“IN WINTER,” said a man carrying a small sack of rock salt on his shoulder, “the wind blows clean through you. In one side and out the other. A terrible voras[1] comes down from the middle of the Peloponnese and follows the line of the Taygetus, pulling up trees by the roots and tearing slabs of marble off the roofs this size,” he spread his arms like a fisherman, “and carries them away as easily as leaves off a branch. And the rains! All the downhill paths turn into rivers.” Looking at the hot landscape of pebbles sinking towards the sea, this was almost impossible to conjure up. The air was stifling. We had fallen in with the salt-carrier in a lane going down to the bay. He waved back towards Kitta and Nomia. “The year before the war we had so much rain that it carried all the plants away, all the trees, every speck of earth, licked the rocks clean to the bone. It even emptied the cemeteries and scattered skulls and bones and ribs for miles over the hillside! When God had finished making the world, he had a sack of stones left over and he emptied it here....” He kicked one of them. “If only we could find a merchant who bought stones, we’d all be millionaires... You wouldn’t find me sweating along the roads with this,” he said, giving a resentful slap to the sack of salt.
We stopped on a headland near the ruins of a fort and looked down at the little port of Yeroliména. How mild and ordinary it looked after the strange villages we had left behind: a few houses, a quay lined with caiques, a mole running out into the bay. But beyond it the coast climbed away eastwards and each rocky shoulder supported a congregation of towers. “There you are,” he said pointing, “the Kakovounia”[2]—they ended in a low saddle and then rose again turning south, and finally sank into the sea once and for all—“and Cape Matapan. Nothing but stones all the way. Are you sure you don’t need any in England? I’d let you have them cheap...or some thorns? We’ve got some very nice thorns....”
* * *
Small as it is, the little town of Yeroliména is a loophole into the outer world from the stern seclusion of the Mani. The caiques along the quay, the anchors and capstans and coils of cable, the gilt lettering on the bottles of a chemist’s shop, the sacks and barrels and tins of the grocers’, three policemen drinking coffee under a tree, three caique captains with shiny peaked caps drinking Fix beer—all indicated in the single dusty street, even under the furnace breath of the sirocco which lulled it into semi-catalepsy, that another world existed somewhere. Undreamable leagues away, round cape after cape, past a dozen gulfs and islands, at the end of caique journeys that seemed as remote and hazardous as argosies, hovered, in the mind’s eye, the disordered mirage of the Piraeus.... Taking our cue from the sailors, we sat down. The salt-carrier rapped an iron table top and spirited three bottles out of the depths of a café, drops of moisture running in shiny tracks over the misted glass like advertisements in the New Yorker. The salt encrusted along the whiskers and eyelashes of our companion, the taste of sweat in our mouths and the African wind that seemed to be burying us at the bottom of invisible dunes, trebled the rapture of those long icy draughts.... One forgets about wine at moments like this and blesses the memory of Herr Fuchs, the brewer to the Wittelsbachs in Munich who was summoned here over a century ago by his fellow Bavarian, King Otto. FIJ, his transliterated name on all the beer bottles of Greece, has a peculiar talismanic magic. It revived us enough to arrange with one of the captains at the next table for a lift in his caique next day round Cape Matapan. In a little while we were supine and sheltered from the sun in rooms above the chemist’s. Nada the Lily and Two Worlds and Their Ways slowly fell from our hands as we sank Lethewards while outside the languid activity of Yeroliména lost momentum and halted at last in its noon trance.
Yeroliména may, according to a theory of Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis, have been the site of the town of Hippola to which Pausanias attributes the emplacement of a temple to Pallas Athene. Other compilers of classical atlases have placed it further up the coast. As there is little more than a mention in Pausanias and not a stone to go on in either place, honours are even. Less than a century ago there was nothing here at all except a little ruined chapel by the sea. A young man called Michali Kasimantis left his village of Kipoula (the other candidate for the temple) some time before the middle of the last century and got a job in a European paint-merchant’s shop in the island of Syra. Floating at the maritime cross-roads of Asia, Thrace, Crete, the Greek mainland and the archipelago, Syra, before the rise of Piraeus, Patras and Salonika, was the most important port and trading centre of Greece. (Its importance has declined now but the little capital is full of substantial merchants’ houses and fine streets and gasoliers and Second Empire cafés. There is an elegant colonnaded square with a pillar-fronted theatre, tall palm trees and statues and a band-stand which should always be showering forth the music of Offenbach and Meyerbeer. A disarming, faded cosmopolitan air hangs over everything. It is best known to-day for its Turkish Delight and delicious nougat in large circular slabs.) Kasimantis eventually set up on his own, flourished, and soon became the most prosperous colourman of the Levant. Remembering his home, he returned to Yeroliména in the 70’s, and built a quay and a mole and a couple of warehouses and put two nephews in charge. Soon caiques were calling with all kinds of goods which were piled into the warehouses and carried on the backs of mules up steep paths to the scattered thorpes of the Deep Mani; and the caiques sailed away again with olives and oil and carobs and the surplus of their corn. The little town sprang up, and the weekly steamer from the Piraeus drops anchor there. It has already acquired the agreeable mellowness of decay.
