The Greek Islands (18 page)

I linger a little before leaving the town of Rhodes where I spent such happy post-war years, locked into the secret garden of Murad Reis. I was indeed living in a Turkish cemetery of such beauty and silence that I often longed to die and be sealed into one of those beautiful forms; to lie there dreaming forever of Eyoub and the great ladies who drowse away time in the vehement silences of the Turkish heat, with just the sound of the leaves falling. In Rhodes it was the leaves of the eucalyptus, like little propellers, spinning down. My table in the garden rotted with heat and spilt wine; sometimes I made notes on it or drew something. Everything ran with sweat, wine and heat. Then visiting friends wrote messages on the table when I was absent, and finally started to write poems. The yard was
completely
surrounded with flowering hibiscus – the most
beautiful
, tenacious and feminine plant there is. What a joy, like a drink of cold water, to see it bursting from the throat of a
riverbed
, or from a nest of burning stones, in full summer. In my dreams women have always been mixed up with flowering hibiscus! Obscure thirsts are nourished by such images.

There is a persistent factor in Rhodes’s history which seems to repeat itself over and over again. This is the Rhodian’s taste
for all things outsize. Think of the three thousand statues, for example, or the gigantic proportions of the statue of Helios. When they had a siege it was the biggest ever, and Demetrius produced his
Helepolis
for it. When they possessed a
philosopher
, he was greater than Solon. It is interesting that this preoccupation with size emerged again during the period of the Crusades. Not content with having the biggest-ever sieges against the biggest-ever armies, they decided one day to go the whole hog and build a Titanic of a boat – the biggest man-
of-war
ever seen afloat. It was called
The Grand Carrack
and descriptions of it suggest that it really was all that they planned it should be.

It had eight decks and so much space for stores that it could keep in the sea for more than six months at a time without touching land to re-provision, even for water. It had huge tanks of fresh water aboard. Nor did the crew get along with mere ship’s biscuits as was the custom of the day. They ate the whitest of white bread, for the ship’s bakeries turned out two thousand loaves at a throw, using freshly ground corn milled in hundreds of hand-mills. This great sea animal was sheathed below water with several layers of metal, riveted with bronze screws which do not rust like iron ones. ‘With such consummate art was it built that it could never sink, no human power could submerge it.’ (One recognizes the authentic note of hubris – the Greek sin of overplaying one’s hand, the sure road to catastrophe.) The armoury was equipped for five hundred men. Cannon of every sort and kind figured in the armament, while fifty of the pieces were of extraordinary dimensions. But what crowned all, according to the chronicler, was that this enormous boat was incomparably swift and manoeuvrable; it required little effort to reef or veer her sails and she was speedy in her revolutions. A crew of three hundred managed her, while she had two large galleys of fifteen benches each, one lying in tow and the other
aboard. ‘Though she had often been in action and perforated by many cannon balls, not one went directly through her, or even passed her lead work.’

The ancient cities can be visited comfortably in a day; leaving the town by car at nine, you can lunch, lounge and swim at Lindos, call in on Cameirus at about four, and after a visit to the site of ancient Ialysos return to the town by dusk. This is thanks to an excellent motor-road which the Italians provided and which is still the most important tourist factor today. In sunny weather it is worth taking an early morning stroll round the market before setting off and filling your saddle-bags with fruit, melon, peaches and tomatoes – a sort of spare lunch in case Lindos should let you down; or worse still, lest some horror to suit the palate of some barbarous nation be forced upon you. Moreover, with a picnic you can crawl down to the sea and eat on the beach between bathes, than which there is no sweeter moral exercise or richer psychic balm. But first the assault on the citadel should be made otherwise you will not be worthy of your food, eaten beside this water which from the top of the cliff looks like a peacock’s tail spread out below – so brilliant and so various are its hues in sun and shadow. Your mind will say, ‘Go on then, jump!’ and for a long moment you will hover between the worlds of the dead and the living, hanging like a fly to the edge of the citadel. It is an extraordinary place, the
temple
of Lindos; so light and aerial, so pure and in tune with the sky above. One longs to know what statues stood up here. It is far more impressive than Sunion or Erix in Sicily. Here one regrets the intrusion of Byzantines and knights – everything sweaty-Christian should be scraped off, so that the pagan soul of the place can float free, as a reminder of the time when the aspirations of the human mind acknowledged the powers and terrors of nature. The site echoes with its past like a chord of music which the mind only can hear.

