ONE COMPENSATION of this kind of travel is the unchartable and unregimented leisure between the rigours of displacement. Letters build their vain pyramids on some table in Athens; weeks pass; their mute clamour dies down unanswered; dust and oblivion enshroud them and the flight of months makes them obsolete and strips them of all but antiquarian interest. This vacuous and Olympian sloth is made more precious still by the evidence all round of arduous and boring toil. Here, too, in the absence of lofty theories about the intrinsic virtue of work regardless of results, no northern guilt comes to impair its full enjoyment. Such mephitic ideas cannot long survive the clear and decarbonizing sun.
Now and then one finds oneself, in the dilettante fashion of one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, helping in some pleasant and unexacting task: gathering olives onto spread blankets in late autumn, after beating fruit from the branches with long rods of bamboo; picking grapes into baskets, shelling peas or occasionally, in late summer, helping to tread the grapes. I remember one such occasion in Crete, in a cobbled and leafy yard in the village of Vaphé at the foothills of the White Mountains. First we spread deep layers of thyme branches at the bottom of a stone vat which stood breast-high like a giant Roman sarcophagus, then a troop of girls hoisted their heavy baskets and tipped in tangled cataracts of white and black grapes. The treading itself is considered a young man’s job. The first three, of which I was one, had their long mountain boots pulled off; buckets of water were sloshed over grimy shanks and breeches rolled above the knee. “A pity to wash off the dirt,” croaked the old men that always gather on such occasions. “You’ll spoil the taste.” This chestnut—which I imagine to have existed for several millennia—evoked its ritual laughter while we climbed on the edge and jumped down on the resilient mattress of grapes. Scores of skins exploded and the juice squirted between our toes.... In a minute or two a mauve-pink trickle crossed the stone lip of the spout, and dripped into the waiting tub; the trickle broadened, the drops became a stream and curved into a splashing arc.... We were handed glasses of the sweet juice which already—or was this imagination?—had a corrupt and ghostly tang of fermentation. When the stream slackened, the manhood of the treaders, shuffling calf-deep in a tangled slush by now and purple to the groin, was jovially impugned.... For days the sweet heady smell of the must hangs over the village. All is sticky to the touch, purple splashes and handprints on the whitewash and spilt red rivulets between the cobbles and the clouds of flies suggest a massacre. Meanwhile, in the dark crypts of the houses, in huge grooved Minoan amphorae, the must grumbles and hits out and fills the house with unnerving fumes and a bubbling noise like the rumour of plots, a dark conspiracy of whispers. For as long as this vaulted collusion lasts, a mood of swooning and Dionysiac laxity roves the air.
How different from the vineless and unleafy Mani! But still, leisure has its rewards here as well: idle mornings of meditation in upper rooms and saunters through a maze of towers and now, lying and smoking after a happy sleep in the cave-like shadow of a carob tree, above a landscape scattered with harvesters, I could watch the glint of their sickles as they felled the sparse corn. Under their yellow loads animals minced up the lanes on delicate hoofs. Threshing teams rotated on the gleaming dials of stone like the bustling minute-hands of eccentric timepieces and the winnowers plumed the middle distance with golden geysers of chaff. Strange that the word cereal should conjure up no vision but that of an overfed northern brat with a scarlet cheek crammed with breakfast food; never Ceres, whose rites were being celebrated below. But the Greek name—Demetriaka—immediately suggests the kind goddess of the sheaves with her chaplet of wheatears, her torch and her poppy.
Common words derived from the names of ancient gods in modern Greek are more evocative of their origins, perhaps by their freshness on a foreign ear, than their Latin equivalents in English. “Venereal,” for instance, never suggests Venus, but “the Aphrodisiac diseases” in modern Greek are immediately and painfully suggestive of baleful aspects of Aphrodite Pandemos. “Erotikos” merely connotes “pertaining to love,” and summons up the innocent and youthful Eros; unlike the word “erotic” in English. But there is no English equivalent of divine Latin origin—it would be “cupidinous”; Amor’s derivatives strike a more suspect note; and, strangely, though “Mercury” is the fluid metal compound in English, the Greek word hydrargyros (watersilver) fails to commemorate Hermes. He only survives, as he does with us, in the word “hermetic,” recalling not so much the messenger of the gods’ swiftness and volatility, as Hermes Trismegistus or the Egyptian Thoth and all that is sealed up initiate and arcane.
