ON THE map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southward in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Taygetus mountains, which, from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length—seventy-five miles on their western and forty-five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across—projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani. As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre, subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold. Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of continental Greece. Nothing but the blank Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the northern marches of the Mani, rears a bare and waterless inferno of rock.
But all this, as we toiled up the north-eastern side next morning, was still a matter of conjecture and hearsay. Yorgo, trudging far above, stooped Atlas-like under our gear. The shoulder-strings of the Cretan bag in which I had stuffed the minute overflow burnt into my shoulders.... The chestnut trees of Anavryti were far below, and as we climbed the steep mountainside and the sun climbed the sky, vast extents of the Morea spread below us. The going grew quickly steeper and the path corkscrewed at last into a Grimm-like and Gothic forest of conifers where we were forever slipping backwards on loose stones and pine-needles. Emerging, we could look back over range after range of the Peloponnesian mountains—Parnon, Maenalus, even a few far away and dizzy crags of Killini and Erymanthus, and, here and there, between gaps of the Spartan and Arcadian sierras, blue far-away triangles of the Aegean and the gulf of Argos. But ahead we were faced by an unattractively Alpine wall of mineral: pale grey shale and scree made yet more hideous by a scattered plague of stunted Christmas trees. These torturing hours of ascent seemed as though they could never end. A vast slag heap soon shut out the kindly lower world; the sun trampled overhead through sizzling and windless air. Feet became cannon-balls, loads turned to lead, hearts pounded, hands slipped on the handles of sticks and rivers of sweat streamed over burning faces and trickled into our mouths like brine. Why, we kept wondering, though too short of breath for talk, does one ever embark on these furious wrestling matches, these rib-cracking clinches with the sublime? Felons on invisible treadmills, our labour continued through viewless infernos like the waste-shoots of lime-kilns.... Finally the toy German trees petered out and the terrible slope flattened into a smooth green lawn scattered with flowers and adorned by a single cistus clump with a flower like a sweet-smelling dog-rose. Yorgo was waiting in a last narrow cleft immediately above. It was the watershed of the Taygetus and so sharply defined that one could put a finger on a thin edge of rock and say, “Here it is.” A last step, and we were over it into the Mani.
A wilderness of barren grey spikes shot precipitously from their winding ravines to heights that equalled or overtopped our own; tilted at insane angles, they fell so sheer that it was impossible to see what lay, a world below, at the bottom of our immediate canyon. Except where their cutting edges were blurred by landslides, the mountains looked as harsh as steel. It was a dead, planetary place, a habitat for dragons. All was motionless. There was not even a floating eagle, not a sound or a sign that human beings had ever trodden there, and immense palisades of rock seemed to bar all way of escape. The perpendicular and shadowless light reverberated from the stone with a metallic glare and the whole landscape had a slight continual shudder, trembling and wavering in the fierce blaze of noon. The only hint of salvation lay far away to the south-west. There, through a deep notch in the confining mountains, gleamed a pale and hazy vista of the Ionian with a ghost of the Messenian peninsula along its skyline. Everything, except this remote gleam, was the abomination of desolation.
On a narrow ledge that overhung this chaos we found a miraculous spring: a trickle of cold bright water husbanded in a hollow tree-trunk lined with brilliant green moss. A wild fig-tree gesticulated overhead. Here, after long draughts, we lay with our feet propped on boulders. While sweat dried in salty craters and our pulses gradually slowed down we watched the thin blue wreaths of cigarette smoke melt into the sky as speech came slowly back. These empty peaks, according to Homer, were the haunt of Artemis and of three goat-footed nymphs who would engage lonely travellers in a country dance and lead them unsuspectingly to the precipice where they tripped them up and sent them spinning down the gulf.... All at once a further wonder came to increase our well-being: a cool breath of wind. This is one of the seldom-failing blessings of midsummer in the Peloponnese. After long broiling mornings when the afternoon, one would think, can only bring fiercer refinements of torture, the static air, heated beyond endurance, rises all at once like a Mongolfier and the sudden threat of that vacuum which nature abhors, drawing cool drafts from the sea along the winding canyons, sets up a delicious atmospheric commotion: a steady cool breeze that revives the traveller at his last gasp.