Limeni, the cradle of the Mavromichalis family below Areo-polis in the long gulf of Vitylo, is one of the only two safe harbours of the Deep Mani. But communications to Limeni are cut off by mountains and lack of roads from the extreme south, leaving only Mezapo and Yeroliména. Both of them are hazardous in foul weather. Ships must then load and unload as best they can in the little desolate bay of Porto Cayo, just over the saddle of the Taygetus. The single office of these inlets in the past was to afford a fair-weather refuge for the Maniot pirate ships. The slave trade was one of the mainsprings of eastern Mediterranean piracy. This demand for slaves began in the time of the Mameluke Sultans of Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of them were needed yearly for harems and household work and even, such poor fighting men were the Egyptians, as soldiers. The Sultans were soon imitated by all the Moslem potentates from Spain to the Caucasus and the western coasts of India. Venice and Genoa were the great slave merchants of the Levant, and, based on their fiefs in the Aegean islands, they would buy or capture slaves wherever they could lay hands on them regardless of race or religion, though they had a slight bias against selling their fellow Catholics. They had assembly-points in the Black and Red Seas and unloaded their wares at the great slave-markets of Alexandria, Damietta, Beirut and Algiers. The towns of Venice and Genoa were slave transit-camps; the Florentines made use of Ancona for the same purpose and many rich Italian families kept slaves in their houses. When Gallipoli and Adrianople fell to the Turks, the Greeks also adopted the trade, shipping off vast quantities of Christian prisoners for sale in Egypt. The Maniots would raid the islands and the Turkish villages, collect prisoners—they specialized in Turks and in the Catholic Franco-Levantines of the Cyclades—and sell them to Venetian traders from Methoni and Coroni on the Messenian peninsula. When the Venetian slave galleys put in, Maniots at feud would even attempt to waylay and capture each other or their enemies’ wives for sale as slaves; a convenient way of ridding the neighbourhood, of putting the avenger out of harm’s way and of turning an honest sequin. Their vessels would lie in wait for Turkish and Venetian convoys between Crete and Cape Matapan, and, being too small to attack them in bulk, pounce on laggards and strays, board them, or force them into the rocks. They were frequently in league with captains from the islands, particularly from Cephalonia. Travellers have described the great caves of the Mani stacked with various loot: guns, yataghans, swords, turbans, stocks of baggy trousers, embroidered waistcoats, soft fezzes, and wide skirts and fur-trimmed gold laced jackets for women. Cunningly carved woodwork and wooden furniture, all cut from one piece, were much in demand; troughs, plates, forks, spoons, cups, caskets, bronze kitchenware pots, pitchers and amphorae from Messenia, also the inevitable lime for tower-building. Small ships would sail away to the minute islets of Sapienza and Skiza off the tip of Messenia, build rough kilns, and sail back in a few months with cargoes of this precious stuff. This was the era when Greek pirates would “churn up the sea in boats no bigger than walnut shells,” in the words of Capodistria, who finally suppressed the already waning piracy of the Mani.
No pirate enterprise of any consequence was complete without a priest. He blessed the expedition at its outset, prayed for fair weather for his parent ship and foul weather for the enemy and interceded for the souls of his fallen messmates. He absolved the sins of his floating flock and saw to it that a share of the loot, often wet with blood, was hung beside the ikons on the mainmast as a votive offering. If more than eight days passed and no prize came their way, he would intone a litany on the deck, and when a prospective prize was sighted he would level a matchlock over the bulwarks with the rest and join the boarding party with khanjar and scimitar. After the decline of piracy the Deep Mani was supplied by pedlars from all over Greece with caravans of donkeys—like those of Anavryti—which drove from one mountain hamlet to the next with great bundles of assorted wares. The pedlars, in their turn, grew scarcer when the quay at Yeroliména was built.