The cavernous shelter of this carob tree, these branches dangling with horny locust beans, was the right asylum from the afternoon sun for this Maniot pastoral. As the oven-like heat began to languish, the beckoning figure of our old host appeared below. Joining him, we made our way along a lane that circled like a contour-line the flank of two tower-crowned hills and led away to a cleft in the limestone mountain-side unexpectedly filled with green plane trees and figs and sycamores and a sudden insurrection of pink and white oleander: a green and leafy dell on the flank of the Mani. It was all due to a tinkling thread of water so cold that a mouthful made one shiver, which fell from the rock face into a rough stone tank whose inner walls fluttered with dark green water-weed. Neolithic channels and bamboo conduits led the precious liquid into hollowed tree trunks; and a similar system of flimsy and primordial irrigation had conjured up, over strips of earth banked in miniature tiers on both sides of the descending cleft, the green of tomato leaves and chickpeas and beanstalks. It soon petered out and the rock descended in great steel sweeps to the sea, interrupted now and then by a crescent of yellow stubble. The place had the unexpectedness of an oasis. The old man slipped two bottles into the tank and joined us at the low wall that overhung the bright layers. “There!” he said, “my garden.”
He used the word bagtche, a Turkish word of Persian origin, instead of the more usual Greek kipos or perivoli. It is a term still in common use in many country districts. I had been on the lookout in the Mani for any diminution in the sprinkling of Turkish words in spoken Greek but although there are considerable local peculiarities in the Maniot dialect there appeared to be no appreciable change in this respect. Contact with other races inevitably leaves a linguistic deposit and the two main contributors in Greek have been the Turks and the Venetians, the latter especially in matters concerning navigation. Perhaps the word bagtche has stuck because of the Turkish devotion to kitchen gardens; though the best gardeners in the Balkans are actually the Bulgars. It is, with curd-making and the distillation of attar, almost their only skill.
One of the great stumbling-blocks for writers like Dr. Fallmerayer, who are eager to underline or exaggerate the importance of the Slav element in the ethnological make-up of the modern Greeks, is that although Slav settlements in Greece left a vast and tiresome legacy of place-names behind them, there is scarcely a word of Slav origin in ordinary spoken Greek. If the language of a race is a living memorial to its history, the Sla-vonic share in the history of Greece would seem to be very slight indeed. The Turkish and Venetian words are nearly all nouns describing some object that first reached the Greeks via the Turks or the Venetians. In nearly every case there is a pure Greek equivalent and the interlopers could all, if necessary, be discarded. Indeed, there are purists who are eager to scrape away these alien barnacles as blemishes to the purity of the Greek tongue; perhaps, also, as they seem the stigmata of foreign occupation. Wrongly, I think. The corollary of this cleaning-up process is a distortion of history. It would certainly rob the rich spoken tongue of much of its stimulus and bite. (The Hellene and the Romios are at it again!) There are, through this random incrustation of Turkish words on the smooth surface of the Greek language—jagged and barbarous sounds perhaps, but with a rank zest like a wipe of garlic round a salad bowl—a number of noble Persian words. One turn of phrase, now that I know its full import, always fills me with delight: “Milá ta Ellinika pharsí,” “He speaks Greek perfectly.” It is a common remark in the everyday demotic. All is plain sailing except the last word. Pharsí? This mysterious and un-Hellenic adverb of perfection is never applied to anything but skill in language and it was only after I had been hearing it for years that an Athenian expert in such matters explained its meaning. Among the old Turks of the Ottoman Empire, Arabic was the language of religion and Persian the language of poetry and romantic literature. A cultivated man was expected to be acquainted with the latter, and, even if his knowledge of it was slight, to adorn his rough vernacular, as a jackdaw decorates its nest, with borrowed Iranian elegances; to talk, in fact, in the mode of Fars, the south-eastern province from which the name of Persia (and, no doubt, of the Zoroastrian Parsees) derives. In the mode of Fars...the phrase slipped into the Romaic, and I can never hear it now without a brief dream-vision of the closed gardens of Shiraz—bhags, in fact—filled with the sound of lutes and quatrains and falling fountains and the songs of moon-faced girls....[1]