A faint tinkle of bells from the abyss told that faraway goats were shaking off the mesmeric stupor of midday. Yorgo, meanwhile, was busy slicing onions and garlic and green paprika pods into a concavity of the rock. Snipping the end off a cucumber, he handed it to Joan, who, without a word, stuck it on her forehead. (This curious custom spreads a welcome coolness on the forehead. It is common, in summer, to see people sitting over their food, or even walking in the street, with these mysterious dark green excrescences growing from their heads like the incipient horn of a unicorn’s foal.) Reaching into the hollow of the log, he extracted three paximadia from the spring and wrapped them in a cloth to draw the water out before they got too soggy. These dark brown pumices of twice-baked bread—the staple fare of Greek shepherds and of the medieval Basilian hermits—can be kept for months. Hard as fossils, they are excellent; especially with garlic, when soaked to the right consistency. (The baked oblongs are fluted with deep clefts for easier breaking, and the detached fragments look like nothing so much as the brown treeless islets scattered round the coasts of Greece; in fact, many a small archipelago—notably the crags jutting from the Libyan sea off the south of Crete—are called Ta Paximadia.) Unwrapping the cloth, he put them on a stone, sprinkled the onions and tomatoes and peppers and cucumber with rock-salt and poured oil over them. Then he picked a fig leaf on which he piled a handful of olives in a black pyramid and pulled out a small bottle of wine. We joined him, he crossed himself three times, and we all fell to. When we had finished, emptying the glass in turn and mopping up the last puddles of oil with lumps of paximadia, he produced some small green pears which were hard and sweet. While we leant back smoking against boulders, he scrupulously collected what remained of the paximadia, kissed it, and knotted it in a cloth. There is a superstitious veto against throwing away all but the smallest crumbs of bread and the kiss is a thanksgiving and a memento of the Last Supper. He was a fair-haired, friendly but rather silent man.
“You shouldn’t go to sleep under a fig tree,” he said, observing our falling eyelids.
“Why not?”
“The shadow is heavy.”
I had heard this before, especially in Crete. There is never an explanation of this heaviness, except that it is alleged to bring on vertigo and bad dreams; it is as odd as the Caribbean superstition that sleeping under the bells of a datura tree in flower drives the sleeper mad. I shifted a few inches out of politeness, though I have never felt the ill effects. Yorgo lay with his head on a stone.
When we woke up half an hour later, two small figures were standing at gaze a little distance off and behind them half a dozen goats had materialized, their presence unheralded by the clash of bells. We called to them but they neither answered nor moved, and it was only by dint of long coaxings and assurances that we were neither robbers nor outlaws that they ventured closer. They were two barefoot, raggedly dressed and ikon-faced little girls of ten and twelve, both of them extremely beautiful. They were tanned to a gypsy darkness, their hair was inexpertly bobbed and their brown legs were criss-crossed with the scars of thorns and thistles. They sat side by side on stones with their hands clasped round their knees and drank us in with immense black luminous eyes strangely compounded by innocence and wisdom under brows like arched and sweeping penstrokes, which seemed to fill their entire faces. Delicate, fine-boned and solemn, they could have been nothing but Greek; not so much the Greeks of the pagan world as the spiritual etiolation that gazes from the walls of St. Sophia and Ravenna: the bewildering combination of aloofness and devouring intensity that radiates from the eye-sockets of eastern Madonnas and empresses. They were called Anastasia and Antiope. Too shy to talk, almost their only utterances were an occasional cry—accompanied by a flung stone or a menacing flourish of their crooks—directed at a goat straying too far from the flock. Then they would sink into their silent and wide-eyed scrutiny. We gave them our remaining pears, and they thanked us with a polite gravity, but kept them, they said, to eat later. The pears remained like votive offerings in their cupped brown hands. When we rose and said good-bye, they asked us, suddenly articulate, why we didn’t stay on, and the eldest waved her hand round the rocky landscape as if to say that their house was at our disposal. But we hoisted our bundles and set off downhill.
“Go towards the Good,” one of them said, and the other, “May you have the Good Hour!”
The immobile figures of these two little Byzantines dwindled as we zigzagged downhill. Even at a distance we could sense the wide effulgent gaze which those four eyes aimed from their ledge half-way to the sky. They waved when we were just about to dip out of sight. There are very few people in these surroundings, Yorgo observed. “They are wild and shy and not accustomed to talk.” He pointed straight up into the air. The canyon was closing round us. “They see nothing but God.”
* * *
The mountain-side descending into the chasm was an upturned harrow of spikes, the spaces between the spikes were choked with boulders and loose stones and so steep was the slope that every other step unloosed a private landslide. Labouring downhill in cataracts of falling stones whose clatter sent echoes volleying along the ravine, we got to the bottom at last.