* * *
The sirocco died during the afternoon. Towards evening we followed a gentle slope that carried us into the foothills of this last buttress but one of the Taygetus: a shallow staircase, winding and rising, of smooth marble slabs. This luxurious going seemed almost decadent after those dolorous inland lanes, turning the pedestrian’s gait into the dignified and ceremonious ascent of a doge. The sea sank and skyscraper villages loomed on the steepening slants of the mountain-side. Alika, the first of these, seemed locked in a death-grapple with the omnipresent prickly pear. Millions of thorn-studded bats swirled round the tower bases and groped through barred windows and gaps in the masonry and rolled in green cataracts from the steep rock’s face overhead. It seemed to have driven the villagers out; all but two old men who were drinking outside a vault-like tavern on the flat stage of the rouga, half of which had been excavated out of a precipice. The tempest of thorns overhead was succeeded on the rock face below by a jungle of slogans and rather talented primitive caricatures on the hewn rock in white paint. But it wasn’t the vegetation that had cleared the village, one of them said, seizing my wrist like the Ancient Mariner and pouring out a glass of wine with his free hand, while his companion jerked a stool behind my knees compelling me to sit (they didn’t often get company, they observed), but hatred and politics. Ta politika! The occupation, the Germans, the Italians, old feuds, the Communist bands, the Greek security battalions which the Germans armed against them, the right-wing Chi organization after the Liberation, the battles with ELAS up in the mountains, the massacre of their opponents in remote valleys, the savage reprisals. “It was a fight of each side to wipe out the other, burning their houses, smashing their oil jars, shooting prisoners...” Then the Civil War, poverty, disappointment—no wonder the village was empty! “Only a few old sticks like us are left behind.” He shouted for some more wine, and softly changed gear. “We used to get thousands of okas of unfermented must from Kalamata by caique. We put in the resin ourselves, letting it work and mature; and then,” he demonstrated what he meant, “we swallowed it. But we don’t need so much now. There are not enough throats left.” Next he told us how seventeen Maniots after the fall of Greece, finding the Germans and ELAS equally intolerable, sneaked off in the middle of the night in a rowing boat that could barely hold them. Favoured however by a mast and a sail and a steady north wind, after three days they espied a line of sand, some palm trees and houses and a minaret. It was Derna, and luckily it had just fallen to the advancing British Army. They were greeted as heroes by the English, who gave them “white bread and tinned meat,” and sent them off to join the Greek brigade, with whom they fought until the final assault on Rimini.
A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it’s the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practically incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrarchian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.
The path from Alika sank into a deep ravine which ended in a quiet and secret-seeming combe; then it climbed the other side to the steep and jutting headland of Kyparissos. We lay down near an altar with a slab commemorating the republic of the Free Laconians among the broken fragments of a Greco-Roman temple and watched the sun westering towards Yeroliména. Again there was this miracle of innumerable gold splinters sown over the sea. Directly below the sun they gathered into a wide gold sheet, flaking away in fragments and ripples as the water approached the shore and turning purple and grass-green among the teeth of rocks a long way beneath our cliff. It was exactly here that Mavromichalis found the mermaid-princess. Inland, the gold towers of half a dozen villages began to slant their stretching shadows across the mountains. The coast rose and fell westwards to the gulf of Yeroliména where the sea was on fire. It rose and fell for a few miles to the east, then turned south to the darkening last blue peninsula of Taenarus.
The shrine of Poseidon on that shadowy cape was the oracle and sanctuary of the Laconians. A town grew up at Kyparissos for the pilgrims; temples to Demeter and Aphrodite rose from its midst. Much later, after the Roman invasion, Poseidon’s temple was destroyed; probably when the Cilician pirates, strong in the alliance of Mithridates, raided and looted the Roman-occupied Greek peninsula until they were destroyed, in an astonishing campaign of three months, by Pompey. But the temples of Demeter and Aphrodite survived and Kainepolis (the New Town) appeared. They were standing when Pausanias passed this way in the second century A.D. But they too were destroyed at last, possibly five centuries later or more. Nothing is known of the date, though some conclude that it must have been the work of that scourge of the Mediterranean, the “Algerian” pirates based on Spain, who actually captured and occupied Crete for a century, until they in their turn were demolished by Nicephorus Phocas. These terrible men tormented the Greek coasts, looting, killing, burning and destroying for centuries. It is because of them that all the littoral villages of Greece are built a mile or two inland, usually with a tower or a little fort at the skala by the sea, to hold the invaders while the burghers stood to their arms or fled. Epesan san Argerinoi—“They fell on us like Algerians”—is still a current phrase.