The old man picked a few tomatoes and chickpeas and unwrapped from its rag a lump of cheese which he took out of his basket. Spreading them all neatly on a napkin he then unstoppered one of the bottles that he had left in the stone tank. It was kokkinelli, excellent retsina the colour of pink champagne which is common enough in Attica but rarer than nectar in this landscape of pumice. Its short sojourn under water had almost frozen it. Sipping and eating, alerted by a sudden noise and the clank of bells, we watched two herds of goats converge along the path from either direction. A third came leaping down through the trees, three shaggy hordes of Satans reeking of Hell and filling the air with dust. The hillside was alive with their many-pitched and sardonic derision; there was a ripple of hoofs and a clatter of long ribbed and spiralling horns as they assaulted the troughs and the hubbub was augmented by the heckling of skinny dogs.
Human dominion is never more than barely tolerated by these half-wild flocks. There is protest and anarchy at every step and the wide-hatted herdsmen, knee-deep in the rank turmoil, seem only to control them by the constant whirling of their crooks and a fusillade of stones and un-Theocritan objurgation. A raffish distinction is supplied to the goats’ faces by the jut of their southern gentlemen’s beards, but the set of their flecked yellow eyes, barred by oblong black pupils, spells only wickedness and cynicism and a kind of off-hand and humorous connivance, as if they were jeeringly abreast of our most carefully hidden secrets. A scattering of black Maniot pigs added their plebeian hysteria to the stampede. What could they all find to eat in this sun-smitten wilderness? A nimble nanny-goat had settled the problem by leaping into a sycamore tree and rising with lightning bounds from branch to branch till she had reached the top, where, perched precariously like a heraldic emblem, she began swallowing the delicious young leaves. The goatherd was in a frenzy and inappropriate oaths whizzed through the air in the wake of stony missiles. “Pimp!” he shouted, “Catamite!” and “Whore!”; all in vain. Finally, aiming his crook like a javelin, and winging it pleonastically with the cry of “hornwearer!” he caught her a neat blow on the belly. “Na, Keratá!” The goat sailed up into the air and over our heads in a wide arc and alighted on the hillside, where, cool as a cucumber, the female cuckold went on munching some gloomy plant. They vanished as quickly as they had come leaving nothing but a rank whiff and a pattern of neat cloven intaglios in the mud round the troughs. The barking and jeering dustclouds diminished and died away in the direction of the towers and vanished towards the sunset in a golden, far-tinkling haze.
* * *
It came as no surprise when our old host, fishing out and uncorking the second bottle as the moon took over from the sun, mentioned that “the old people”—always this disclaimer!—believed this fountain to be haunted by nereids. It was just the place for them. After Charon and a mysterious creature called the kallikantzaros, these beings are the supernatural survivors of the ancient world most often mentioned by name in the Greek countryside. Though some of them can be—especially in the Mani—sea-dwellers, on the whole they seem to have moved inland and become freshwater denizens haunting remote streams, springs, fountains, watery grottoes, mountain rivers and torrents and, occasionally, mill-ponds, especially if the mills are in ruins. It is impossible to say when this migration took place; perhaps it is just a shift of names; but they have usurped the hegemony of the ancient naiads and of the dryads and oreads as well. They have inherited the generic rôle of the nymphs. They dress in white and gold and are of unearthly beauty. Strangely enough, they are not immortal; they live about a thousand years. But they are of a different and rarer essence from ordinary mortals and, in some way, half divine. Their beauty never fades, nor do the charm and seduction of their voices. They are wonderful cooks and skilful spinners of flimsy and diaphanous fabrics. “Cooked by a nereid!” “Spun by a nereid!”—these expressions used to be common praise. There is also a light and airy creeper that festoons the trees in some parts of Greece, known as “nereid-spinning.” It reminds one of the cave where Odysseus landed on his return to Ithaca and the “great looms of stone where the nymphs weave robes of sea purple marvellous to behold.”