The little town below, with its intricate cobbled streets and blazing whitewashed walls, lies very still. There seem to be few taverns, few open spaces under a plane tree where one can put a table and a chair. The main
taverna
, however, is beautifully situated just outside the citadel entrance under a tree, and others have sprung up in recent years. You can rent rooms in the town of Lindos, which drowses its life away, hardly troubled by the coming and going of the big buses with their sightseers. Strangely enough, the fishing is poor and one sees few
fishermen
. I made friends with one of the rare people with a small boat, a sort of absurd moralist called Janaki, and was pleased to see that the gift of philosophic reasoning was far from dead – indeed had been transmitted directly from the chief sage of the region, Cleobolus, who was, so to speak, the ancient Greek ancestor of Janaki. There is a marvellous water-labyrinth off the tiny beach below and while we explored it, Janaki, rowing while standing up, and dragging me softly along behind the boat in the cool water, would give way to profound moralizings upon nature. He took everything in dead earnest. Once we were
arguing
about the respective rights and roles of men and women in society and Janaki said, ‘The nature of the man is to bring a hammer down hard on a stone, that is his role.’ I said, ‘What about women?’ For a moment the question perplexed him and then his face cleared with relief. ‘Her role is to hold his trousers up,’ he said. ‘If ever she should let go our whole civilization would fall apart.’

It was in deference to Lindos’s top sage that I called my little studio in Rhodes the Villa Cleobolus. Nothing of the old boy’s teaching remains, but we know that, like Pythagoras and Buddha, he believed in admitting women to the work, and allowed his own daughter and wife to become his students. Janaki had not heard of him – his education had stopped with the catechism. Yet I would regard Janaki as an educated peasant,
for he knew his saints, his trees, and his sea. We spent
afternoons
in the little bay where St Paul touched down once (another epistle, another thrashing), and Janaki regaled me with his Lindean culture, which as a matter of fact, contained some interesting elements – such as the sunken cities. There were, he said, three cities which had been submerged far out to sea, off the point of the citadel, and sometimes in still weather one could look down into them and see everything very clearly. Being so used to this kind of Atlantean folklore I paid little attention, thinking that he had heard an account of the three Rhodian cities of antiquity, of which Lindos was the most
famous
, and that he had jumbled it all up in his head as peasants do. But I repeated this tale to a flower-hunting soldier who used to botanize in the island and he told me that one day, walking on the great bronze cliffs above Lindos in summer weather, he had seen the sea curdle and become still far out and had perceived, as if from an aircraft, dim forms which looked like Janaki’s city, far out to sea. The idea stayed with me and I once tried to work it into a play.

Janaki was a dynamite fisherman – since the coming of dynamite the fish have moved very much further out to sea and have become more scarce. Today the Aegean is full of fishermen who are thumbless, because of a faulty priming; the standard lazy man’s weapon being a cigarette tin packed with explosives and primed with a short fuse which makes an explosion in about two fathoms. Before the time of dynamite the fish were not only more plentiful but stayed close in to the land. Now they have to be pursued much further out, which explains why in poor ports where the men cannot afford good boats and tackle there is a dearth of fish. This is certainly the case with Lindos today.

I am much on my guard against chronologies which seem too water-tight, and against statistics. Theories of gradual
evolution may not be infallible. An entirely new species could, I have always felt, emerge by an accidental jolt or jog caused by the elbow of a sleepy god. The infinite millennia so often
posited
are the dream-boats of numerologists. As for the science of statistics, I must report respect tempered by scepticism. There was a fine example in Rhodes, where I was saddled with a clerk who went to exaggerated lengths to secure statistics of sales for our little newspaper. Of course you must know who buys your paper and where, for distribution purposes, so I did not
discourage
his ardour. One day he came to me in some
puzzlement
and showed me the sales for one small island off Leros, which startled us. Apparently we sold five times more copies than the total population of the island, on which there was only one tiny hamlet. Moreover, I knew from a friend that there was almost nobody except the priest who could read in the place. How then came these prodigious sales?

