Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page B

Cistercians turned bandit. Someone would be smashing shells with his pistol-butt and offering peeled walnuts in a horny palm; another sliced tobacco on the stock of a rifle: for hours we forgot the war with talk and singing and stories; laughter echoed along minotaurish warrens.

    Few of the old men could write or read, those in middle age found reading hard and writing a grind; the young were defter penmen, but, owing to their short time at school and the disorder of the war, they were not advanced in the craft, apart from an occasional student on the run from the underground in one of the towns. A by-product of this scholastic void was a universal gift for lively and original talk; the flow and style of their discourse were unhindered by the self-consciousness which hobbles and hamstrings the rest of us. They had astonishing memories. These often reached back to their great-grandfathers’ day, and, by hearsay, far beyond. In an island of long lives, this made all the past seem recent: compelling proof of the continuity of history. It reduced the war to just another struggle, the worst and the most recent of many, with which we were perfectly able to deal, and, though the Germans had overrun Greece and driven the British back to El Alamein, win. “Never fear, my child,” some greybeard would say, prophetically prodding the smoke with a forefinger like a fossil, “with Christ and the Virgin’s help, we’ll eat them.” All agreed, and the conversation wandered to the First World War and Asia Minor and arguments about the respective merits of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, to Bismarck and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or the governments, constitutions and electoral systems of different countries. Then the level of this far-ranging chat, much of it far beyond the scope of their literate equivalents in England, might suddenly be reduced by another old man, simpler than his fellows, asking, and evoking general derision and amusement by his question, whether the English were Christians or, like the Moslems, polygamous....Intelligence, humour, curiosity, the rapid assimilation of ideas and their quick deployment, an incomparable narrative knack, arguments resolved by a sudden twist, the inability to leave facts and ideas undeveloped—they are objects to play with like nuggets—all these graces flowered in this stony terrain. The Cretan dialect, with its ancient survivalsand turns of phrase and a vocabulary that changed from valley to valley and an accent unpolluted by the metropolis, was an unstaunchable fountain of delight and fascination.
    Their clothes, however ragged and patched, were emblematic of the dash and spirit they prize so highly: black boots to the knee, baggy, pleated, dark-blue trousers—breeches among the young [13] —wasp-waisted at the middle by a twisted mulberry silk sash eight feet long in which was often stuck a long dagger with a branching ivory hilt and an embossed silver sheath; above this came a black shirt and sometimes a blue waistcoat as tight as a bullfighter’s, stiff with embroidered whorls. A black silk turban with a heavy fringe was twisted at a rakish tilt round every brow. Bandoliers and a slung gun came next—fittings which often accompanied the frocks of abbots, monks and priests—and over them, in winter, the white hooded cape. A curly handled stick, never a crook as on the mainland, with as many wriggles along its shaft as could be found, finishes everything off. All, however tattered and frayed by mountain life, is taut and streamlined, a garb in which, as I well know, it is impossible not to swagger. This bravura was accentuated among the old men by the odd archaic cut of their beards; shorn under the jaw-line, they jutted from their chins like the beards of ancient warriors on vases. This look was underscored by their deceptively frowning eyebrows and the high hawklike bridges of their noses. The ferocity of those swooping brows