Modern Greek contains another odd survival of the kind which harks back to an even remoter invasion of south-eastern Europe by barbarians: that ruthless Germanic race of the central European forests, the Alamanni. It was strange, during the German occupation, to hear Cretan peasants observe with innocent pleonasm that “These Germans are worse than the Alamanni!” (Avtoi oi Germanoi einai cheiroteroi apo tous Alamannous!). It is a little known fact, recorded in the Wars of Procopius, that Genseric, King of the Vandals, after he had conquered Carthage, purposed to invade the Mani and establish a forward base on these inaccessible shores from which to harass the Peloponnese. In A.D. 468 he attacked Kainepolis with a strong pirate fleet, but was defeated with such heavy losses that he sailed to Zakynthos in a rage, took five hundred prisoners, hacked them to bits and scattered them over the waves on his way home to Carthage. The little town had saved the entire Peloponnese. Sixty-six years later (according to some authorities) Belisarius put in here on his way to defeat the descendants of Genseric and restore Carthage to the Empire in a latter-day Punic war.
But these barbaric doings have left no trace in the atmosphere that hangs over Kyparissos. Pirate fleets and jangling Nyklians seem equally remote and equally irrelevant. The slow fall of the evening among this smashed and scattered masonry, the decrescendo and then the silence of the cicadas, the wide unruffled gleam of the sea below and the nerve-stilling quietness of the air, hold a different message. A spell of peace lives in the ruins of ancient Greek temples. As the traveller leans back among the fallen capitals and allows the hours to pass, it empties the mind of troubling thoughts and anxieties and slowly refills it, like a vessel that has been drained and scoured, with a quiet ecstasy. Nearly all that has happened fades to a limbo of shadows and insignificance and is painlessly replaced by an intimation of radiance, simplicity and calm which unties all knots and solves all riddles and seems to murmur a benevolent and unimperious suggestion that the whole of life, if it were allowed to unfold without hindrance or compulsion or search for alien solutions, might be limitlessly happy.
The dusk was reducing those marble fragments to pale shapes among the thistles. It was in just such a mood of serenity that we retraced the winding path to Alika. A hint of moonrise behind the dark towers soon turned the steps to a shallow silver staircase. Down this, buoyed still by the elation that the wreck of these unimportant temples had provided, we seemed to glide or fly. The reflected lamps of Yeroliména were shining in the bay.
* * *
Down a few steps we found a long, barrel-vaulted room. Pinned to the whitewashed walls were Singer sewing machine advertisements, pictures of King Paul and Queen Frederika, and of the late King George of England, the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth II. Leaning into the cooking alcove a thin handsome woman was delicately arranging twigs, with the economy that treeless regions compel, under a sizzling frying pan. Down a ladder at the other end of this semi-cylinder lay a little platform of rock with three tin tables. It hung immediately above the sea, hemmed in by sweet-smelling herbs in whitewashed petrol tins and a dozen tall sun-flowers. The cluster of masts, the criss-cross of rigging and the sea’s many reflections were so close that we seemed, as we settled there, to be under way. The three caique captains were drinking retsina and playing a record so old and defaced that it was hard to detect in the tune an Athenian music-hall song twenty years old. The battered gramophone was armed with a petunia-coloured horn like a giant convolvulus, its open bell painted with faded nosegays. One of the captains, affected by the soft influences of the night, had put a sprig of basil behind his ear. After an omelette and some lentils, we noticed that the water our hostess brought with the coffee tasted slightly of wine. We asked the sailors if they had noticed. The one with the basil—he had a dark intelligent face hard as leather, deeply lined and bashed with vicissitudes, a kind of alert and humorous physiognomy which is just as essentially Greek as the chipped capitals on the headland—said, “Yes, but don’t say anything. She’s in despair about it.” She had stored her wine in a room above the cistern which warrened the rock under the whole house. One of her barrels had leaked and the wine had dripped through a broken floor-slab into the dark cistern below, draining a hogshead in one long, fatal night. The cistern was filled by rain water led there in conduits from the flat roof, and when the calamity had occurred, spring was on the way and not a drop could be expected till October or later...not till the quails came....
“Have you ever eaten quails in Greece?”
“Yes, once, a few years ago. In Santorin.”
He abolished the little volcano with a wave of his hand.
“Here’s the place for them. Why, in good years, they used to send hundreds of thousands of them—hundreds of thousands—alive, to Marseilles. And those French know how to eat, the cuckolds. You should stay on till the quails come.”