The torrent bed, filled with bleached boulders, wound away nowhere between confining walls of rock. It was utterly desolate. Sometimes the dry bed would widen into a broad pebbly loop, only to close again to narrows which must turn the spate of winter waters into a swollen turmoil of foam and spray. Now there was not even a trickle; only the occasional loyal emblem of an oleander. But one of the turnings brought us on top of a shady and idyllic clump of plane trees growing round the entrance to a cave. It was built up with flat stones into a fold for flocks, and a group of men and women were squatting or lying under the leaves. Donkeys were tethered to the lower boughs, and goats, whose far-off bells we had heard from the mountain top, nibbled invisible vegetation among the rocks. Bronze cauldrons of whey bubbled over fires of thorns, dripping cloths full of wet cheese hung from the branches among bright haversacks and crooks and blankets and a couple of double-barrelled guns and a portable cradle like a Red Indian papoose which swung like a pendulum. Wooden saddles, to three of which we were promptly bidden—side-saddle, they make comfortable chairs when standing on the ground—were scattered about. The men and women, lean and dark as Algonquins, wore plaited wicker hats with brims almost a yard in diameter: great discs over which the shadows of the plane-tree leaves flickered and revolved and slid when their heads moved. We were given wooden spoons and half-calabashes of warm milk sprinkled with salt and then grilled about politics in England, the chances of war, the Cyprus question, Middle East strategy and the nature of the British Constitution.
One of the shepherds, with a hand laid on our shoulders, said the great bond between Greece and England was that we both had kings and queens. It was the first time we came in contact with the unshakable royalism of the Mani. Minute, long-necked casseroles were pushed into the embers, and, after coffee and farewells as cordial as though we were leaving after a month’s stay, we continued down the gorge. Our hands were filled with gifts of almonds and pears, our stuff was piled on a mule and driven off by a boy of sixteen called Chrysanthos. Yorgo’s office being accomplished, he shook hands and sped clean up the mountain-side as though he were wearing seven-league boots. Soon he was a speck far above us. He planned, incredible as it seemed, to be back at Anavryti by daybreak. His last words were a whispered admonition about the inhabitants of the Mani....
Further along the gorge, Chrysanthos pointed to some scattered bones. “There you are,” he said, “the remains of a rebel.” I know nothing of anatomy, but they looked very much like the fragments of a human pelvis, a tibia and a couple of ribs. Then we noticed an old boot and a bit of rotted webbing. A little further on he picked up an empty cartridge-case and whistled down it.
“These mountains were full of the cuckolds,” he went on, “a real stronghold. It took a man like Papagos to do them in.” He described, with staccato gestures of aiming and trigger pressing and all the onomatopoeia of a battle—the whistle of bullets, the stutter of machine-guns and the bangs of mortar bombs exploding—how the rebel force had been outflanked and destroyed....“The mountains stank of dead Elasites for weeks afterwards and a good riddance of bad rubbish. But they fought like dogs. Like dogs!” He bared his teeth. “Because, after all, they were Greeks and they knew how to fight....”
The gorge grew claustrophobically narrow and the whirling stratification of each side tallied as accurately with its fellow as if a knife stroke had sliced them apart. They almost joined overhead—spanned at one point, high above, by an old semicircular bridge—plunging the narrow rock-strewn bottom into the half darkness of a cave. Eaves and ledges of damp rock overhung and dripped with stalactites and a thicker and thicker mantling of creeper and weed and stunted trees choked the converging walls. It was gloomy and dank, the rocks shone with sweating seams and the tracks of snails and the passage was festooned with spiders’ webs. At each step their silken meshes snapped and we brushed the tangle from our hair and faces.
“Not many people come this way,” Chrysanthos observed, slashing through films of this grey rigging and wiping the tatters from his stick. “It’s a bad place.”
He rattled the stick across some boulders and a small party of bats went hurtling up towards the ribbon of sky overhead. Once he dislodged a little owl of Pallas Athene which flew noiselessly to the branch of a wild fig and watched us out of sight, its body in profile and its head full-face in the precise posture of vigilant alertness one knows from Greek coins.
At last the walls began to slant outwards and subside. The sky expanded. Curling down from the east, an old road, paved with slabs, carried us up again over a milder hillside while the river bed and its diminishing canyon trailed away to the west. We followed Chrysanthos on to a knoll, which he said had been the site of an old temple of Artemis, and sure enough, guarding the corridor which led back to the pass, great irregular blocks of Pelasgian masonry jutted in a bastion, and on the top of the knoll, presumably on the emplacement of the vanished temple itself, stood a handsome old church embedded in scaffolding. The interior was a jungle of lashed beams and platforms of planks, and three masons in those neat paper caps, of the kind worn by the Carpenter in Alice in Wonderland (made, in this case, of folded sheets of the Akropolis and the Ethnikos Kiryx), were sitting smoking among a débris of fallen plaster. They were repairing it, they said, as it had been struck by lightning the year before. They led us up a ladder to the top of the narthex. Daylight showed through gaps, fragments of the rood-screen were broken off, and great fissures crossed the painted walls. These were populated with lively seventeenth-century frescoes bright with the elaborate gilding of haloes and splendid with splashes of blue and scarlet robes; all were dominated by the church’s patron, St. Demetrius, on a prancing steed. A ray of sunlight fell on a menacing figure of Apollyon holding aloft a flaming sword. A mason stroked his gorgoned breastplate, and the two hideous faces embossed on his brazen greaves.