On my next trip north I called in and the mystery was revealed to me. The price of ordinary brown paper, such as tradesmen use for wrapping, had become very high, because of shortage; they were using my precious newspaper to wrap up their fish because it was cheaper than any other. It was not the prose or the layout or the information which it carried that made them buy; it was a godsend to them for
wrapping fish
. This was a salutary lesson and I often think of it when I study the circulation of a big London paper. Who is wrapping fish in it? Every editor should ask himself the question at least once a day.

Another factor in evolution that interests me is human adaptability. It need not take centuries for an entirely new thought to come into the human mind and create a fashion which runs counter to all that was accepted before. I
experienced
an example of this too in Rhodes. The Turkish
community
had no newspaper and we were asked if we could oblige
with a small weekly. We had no Turkish founts at the
Government
Press. Dear old Gabriele, the Venetian head printer, mulled over the problem for a while and then came up with a suggestion. Since Ataturk had romanized the Turkish script, we could set up almost everything they asked us to; but there were two or three gaps – letters with a cedilla, or an apostrophe. The old man said he thought we might find a substitute for the missing letters by turning some of our existing vowels upside down or on their side. It sounded to me most impractical, and a nightmare to hand-set. Gabriele, who loved his plant and
everything
about print and paper, implored me to let him try, and so I did. The first number was a surprise, and my critics in the administration accused me of trying to give the Turks
strabismus
and sick headaches. I also got a mild Turkish protest or two. By the third number everyone was reading our new improvised Turkish quite easily and the paper enjoyed the desired success with the community. Come to think of it, the Greek post office has become quite used to receiving and transmitting texts in transliterated Greek. Indeed, I seem to remember that somewhere in Asia Minor there is a community for whom a special edition of the Bible was prepared in
transliterated
Greek, because though Greek by birth they had never been allowed to learn the alphabet; they had preserved the spoken language phonetically.

When one thinks how systematically and with what tenacity the Italians tried to suppress and undermine Hellenism in these islands for thirty-six years, one is amazed at the resilience and endurance of the Hellenic tradition. It is claimed the Italians were much tougher even than the Turks; they were certainly set on stamping out the embers of Hellenism in order to secure their propaganda pre-eminence in the world at large. I was therefore astonished to find that, though everything had gone under cover, hardly a year passed before the whole trappings of
feasts, holy days and religious observance had once more taken possession of the island, for all the world as if they had never been suppressed. The brilliant Byzantine colouring of the Orthodox rituals, the country fairs, the weddings and baptisms emerged with renewed impetus and vigour. It was touching to see the ancient Greek island awake from its long sleep, with an indication that after so long it might be united to metropolitan Greece.

But has Greece ever ‘fallen asleep’? It is worth mentioning (in order to stress once more the primordial continuity of things) that just under Lindos, as under the Acropolis in Athens, there is a sacred grotto which is still invoked in prayers – though the present incumbent is called ‘The Virgin’ (
Panaghia
) instead of Athena. She is equal to every emergency – from plagues, or national disasters of any kind, to sterility and even human illness. The Christian overlay is less than an inch thick.
Moreover
, with the liberation of the island, all the Orthodox saints popped into the daylight, one after the other. St Nicholas, once Poseidon; Demetrius, once Demeter; Artemidoros who was once Artemis the huntress; Dionysios about whom the less said the better. Sitting in the tavern, under the blaze of whiteness – the heart of light – which is Lindos’s citadel, I often heard the saints invoked by Janaki and his friends, and it always reassured me that they should spring so naturally to the lips of these inventive, generous and dispossessed modern Greeks, who had all the same virtues and defects of their long-ago ancestors.