closer inspection, into polythene protection for acres of tomatoes and cucumbers.

Something else un-English was the Mediterranean and the sun-drenched sand 100 yards away on my right with the mountains rising steeply on my left to the peak of Psiloritis, 7,500 feet above my lane.

It was the snow that was giving the keen edge to the wind but not cold enough to discourage millions of wild flowers and the bees and butterflies that fluttered among them.

There was also the first snake I had seen in Crete, but it was much too nice a morning to kill anything, and I
let it slither away into the grass. Gaithuri seemed quite unconcerned about it.

The fields about me were dotted with cows and goats, and the donkeys on which the labourers had ridden to their fields. One particular black donkey obviously took a great fancy to Gaithuri and pranced and leaped at the end of his tether in an attempt to break loose.

He was secured by a rope round one ankle and as I had a habit of talking to animals encountered en route, I shouted some derisory brays at him and his amorous inclinations.

Well, I hope I have conveyed the peace and tranquillity and beauty with which I was enveloped. I was totally immersed in it. The road was soft underfoot – in itself a major blessing after all those miles of tarmac; Gaithuri was well-fed and cooperative; the problem of Heraklion was behind me; and all of summer lay ahead.

Twelve paces breathing in, twelve paces breathing out… that was something you could only do (if you could do it at all) when the air was unpolluted.

There were three choices of road before me. One of them went up and over the mountain in the now familiar Z-shaped scar; one disappeared into a gorge heading west; the third was the fresh disfigurement of the still incomplete national road, hugging the coastline, corner-cutting, easily graded and many miles shorter than the twisting mountain road.

It was a decision which could be postponed until it had to be made, which would be when I reached the corner of the bay and the direction posts at the crossroads
half an hour later.

I was happily singing a Gracie Fields song from the twenties about waking up in the morning to hear the birdies say good morning and similar references to clover and new mown hay when Gaithuri with a rush went past me kicking madly. And alongside her was that bloody black donkey. I never even heard him coming.

The weight of baggage on the saddle plus the leather strappings round her hind legs made all Gaithuri's effort at self-defence futile and before I could get round to her other side to deal with the attack that beast literally had her by the scruff of the neck in his jaws. That was when I broke my walking stick.

I hit that donkey as hard as I could on the rump. The bottom two feet of the stick snapped off. I reversed it and hit him again. The crook and another foot of wood disintegrated. I was left with eighteen inches of useless wood in my hand.

By this time, what with the burden on her back and the mauling she was getting, Gaithuri was down on the ground, the baggage still intact on the saddle and those horrible jaws still clamped on the top of her neck. That monster was ravishing my rucksack.

I grabbed his halter and jerked back with all my weight. The leather snapped and sent me sprawling.

Suddenly, we were back a million years in evolution. Not fang and claw but teeth and hooves and bare hands. Not two but three primitive animals.

I knew I was going to kill that donkey before it killed Gaithuri. I looked wildly round for a weapon and found it in a jagged rock at the roadside. I grabbed one black ear and raised the rock above my head. No doubt about it, in another second I would have bashed that
brute between the eyes as hard as I could.

The shouting came from behind me and I looked round to see three men running down the road towards me. One of them was waving his hands frantically and yelling.

I lowered my hands and stepped back, feeling intensely relieved at such a timely intervention. I found myself almost panting, not with exertion but something like blood lust.

As the men rushed up one of them grabbed the black donkey by the nose just above the nostril and squeezed hard. At the same time he yelled a few unintelligible words into the animal's ear. But the donkey understood them.

Also it couldn't breathe.

In another moment the action was over. The owner, for such he was, led his donkey away and gave it a brutal thrashing which I was in no mood to disapprove. The other men lifted Gaithuri to her feet, where she stood a little wobbly-kneed but otherwise intact.

I noted with a good deal of satisfaction that all my bits and pieces and the big rucksack were still where I had tied them when loading. If they could withstand that onslaught I needn't worry in the future about anything coming adrift on the march.

I examined poor Gaithuri carefully for injuries. Fortunately I keep the tethering rope around her neck at all times, and those lustful teeth had clamped on the rope. She seemed strangely unperturbed as though it was something that happened to her every other day. With my
own nostrils still slightly aquiver with rage, she was not even breathing hard.