I reminded him that we were off before dawn for Cape Matapan with his neighbour.
“It’s a fine journey,” he said, “and the first thing you see when you round the cape is the island of Cythera. Have you been there? You know Aphrodite was born near there, out of the waves? Hm.” He turned to his companions, and said, “You see? Foreigners know more about our country than we do ourselves. But did you go to Egg Island? What, not to Avgo? You ought to have gone there; its about an hour’s rowing from Cerigo,[3] a small round island, covered with seagulls. You only have to clap your hands,” he did so, “and the whole heaven fills up,” his hands fluttered expansively above his head, “with millions of gulls! And there’s a deep cave there, with the sea running in, bright blue inside like the sky. There are plenty of seals swimming about too. You can see them lying on the rocks with their wives and their children.”
Having been to Cythera less than two months before, this was shattering news for us. I have always longed to see a seal in Greece and always in vain. The only one I have ever come across is a shrivelled and stuffed one hanging over the door of a sailors’ tavern on the waterfront of Canea.
“...and on clear days on Cape Matapan,” he was saying, “you can hear the cocks crowing in Cythera.”
“I’ve never heard them,” said Panayioti, the skipper of the caique we were to take on the morrow, “never.”
“Neither have I,” said the other.
“Then you ought to buy new ears. I’ve often heard them when I put my nets down on the windward side of the cape. You need a quiet day and a very gentle ostrolevante blowing; a small southeaster, but very small. Then,” he said, leaning back against a sunflower, a finger behind the lobe of his ear, the other hand outstretched with splayed fingers to represent Wind, his wide-stretched eyes indicating Distance, “it comes floating towards you over the water, you can only just hear it.” His voice sank to a singing whisper: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo!” His eyes rolled ominously from one to the other of us. Hypnotized by the dying fall of his onomatopoeia and delighted at the awe of our silence, he repeated this ghostly cockcrow; still more softly and in a slightly different key: “Ki-ki-kirri-koo-oo-oo....”
* * *
They left soon afterwards. We sat on in the cool silence of the floating garden, talking of these phantom cockcrows; and with a special reason. If the reader knows Mr. Henry Miller’s book about Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi (which I humbly recommend), he will remember an appendix, a letter from Lawrence Durrell to the author soon after his departure; it describes how, following a tremendous dinner in Athens, Durrell and his fellow diners climbed up to the Acropolis but found the gates shut; Katsimbalis, suddenly inspired, took a deep breath and (it is Durrell speaking) “sent out the most bloodcurdling clarion I have ever heard: Cock-a-doodle-doo...” and then, after a pause, “lo from the distance, silvery-clear in the darkness, a cock drowsily answered—then another, then another.” Soon the whole night was reverberating with cockcrows: all Attica and perhaps all Greece.
Perhaps all Greece. The distance between Cythera and Cape Matapan on the tattered map in my pocket, was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. This enormously extended the possible ambit of George’s initial cockcrow. If the Maniots, with a helping wind, could hear the cocks of Cythera, the traffic, with a different wind, could be reversed, and leap from the Mani (or better still, Cape Malea) to Cythera, from Cythera to Anticythera, and from Anticythera to the piratical peninsulas of western Crete; only to die out south of the great island in a last lonely crow on the islet of Gavdos, in the Libyan Sea.... But a timely west wind could carry it to the eastern capes of Crete, over the Cassos straits, through the islands of the Dodecanese, and thence to the Halicarnassus peninsula and the Taurus mountains.... The possibilities became suddenly tremendous and in our mind’s ear the ghostly clarion travelled south-west into Egypt, south-east to the Persian Gulf; up the Nile, past the villages of the stork-like Dinkas, through the great forests, from kraal to kraal of the Zulus, waking the drowsy Boers of the Transvaal and expiring from a chicken-run on Table Mountain over the Cape of Good Hope. North of Athens, all was plain sailing; it would be through the Iron Curtain, over the Great Balkan range and across the Danube within the hour, with nothing to hinder its spread across the Ukraine and Great Russia—the sudden hubbub in a hundred collective farms alerting the N.K.V.D. and causing a number of arrests on suspicion—until it reached the reindeer-haunted forests of Lapland, and called across the ice towards Nova Zembla to languish among igloos. How far north could poultry thrive? We didn’t know, but every moment the wind was becoming a more reliable carrier and further-flung and the cocks robuster. Thus, as the northern call fell silent among the tongue-tied penguins of the Arctic floes, the westward sweep, after startling the solitary Magyar herdsman with the untimely uproar and alarming the night-capped Normans with thoughts of theft, was culminating in ultimate unanswered challenges from John o’ Groats and the Blasket Islands, Finisterre and Cape Trafalgar, and a regimental mascot in Gibraltar was already rousing the Berbers of Tangier... Due to the new impetus of Leghorn—enough to send a tremor through the doffed headgear of Bersagliere in many a draughty barrack-room—the Sicilian barnyards had long been astir.
