The Greek Islands (14 page)

It is hard to leave Crete, yet, if this book is ever to end, I must. I have things to say about vampires and volcanoes, but I will keep them until I reach Santorin, which specializes in both. As a cliff-hanger I will just mention that Sir Arthur Evans did not believe in the ‘invasion’ theory as an explanation of the final destruction of the palaces. He believed in a ‘natural calamity like an earthquake’.

Later I must discuss this theory in great detail, but again the proper place to do so is in the tremendous crater of Santorin. Was it this great quake that finished off Knossos and the Minoan culture?

By some of those vagaries of pure chance, which in retrospect often seem meaningful, I first heard the words uttered by a girl student one afternoon, in the swimming, grey aquarium-light of an Athens museum. She was leaning forward through the reflections thrown by the glass cases, in order to read a
show-card
referring to an exhibit which had already caught my
attention
. Its empty hand is what somehow impressed me in the little statue; it lay there in space, lightly and effortlessly curved around some lost object – a ball, an apple? The empty space itself conferred something like a signature. It seemed symbolic of Greece itself, where so much vital information has vanished, leaving only these tormenting black spaces, clues from which one must try to fashion a mould into which we can pour our notions about these forgotten peoples and times. The apple of truth perhaps?

She read slowly with a strong provincial intonation: ‘Bronze statue of a youth
circa
240
BC
. The extended right hand seems to offer something for it is as if curved around some object. It has been suggested that he is a Paris, the work of Euphranos, shown as offering the apple of discord to Aphrodite.’ It had been part of a shipload of statues wrecked off Anticythera
en route
for Italy.

The apple –
was
it an apple? – had been sucked out of the hand by the sea. As for the hand, it haunted me as a sort of symbol too: the Apple of Discord, the Apple of Oblivion, the Apple of Eden, or of the Hesperides – eternal youth! The statue
alone knew the truth, and it stood there silently, inhabiting a unique moment of time, limbs tense as music yet full of
controlled
desire, full of the sufficiency of their own pure, primal weight. To give him a name, to call him Paris, would hardly disturb the smooth surface of the sculptor’s thought. It was balanced there like a bird. Its precious apple lay fathoms deep off Anticythera, an isle about which I then knew hardly
anything
. Yes, once a fisherman had said that there was an islet somewhere near it called Egg (Avgo) which had a marvellous marine grotto with stalactites and a colony of seals. (The seals all look like Proteus; that is presumably why he was appointed to be keeper of the Olympian sealery.) Not many months later I found myself coming into Cythera for a dawn landfall, as a refugee on my way to Crete and Egypt. I thought of the little statue.

But it is not for any personal reason that I feel it right to add a note about these two unprepossessing little islands. They have today little charm and less to show in the way of ancient monuments. Some good, safe anchorages for small craft are about all they have, unless you count the two mediocre churches and a sort of nondescript barn of a building which suggests a maritime
lazaretto
or a
dogana
. However, Cythera marks the halfway point between the mainland and Crete and, during the long centuries before steam, almost everything either touched it or passed close in, using the island as a
convenient
lee against the swing of the main deep, or a shield against wind. Yes, that is all, except for one singular and
arresting
fact, namely that Aphrodite was apparently born here. The small Phoenician trading post, which has now completely
disappeared
, imported her worship from the Middle East, and it was from here that she went back into Cyprus to lovely Paphos, and forward to the eagle-patrolled heights of Mount Erix in Sicily. In comparison with these two magnetic sites, Cythera
seems a dowdy little place to be born in, but then Aphrodite enjoyed a multiple personality and no doubt in each place she took on a separate identity. In Erix – so grim is the place – she must have come in her savage and pitiless version. There is still a whiff of sulphur about the mountain, and obscure hints in the texts of human sacrifices and incredible fleshy orgies. Of course the scholars keep reminding us that she is Asiatic in origin and not Greek, and warning us not to be taken in by bad puns on words like
aphros
meaning ‘foam’. This is all very well. Once she was adopted, re-cycled and structured by the invincible Greek tongue – that alphabet crisp as a laundered collar – she became, and will for ever remain, the Greek goddess of love – older than Greek, perhaps, but always as young as first love. Under her title Urania, she stood for pure and ideal love; as Genetrix or
Nymphia
, she was the protector of lawful marriage and favoured all serious unions; as Pandemos or Porne she was the patron of all prostitutes and favoured all lust and venal love. Everything to do with passion, from the noblest to the most degraded, came within her scope. It is her completeness, compounded of many attributes, which wins our hearts. With her, loving had a
comprehensiveness
that accepted every human foible, good or bad.