Everything that had happened suddenly began to appear in a slightly different light. I even thought I could detect a small gleam of gratification in her eye. I suppose at her age even such an assault could have been considered flattering. You never knew with dames.

I myself learned a good deal from the experience, including the lesson that when passing strange donkeys on the road, you should keep your flipping mouth shut.

The national highway running the full length of the north coast of Crete was becoming, much against my wishes and my will, one of the dominant factors in my perambulant life. I got off it whenever a peninsula offered me escape from its asphalt omnipresence, but I was always compelled to return to it on my westward march. And once you were on it, it was extremely difficult to get off – even to go to the loo. For it was lined with high fencing erected at government expense to keep the sheep and goats off the road.

It was a moot point whether the intention was to save the sheep or the motorists but there was no doubt of its necessity. The hillsides often moved and tinkled with the presence of great flocks and as I stood and watched them it was certain that a dark figure would immediately detach itself and come bounding down the slopes towards me.

Those shepherds were as sure-footed and almost as wild as their goats. They were of a tradition as old as Crete and as rugged and undefeatable. They were hard, lonely men whose faces and bearing took on much of the craggy character of their environment. They spoke to me in deep, rough voices that sounded like echoes in a mountain gorge to ask me for a cigarette.

In the passes through which the new road blasted and bulldozed its way men of much or little faith and machines of no faith at all were moving mountains. I mean, literally, moving mountains. Lifting them up piece by piece and dropping them into some river-carved ravine to form a platform for a four-lane highway and a filling station and maybe a hamburger stall.

A process which had taken nature a million years to complete was undone in a few weeks. But nature heals while she destroys. The slow erosion of wind and water is compensated by simultaneous new growth of vegetation. Not so these man-made upheavals. It would take a long, long time to obscure these naked scars across the land.

It was with these thoughts that I and Gaithuri moved deviously through the snarling machines and shouting men, breathing shallowly in the all-pervading dust and diesel fumes – a contrast in time and method which invariably brought even this mountain-moving miracle to a halt as labourers paused to stare and wonder.

There were few towns and villages along the new road. Most of them lay inland in the mountains where they were comparatively safe from assaults by pirates and other sea raiders. The old road naturally linked these centres to each other and the major towns.

One of the advantages of this to the walker with a donkey was that there were no regular buses (not yet anyway) on this part of the national route. But there were plenty of road-making vehicles and their ancillaries to shatter the eternal peace of the hills and valleys and these noisome juggernauts were now reinforced by the procession of tourist coaches. I didn't know whether to be pleased or sorry when a coach squealed to a stop fifty yards past me and then reversed till it was abreast. A score of heads popped out of the windows and one of them asked me: “Are you Peter White?”

Still, it was a change from the “
Germanos
?” which was usually thrust at me by Cretans and which, for some reason, I found very annoying, and it did end in my having, for the first time in a year, a whisky and soda.

With the villages coming at such rare intervals I tended to remember better the ones I did encounter. And I certainly wouldn't forget Sises (pronounced see-sez). It was a solitary dot on my map just off the broad stripe of the motorway and beckoned me for the whole of a long tar-and-concrete day.

As kilometre after empty kilometre went slowly by I found myself reciting over and over again: “she says sises by the seesaw on the seashore.” As far as I can remember I never got it right once.

That was not the only reason I would remember Sises. It was a village that had not adapted itself to the sort of civilisation and tempo that a national highway inevitably brought with it. The tourist was almost as strange an animal as a foreigner with a donkey.

No provision was made for him and that meant no accommodation. This was a situation which I had often encountered and which required only a question from me at the first cafe I came to – “Where can I find a room for the night?” – for an invisible train of events to be set in motion which would end with me in a room which might be anything from four star to a hurriedly cleaned stable. It usually took about five glasses of wine in the cafe before I was aware that something had happened.

At Sises my advent was significant enough to merit the intervention of the mayor himself. I and Gaithuri were his guests for the night with meals and bedding supplied for us both. I strongly suspect that he moved his three young children out of their room into his own bedroom for my benefit. And in the morning, he
presented me with a bottle of wine from his own grapes – and his own feet – to sustain me on the next stage of my journey towards Rethymnon. I knew by now that this sort of wine did not travel well, especially on the back of a donkey, so I didn't allow it to spoil by traveling too far.