The south-eastern tributary meanwhile, after sailing across Baluchistan, was initiating a fuse of clamour across the Deccan, and, reaching Cape Cormorin, leaping the straits, like the magic bridge of Hanuman, to set the roof-tops of Kandy ringing; travelling east to Burma and raising winged mutinies in the Celebes and the Malaccas. There was no problem here. Thanks to swarms of the far-wandering junks of the bird-loving Chinese, shrill calls were soon sounding across the gunfire of Malaya: fumbling for their blowpipes, head-hunters rubbed their eyes in Borneo; Samoans were stretching and yawning on the split bamboo of their stilt-borne floors and hieratic and glittering birds, poised on branches heavy with almond blossom, were swelling their bright throats above the distant triangle of Fujiyama.... And what of the long eastern journey from the Asia Minor? Those solitary cries across the Oxus, those noisy resurrections among the black yurts of the Khirgiz and the Karakalpacks? The contagious din of nomad poultry ringing across steppe and tundra, waking the wiry Mongol fowl and sailing forlornly over the Great Wall of China; turning north to Kamschatka and straining for the Aleutians? What of the shivering, ruffled frustration of the Behring Straits?
Yes, what indeed?
Hearing us talking with some excitement, the moonlit figure of our hostess had appeared at the top of the ladder with another blue enamel half-oka can; and before we were a third of the way down it, we were across: a whale-fishing fleet materialized in the mists, each vessel captained by an eccentric Ahab engaged on a poultry-fancying competition with his colleagues, and it was entirely due to their hardy pets, beating their icicle-weighted wings and calling over the dark sea, that their Athenian message ever reached Alaska and the new world, crossed the Rockies and rang forth across the Hudson Bay towards Baffin Land. Without them, the Mormon roosters of Utah would have slept on; it would never have needed the sudden boost of Rhode Island which was to waft it safely across the mangrove swamps of Louisiana and through the Maya temples and the nightmares of Nicaraguan revolutionaries and across the Panama Canal. Now it spread like a jungle-fire through the southern hemisphere and a strident spark of sound leapt the swift-flowing narrows of Trinidad to ignite the whole Caribbean chain, jolting the rum-sodden slumbers of the Barbadians and touching off, in the throats of sacrificial birds in Haiti that the dark fingers of Voodoo priests were soon to silence, a defiant morituri te salutamus. In the dank unexplored recesses of the Amazonian hinterland, aboriginal and unclassified poultry were sending up shrill and uncouth cries and high in the cold Andean starlight gleaming birds were spreading their wings and filling their breasts on the great tumbled blocks of Inca palaces. The volume of the call was swelling now, sweeping south across the pampas, the Gran Chaco, the Rio Grande; and then dwindling as the two great oceans inexorably closed in, causing the superstitious giants of Patagonia to leap from their rough couches and peer into their wattle hen-coops wild-eyed. Now the dread moment came, the final staging-point and terminus of those great Katsimbalis lungs; the last desperate conflagration of sound in Tierra del Fuego with the ultimate chanticleer calling and calling and calling, unanswered but undaunted, to the maelstroms and the tempests, the hail and the darkness and the battering waves of Cape Horn....
For there was no hope here. It was the end. We thought with sorrow of the silent poles and the huge bereaved antipodes, of the scattered islets and archipelagos that were out of range; of combed heads tucked in sleep under many a speckled wing that no salutation from the Parthenon would ever wake: the beautiful cocks of the Easter and Ellis and the Gilbert islanders, of the Marquesas, the Melanesians and the Trobrianders, of Tristan da Cunha and St. Helena. This gentle melancholy was diffidently interrupted by our hostess: she was going to bed, but if we would like to sit on and enjoy the moonlight, she would leave the street door open, if we would lock up and slip the key under the door. Remembering our early start next day, we rose and asked for the bill. She smiled and said there was nothing to pay. Covert benefactors, the sailors had paid it on the way out and turned us into their guests.
[1] The ancient Boreas.
[2] The Bad Mountains.
[3] The Venetian name for Cythera, still sometimes used.