Nor was she averse at times to using her powers
mischievously
– as when she took it into her head to light a short fuse under the chair of Zeus in Olympus, which gave him one of the worst attacks of skirt-fever ever to win a place in the Olympian version of
The Guinness Book of Records
. Was there nothing sacred, he asked her, all lit up like a Christmas tree? Yes, she must have answered, everything is sacred, without distinction, even laughter. Especially laughter.

It was natural that men should come to worship this graceful blonde pussmoth of a goddess, with her grey eyes and the smile they always mention as playing about her lips – that memorable smile! Of course Hera and Athena were also pretty girls, but
they had other qualities which made one feel they were fragile, this-side-up-with-care sort of people. Haughty Hera inspired respect, while Athena’s severe beauty arrested desire. Aphrodite only had to look and one was enslaved. She hovered somewhere between the impossible and the inevitable. But even she had her moments of weakness for, when Zeus returned the compliment and put the Indian Sign on her, she too was forced to fall in love. He had ‘inspired her with the sweet desire to lie with a mortal man’.

If you should happen to make an excursion to Mount Ida, spare a thought for the Trojan Anchises, for he was the lucky man upon whom her eye fell. He was reputed to be easily as handsome as any of the immortals, and there must have been something to it, for she was overwhelmed. He was there,
pasturing
his flocks on the holy mountain, when he saw this
extraordinary
apparition come towards him across the shocks of mountain grass. Aphrodite knew she was looking her best, for she had just come back from visiting her shrine in Paphos, where the Graces had anointed her body with fragrant and incorruptible oils and adorned her with her most precious jewelry. ‘Her veil was more dazzling than flame, she wore bracelets and ear-rings, round her throat there were golden necklaces, her delicate bosom shone like a moon.’ Anchises was dumb with amazement as he watched her calmly climbing towards him, with her retinue of shaggy wolves and lions and sleek panthers which frisked and played about her. Who could she be?

She told him that she was the daughter of Otreus, King of Phrygia, and that she would like to be his wife. Still speechless with amazement he led her to his rough cot, which however contained a comfortable bed covered with the skins of lions and bears. So: ‘A mortal man, by the will of the gods and of Destiny, slept with an immortal goddess without knowing who
she was.’ They say it happens to all of us, but usually only once.

Next morning when she woke, perhaps quite inadvertently, she showed herself to him in all her true splendour. The
terrified
shepherd fell down before her, fearing the premature old age which is promised to all mortal men who dare to sleep with a goddess, even unknowingly. She reassured him on this score and promised him a son like a god (who proved to be the pious Aeneas) – but he must promise never to reveal the name of his mother. This was her most perfect love-adventure; after it she seems to diminish in size somewhat. Why, for example, did she give herself to the graceless, churlish hunchback called Hephaestus? As a marriage, it was a failure from the beginning, and she sought refuge in other loves like Ares and Hermes. I do not profess to follow her later career with so much interest. Perhaps we do not know all the facts. It would be interesting to write a book which explained all these rather capricious changes of mood. But think what happened to her victims when the spell of her passion was on them. Medea and Ariadne betrayed their fathers; Helen abandoned her home to follow a stranger; the incestuous desires of Myrrha and Phaedra came from her; also the monstrous and bestial passion of poor Pasiphae. It is useless to ask her image about this; all one has in reply is the marvellous smile. ‘When she appears,’ cries
Lucretius
, ‘the heavens are all assuaged and pour forth torrents of light; the waves of the sea smile on her.’ I do not pretend to understand, but I feel the weight of her enigmatic, smiling
presence
. Her goodness is terrifying because it is so absolute.

The Germans had almost reached Kalamata when a consular
caique
appeared and proposed to offer us a safe passage to Crete and thence to Egypt. We left by night and travelled right down the stony sleeve of the Mani, until we reached the very end just
as dawn started breaking. By extraordinary good fortune, throughout this whole adventure we had an April sea of silk, while the nights were starless and without moon. The vessel was crowded with refugees like ourselves, a number of them British, and was a defective old tub slightly down to port. The real danger however was that her wheezy engine uttered showers of bright sparks up into the sky.

