The Revolt of Aphrodite by Lawrence Durrell Page B

have been discussing. They have woven them up spider-wise out of old kerosene tins, driftwood, scraps of bamboo and fern, rush matting, cloth and clay. The variety and inventiveness of their constructions are beyond praise. Though they are unplanned in our sense of the word these settlements are completely homogeneous and appropriate to their sites and I shall be sorry to see them vanish. They have the perfection of organism, not of system. The streets grow up naturally like vines to meet the needs of the inhabitants, their water-points and sanitation groupings intersecting economically and without fuss. All the essential distances have been preserved, needs sorted and linked, yet everything done unprofessionally, by the eye. A micro-climate had been established where a city could take root. Streets of softbaked earth into which has soaked urine and wine and the blood of the Easter lambs—every casual libation. Flowers bloom everywhere from old petrol cans coaxed into loops and trellises, bringing shade to the hot gleaming walls of shanties. On a balcony of reed mats a cage of singing birds whistling the tunes of Pontus. A goat. A man in a red nightcap. There is even a little tavern where the blue cans go back and forth to the butts. There is shade where bargainers can fall asleep over their arguments and card players chaffer. You must compare this heroic effort with the other one we are contemplating tonight . They have much in common. A city, you see, is an animal, and always on the move. We forget this. Any and every human settlement for example spreads to West and North in the absence of natural obstacles. Is there an obscure gravitational law responsible for this? We do not know. Some law of the ant-heap? I cannot answer this question. Then reflect how quarters tend to flock together—birds of a feather. Buildings are like the people who wear them. One brothel, two, three, and soon you have a quarter. Banks, museums, income groups, tend to cling together for protection. Any new intrusion modifies the whole. A new industry displaces function, can poison a whole quarter. Or the disappearance of a tannery, say, can leave a whole suburb to decay like a tooth. Think of all this when you read of the shrine of Idean Zeus, floored with bull’s blood red and polished—as in South Africa today.
    “And now that we have spoken at length about womb-building and tomb-building it is time to consider tool-building and perhaps even fool-building.”
    Here the transcript became blurred and faulty for as he spoke an extraordinary interruption had begun to take place, a completely unexpected diversion.
    A large white hand, with grotesquely painted fingernails, appeared around the column directly behind Caradoc’s back. It advanced in hesitant snail-like fashion, feeling the grooves in the stone. The speaker, noticing the thrill which had rippled through his audience at this sight, and following the direction of everyone’s gaze, turned his own upon this strange object. “So there you are, Mobego” he muttered under his breath. “Good.”
    We all watched with intense concentration as the hand became anarm clothed in a sleeve of baggy black with a preposterous celluloid cuff attached to the wrist. Hippolyta drew several sharp breaths of horror. “It’s Sipple” she whispered with dismay; and indeed it was, but a Sipple that none of us had ever seen, for the creature was wearing the long since discarded equipment of his first profession. Slowly the apparition dawned among the columns of the temple, and the singularity of his appearance was dumbfounding in its wild appropriateness to the place—like some painted wooden grotesque from an ancient Greek bacchanalia which had suddenly stirred into life at the rumble of Caradoc’s words. First the face, with its rhinoceroid proboscis of putty, the flaring nostrils painted on to it as if on to a child’s rocking-horse: the bashed-in gibus with the coarse tufts of hair sprouting from