arch across the living-room, a smoke-blackened hearth, a low ledge of divan round the walls spread with coloured blankets, a loom, a wooden table and stools, the ikons and their lamp and a pitcher with thorn twigs in the mouth against flying insects. Onions, garlic and tomatoeshung from the cobwebbed beams; faded pictures of Venizelos looked down from the walls and enlarged sepia photographs of turbaned grandsires armed to the teeth. Hens, pecking their way indoors, were always being shooed out, and swallows dived to and from their nest in the rafters with a swish; when we were there, rifles leaned in the corner and lay across the tables; some were adorned with silver plaques and cartridge-belts heavy with flashing clips festooned them. The thick embrasures of the windows and the doors framed downhill cascades of olives and a canyon twisting between dovetailing scarps; often these vistas ended in a triangle of the Aegean or the Libyan Sea; they were nearly always commanded by the upheaval of Ida or the White Mountains. Sometimes, with sentries posted, after a banquet with the Olympianly bearded priest, the mayor and the village elders, we would stay the night. At these meals, the women, coiffed and clad in blackâsaviours of numberless British, New Zealand and Australiansâserved and stood near with arms akimbo; they joined in the conversation spiritedly but, in this masculine and patriarchal society, seldom sat with us. In villages like this I was treated for small maladies now and thenâfor rheumatism, due to constant sleeping out in wet clothesâand for persistent headaches. The universal remedy of cupping was followed, in every case, by darker therapies administered by clever old women: many candle-lit signs of the cross were performed over the afflicted part; incantations accompanied them, and oil dropped slowly into a glass of water in ritual quantities. Once a beautiful young witch knotted a pinch of salt in one corner of my turban and murmured spells for half an hour. Impossible to discover the words: â mystiká prágmata! Kalá prágmata! VaskanÃes! â was the only answer, through lips across which forefingers were conspiratorially laid; words followed by peals of laughter from the women and the girls who gather at such times: âSecret things! Good things! Charms...!â They worked at once.
But the high mountains, for nearly three years, were our real home. It was there, at the end of hours climbing and higher than the dizziest village, that devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makersâ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercifully riddle the islandâs stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex-and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping firelit stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the caveâs floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsmanâs bread that must be soaked in water or goatsâ milk before it is eaten. Toasting goatsâ cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers. [12] These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent from the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-coloured wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was slung a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguinsâ wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and moustachioed faces a look of
But the high mountains, for nearly three years, were our real home. It was there, at the end of hours climbing and higher than the dizziest village, that devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makersâ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercifully riddle the islandâs stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex-and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping firelit stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the caveâs floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsmanâs bread that must be soaked in water or goatsâ milk before it is eaten. Toasting goatsâ cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers. [12] These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent from the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-coloured wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was slung a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguinsâ wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and moustachioed faces a look of
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