Cape Matapan (ancient Taenaron) was the very last toe-hold on the peninsula; after that the black bitumen of the night sea which took us to Cythera. It was a poor harbour, indeed hardly one at all; but the divine stillness of the sea made it safe. The whole village came down to see us as we tied up. They had all the reserve and pride of the Maniots – the proudest of Greeks, for their peninsula has never been conquered by a foreign nation – but they were hungry for news. Cut off like this by the mountains, there was no contact with the outside world except one little radio which had died on them. We were in hardly better case, but we shared what news we had from the stricken Kalamata we had left. We had to wait for dusk again before tackling the next leg of the voyage, and I remember in what calm and ease we passed that day – reorganizing ourselves, tidying up the boat, checking provisions and so on; then swimming and washing and sunbathing on the warm pebbles. The whole world seemed to be in a state of suspended
animation
, the whole turning, sunlit globe. No sign of aircraft,
nothing
upon the sea. The bountiful peacefulness of that day had a dream-like flavour. Towards evening our hosts proposed to feast us before we left with the darkness. The last two lambs of the village had been killed; tables were laid down the main street as if for a wedding. So we sat in the warm, buoyant, late sunlight and toasted each other calmly and with love, for we did not expect ever to see each other again. It was a typical Greek feast in this classic simplicity and formality. Boys of
rifle-bearing age (around fourteen) were seated with the grown-ups. A few conventional expressions of hope and good cheer were uttered by individuals, but there were no prepared speeches. Yet our hearts were full. Where did it come from, this smiling calm, this simple confidence, this warmth of plenitude? We had no right to feel like this, for the world had come to an end. Why then this happy fulfilment of quiet talk and laughter?

The reason is that a word had been uttered, a single small word for which the whole of Europe had waited and waited in vain. It was the word ‘No’ (
Ohi
) and Greece had uttered it on behalf of all of us at a time when the so-called great powers were all cringing, fawning and trying to temporize in the face of the Hitlerian menace. With that small word Greece found her soul, and Europe found its example. A small, almost unarmed nation, internally self-divided, once more decided to defy the Persian hordes as it had done in the past.

I think we were filled with a secret relief that at last the word had been uttered, for it brought us the certain knowledge that now, however long the war took, and however many of us did not return from it, it would finally be won. It was the
premonition
of that distant victory and return of peace which filled us with such tranquil happiness. As dusk began to fall, we took our leave of this little faraway village, cut off from everywhere by its ring of mountains. They waved us goodbye with the same smiling certainty as they had shown all day. The sun was just below the rim of the horizon, the world was sinking through veil after veil of violet dusk towards the sheltering darkness.

There came a shriek. ‘Look!’ Wildly, one of the crew pointed up into the sky above us, and we craned our necks to see a flight of Stukas in arrowhead formation moving above us. Instantly the skipper turned the boat in under the high cliffs where it would present a difficult target for dive-bombers. There was a moment of high excitement and near panic; but it ended in
roars of laughter, for the wretched aircraft above us turned out on closer scrutiny to be an arrowhead formation of wild duck, doubtless heading southward to Egypt for their familiar haunts on Lake Mareotis. The darkness came now, the night became chill, and we turned in a little ashamed of our panic. At dawn we wallowed into Cythera.

Here we ran into a group of deserters from the Albanian armies, mostly Cretans, who were in an ugly mood. Their craft had fallen apart just as it reached harbour and was a total wreck – indeed how they had got so far was a mystery, no less a mystery than the route they had taken. There they were, lying among the rocks like mastiffs dressed in bloody rags and soiled sheepskins. They were armed too, which put us at a
disadvantage
during the long diplomatic discussion that followed. They proposed to take our boat and maroon us on Cythera. They had urgent work to do in Crete, they said, they had to execute a traitor, a general, whose name I forget. It took us nearly all day to dissuade them from this course, pleading our women and children as an excuse. Finally they relented and allowed us to go, provided we took three of their badly wounded fellows, which we did. But we cleared the harbour bar rather smartly, long before time, lest these grumpy warriors should change their tune.