These nereids are feminine, volatile and wanton; seldom capable of a lasting passion. But most of the harm they do is involuntary, due to a congenital inaptitude for fidelity and the tamer domestic virtues. Interruption of their revels incurs the penalties of dumbness, blindness or epilepsy. They often fall violently in love with mortals, especially the young and brave, skilful dancers and flute- and lyra-players, and carry them off to their waterside haunts and to the threshing floors where they sometimes dance. Lonely young shepherds are particularly exposed to these dangers. “Do not go up to the lonely tree,” an island song runs, “nor down into the lowlands, nor play your flute by the upper reaches of the river, lest the nereids, finding you alone, gather round you in a throng.” There are many tales of shepherds and princes falling in love with them. When it is the other way round the dazed young stranger is carried off to a secret grotto, and wrapped in a passionate embrace, the nereid sailing away on the wind at the third cockcrow. But, with a few exceptions, their ardour flags before that of their lovers. If a nereid is reluctant to yield to a mortal (according to one legend) the secret of success is to seize her kerchief. She turns into terrifying shapes—into that of a lion, a snake and finally into flames, as in the story of Peleus and Thetis—but she at last resumes her own and surrenders and their secret nuptials are celebrated.
Sometimes, when a mortal keeps the kerchief hidden, nereids remain faithful to their husbands for years, even when the latter are married to mortal wives. Some have helped their husbands with supernatural backing, manœuvring them to the height of worldly success. They hate mortal women and the sentiment is mutual. Both are gnawed by jealousy and women seek protection for their households in amulets, by handing a clove of garlic over the door and by making a cross with paint or lamp-black on the lintel. The forty days between childbirth and churching are a particularly perilous time for women not only from spiteful nereids but from the Evil Eye and the other baleful influences that are loose. There are many families, apart from the Mavromichalis, who are said to be neraïdogennemenoi or nereid-born. They are thought to possess more than human graces. The adjective is also in common use to describe girls of especial beauty and charm. Fickle though they are, nereids worship their children by mortals—they are constantly drawn to their cradles. In fact, they have a general passion for the young and often kidnap pretty children, leaving in their stead sickly nereid changelings who usually pine away and die. Children sometimes run away and dance with them for days off their own bat and their petting and spoiling often has fatal results. When this happens the nereids are overcome with sorrow. Young men in love with nereids become melancholy and ill and prone to strokes and seizures. There are “nereid-doctors” who can cure the nereid-struck with potions and charms. One of the best of these remedies is a branch of “nereid-wood,” a species of tree of which I have not been able to discover the ordinary name. Goats and other livestock fall under their spell; they desert their flocks and waste away. A native of the Aegean islet of Pholegandros attributes the innumerable chapels there to the eagerness of the peasants to have a protecting saint close by. The whole species are sometimes referred to as the “kalokyrades”—“the good ladies”—on the same euphemistic principle that prompted the old Greeks to call the Furies the “Eumenides” or “kindly ones.”
Our old host put the remains of our little feast back into his basket. The moon was rising and we prepared to go back to the towers which now shone silver along their eastern flanks.
“We don’t have much trouble with them now”—how admirably civilized was the attitude of my rustic host and how much more sensible and balanced than the attitude of a whole class of his compatriots with whom I shall have to do in a paragraph or so.
[1] The poet Seferis—now Ambassador in London—introduced me to another of these stray Persian fragments: syntrivani, which is a beautiful demotic word for fountain—indeed for those playing in the imaginary bhags evoked by the word pharsí....