Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page B

of the Mani came to mind and the possibility that here again was a pagan survival; or some uncouth shamanistic practice the Meligs had brought with them from central Asia or the Great Balkan range and, before their absorption, bequeathed to these newly baptized mountains.
    Catchments like swimming baths were squared out of the rock to drain off and husband in the wells every available drop of water. Sitting in an upper room in the house of a friend of the policeman, we watched the daughter of the house drawing water from a deep well leading to a cistern in the white rock. What a time it took till the half brackish, half sweet and slightly cloudy liquid appeared; it was as if the delay were caused by slow and tender decanting in some subterranean cave! She put the jug on the table in the darkening room and aplate of prickly pears, peeled of their thorny coating but full of pips; also a plate of lupin seeds, and a flask of ouzo . Poor Maniots! The policeman sighed and said that he sometimes woke up in the night, thinking of a glass of crystal spring water. Sometimes he dreamed of yoghourt and cakes— baklavas, trigonas and kadaifs . Trouble, poison and bitterness, in dream language, I thought, to go by his talk of the afternoon.
    There is little enough in the Deep Mani. Pigs are the only important livestock with, fortunately, abundant prickly pears to feed them on as well as their masters. A few thin goats keep alive on thistles. A little corn and oats are the only crops; beans, garlic, artichokes and these lupin seeds the only garden produce; plenty of olives, a few almond and fig and carob trees; otherwise nothing but cactus and thorns and stones. The bread used to be made of maize, beans and vetch till wheat began to arrive at the beginning of the century, and there was more of everything since they had built the road to Pyrgos. Two cheerful phenomenally old men in cartwheel hats had joined us. They settled slowly with joints cracking like cap-pistols, and the girl leant back against the wall with her arms folded. Like many of the girls we had seen in this queer region, she was extremely beautiful: a pale, clear face both virginal and spiritual with an intensely aristocratic bone structure, and large, dark, Shulamitish eyes. When she leant forward to pour the ouzo or tip out a new plateful of lupin seeds she put her left hand across her breast to keep her long thick plaits from sweeping across the table, leaning back again afterwards in attentive silence, her face alert and smiling. Her few gestures were deft and distinguished and informed by a patrician lack of fuss. It was a miracle that these waterless rocks, alongside the cactuses and the thorns, could give birth to her as well.
    The shades of evening were obliterating those mountains. Bit by bit the last rearguard of the cicadas had fallen silent. Outside, the desolate spinney of gesticulating ping-pong batswas hardening into silhouette and the sun was disappearing in a sad elaborate pavane over the bare sea. Bare, because the Messenian peninsula had been drawing away westwards to its ultimate cape as we moved down the Mani and now had died away. Due west of the window the sea ran unencumbered for hundreds of miles in a straight line, until, just missing the southernmost rocks of Sicily, it broke on the far-away Cartha-ginian coast. I watched the conflagration die in a suitable mood of sunset melancholy, that affliction of northern people in the Mediterranean. Sonnenuntergangstraurigkeit! It was a sudden feeling of exile and strangeness and of the limitlessness of history which left these Maniots untouched.
    Their discourse of livestock reminded me all at once of the last injunctions of George Katsimbalis in the Plaka before leaving Athens, “...dirges, yes, wonderful dirges! And I believe they have extraordinary bullfights! Des corps à corps! They’re all tremendously strong fellows with biceps like this,” his eyes became twin beads of urgency as he