“Look at those two ugly devils!” He pointed to one on the left leg. “That’s Stalin,” he said, then at the right, “and that’s Gromyko.”
The mountains were behind us, and the gentle foothills waved softly seawards dotted with villages and sparkling with threshing floors. Beyond the last hills lay the mild expanse of the Messenian Gulf and the westernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, where Methoni and Coroni lay. To the north a grey shoulder of the Taygetus concealed the innermost part of the gulf, where sizzled Kalamata. In Galtes, the first village, we stopped for a glass of wine under a trellis with the priest and some peasants in those great Maniot hats, and continued downhill. The road unwound in easy loops. The late afternoon sunset softened everything and, combined with the relief of escape from the confinement of the mountains, it charged the air with a feeling of well-being and holiday. As the hills subsided into a little plain, we fell in with a troop of mules, three of which were mounted by young men. One was a god-brother of Chrysanthos, so in a moment we were hoisting our tired limbs into the saddle.
“From Kalamata?” the god-brother asked.
“No, from Anavryti.”
“Where’s that?”
“The other side of the Taygetus.”
He plainly didn’t believe it, until Chrysanthos assured him it was true. His sympathy was immediate. “And the lady—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name——?”
“Ioanna.”
“And the Kyria Ioanna too? Po, po, po! You must be dead! Those goat-rocks are enough to kill anyone. They are desperate things, they drag the soul out of you.” His face grew serious. “There’s only one remedy when anyone’s as tired as that.” He spoke with the earnestness of a diagnostician. “A medium coffee carefully boiled. Then, after half an hour,” he closed and raised his fist and made a gesture of pouring towards his mouth with an extended thumb, “wine. Good wine. And a great deal of it.” His knit brow became still graver and to avoid all ambiguity he decided to re-phrase it. “When you get to Kampos,” he pointed to the little town ahead of us, whose bells had been clanking for the last few minutes, “you must drink a great deal of wine.”
We were riding through a grove of olives growing out of red earth scattered with stones. The twisted branches were strident with cicadas. The mules trotted along at a spanking pace, and, infected by the excitement of nearing home, they broke into something approaching a gallop. The little cavalcade kicked up a cloud of dust that the last rays of the sun turned into a transfiguring red-gold cloud. We drew rein at the outskirts of Kampos, as the mules were going on to Varousia to collect sacks for wheat which had been threshed during the day. The sun had gone down but the trees and the first houses of Kampos were still glowing with the sunlight they had been storing up since dawn. It seemed to be shining from inside them with the private, interior radiance of summer in Greece that lasts for about an hour after sundown so that the white walls and the tree trunks and the stones fade into the darkness at last like slowly expiring lamps.
“Don’t forget my advice,” the muleteer said and with a rattle of hoofs his brisk score of mules went pricking away through the olive trees in their strange aureole of dust.
* * *
His prescription was excellent. Sitting in the humble plateia of Kampos after dinner, fittingly drugged with wine, all the weariness of the long day’s trudge had resolved itself into a pleasantly blurring torpor. Over the rooftops and leaves in the glimmer of starlight and of the thin ghost of a new moon, the bulk of the Taygetus mountains looked steeper and more impregnable than ever. It seemed impossible that it was only that morning we had set off from that far-away pseudo-Judaea the other side.... Self-congratulation, however, deflated slightly at the thought of Yorgo striding across them at that very moment....A tall form, wishing us good evening and then subsiding on a chair, broke the trend of our sleepy talk. It was a lean, quixotic-looking man with hollow cheeks and beetling eyebrows. He put an ekatostáriko of wine on the table and filled the glasses. We asked him about the town of Kampos.
“It’s a miserable place,” he said, “a suburb of Kalamata, really, although it’s several hours away, and the inhabitants are a useless lot. They’re Vlachs.”
“Vlachs? Surely not in the Peloponnese?”
“That’s what we call them.”
I said I had never heard of any Vlachs south of the Gulf of Corinth, and never expected to find any in the Mani.[1]
“This isn’t the real Mani,” he said, “it’s what they call the Exo Mani, the Outer Mani. You have to wait till you get to the Deep Mani, the Mesa Mani, south of Areopolis, before finding true Maniots. They are quite a different thing. Honourable, tall, good-looking, hospitable, patriotic, intelligent, modest——”
“So you don’t come from Kampos?”
“May God forfend!”
“Where from, then?”
“From the Deep Mani.”
[1] See page 86.