The Golden Step Read online

  The Golden Step

  Copyright © Christopher Somerville 2007, 2012

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  Haus Publishing Ltd

  This edition published in 2012 by

  The Armchair Traveller

  at the bookHaus

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SW1X 9AH

  www.thearmchairtraveller.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ebook ISBN 978 1 907973 33 8

  Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

  [email protected]

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  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Talking to myself

  Out East (Kato Zakros to Kritsa)

  Upcountry Village: Kritsa Interlude

  The Plains of Plenty (Kritsa to Asites)

  Across the Roof of Crete (Asites to Thronos)

  Lotus Land: Amari Interlude

  To Sfakia: A Rock and a Hard Place (Thronos to Chora Sfakion)

  The Gorges of the West (Chora Sfakion to Paleochora)

  Of Earth and Dreams (Paleochora to Hrissoskalitissas)

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Jane, with love and thanks

  Aphordakos

  Aphordakos, great George: your hollow face

  outcuts the wind, eagle nose discovers

  lilies and painted saints. Between the squared

  blocks of Minoan walls you find a place

  for shards others would pocket. Aphordakos,

  your mind hawks the hills, skims the rocks,

  strung like a bow aimed for a shadowed peak.

  Share your heights with me, great aegagros.

  Talking to myself

  In the bus to Sitia, staring out of the dusty windows at the lumpy landscape of eastern Crete, I gave myself a proper talking-to. It was dog trouble once more, revisiting me like an ominous dream – bloody big shepherds’ dogs, three of them, hunting me like wolves up a nameless dirt track. I had beaten off this evil trio many times in the week since my arrival in Crete, but still they rode my waking hours. Other apprehensions slipstreamed behind – staggering into a darkened village where every door was locked against me, tumbling headlong down the gorge side, lost on the mountain at nightfall. Yet at the same time raw excitement kept turning my heart over in my stomach.

  Along with the diesel stink of the bus, this swerving between fear and elation, as if shuttling in an express lift, was making me feel physically sick. I unfolded my two maps of Crete, east and west, across the worn plush seat, and had a steadying look. Already their flimsy coloured paper, printed in Germany, was fraying at the seams. At a scale of 1:100,000 their uselessness to a walker intending to cross the mountainous island from end to end was only too evident. But in this year of 1999 they were the best on offer. They showed the bull-shaped island, familiar to me from many visits over the years, lying between the Cretan and the Libyan Seas. The stumpy hindquarters stretched east to terminate in the little cocked-up tail of the Sideros promontory. The blunt head with its three peninsulas – Akrotiri representing the rounded ear of the bull, Rhodopos and Gramvousa the twin horns – pushed west. Actually Crete looked less like a bull than a rather scrawny and etiolated rhinoceros. Dotted along its north coast at regular intervals were the chief towns of the island – Chania and Rethymnon the elegant Venetian queens of the west, Iraklion (where I had boarded this bus a couple of hours ago) the dusty and noisy capital city in the centre. A little further east lay Hersonissos and Agios Nikolaos, the play-towns of, respectively, more and less downmarket tourism. Out towards the far east the map showed the compact regional centre of Sitia, where the bus driver would be putting me down in an hour or two.

  Two other places stood out. I had ringed them round in black ink. Below the Sideros promontory, tucked into a bay at the easternmost end of the island, was the seaside hamlet of Kato Zakros. By the road into the village the cartographer had placed a symbol, a little red classical column. ‘Antique Place,’ said the key. The 4,000-year-old palace of Zakros lay here, one of the greatest treasures of Crete’s Golden Age of Minoan civilisation. At the western tip of the island, about 200 miles away as the crow flew, sat a tiny black square topped by a cross. ‘Moni Hrissoskalitissas’ was printed alongside in scarlet – the Monastery of the Golden Step. Legend said that one step in the flight of 62 that leads up to the monastery was made of gold; but only the pure in heart could see it.

  I stared along the map, holding it still against the jolting of the bus. Between the eastern and western extremities of Crete lay four ragged areas where the gentle green of lowland country changed colour to a drab olive brown and the contours ran together in bunches. These were the four mountain ranges that made up the lumpy spine of the bull island – Thripti, Dhikti, Psiloritis and Lefka Ori. The latter and more westerly pair were generously overspread with paler patches where the land rose over 7,000 feet above sea level. From previous climbs and dirt road drives I had gathered a very rough impression of these mountains – their fierce gorges, their spiny vegetation and rubbly limestone paths, their overhung cliffs and great scrubby slopes falling into shadows; above all, their lonely stretches of mile after rocky mile with no other human in sight. The map breezily ignored these realities. It showed a footpath running from east to west across the whole island, a red wriggling line about 300 miles long, labelled ‘European Hiking Route E4’, marching confidently all the way from Kato Zakros to Hrissoskalitissas with never a doubt in its head, hurdling mountains and striding across lowlands with equal nonchalance. Just follow me, it seemed to say. Bob’s your uncle. What’s the problem?

  No problem – except that I had been doing a little checking up online and among personal contacts, and was pretty clear that European Hiking Route E4 was in truth a poorly way-marked, barely visible apology for a path, a fickle companion liable to sneak away and hide when the going got rough in the wild uplands of Crete. It was up in such high and lonely places that my overactive imagination had set all those troubling scenarios of dog attacks and inaccessible crags I had improbably scrambled to. Yet paradoxically it was the mountainous interior of Crete that had called to me from the very first day I had set foot in the island many years before.

  The coasts of Crete are famous for their beauty. Each sandy bay looks as if it has been arranged by an exterior designer for the exclusive appreciation of discerning persons. The seas are warm and of an irresistible inshore turquoise that shades out into inky blue. Mountains slope seductively to cliffs and coves. The bathing, sun-worshipping, beer-sipping life never seems more seductive than in the coastal havens of Sougia, of Xerokambos, of Falassarna and Tholos. But my Cretan eyes, somehow, were always lifted to the hills. This must have been largely thanks to George Psychoundakis and his wonderful book The Cretan Runner. I’d first devoured this classic account of the Second World War resistance in German-occupied Crete as a teenager, reading my father’s battered old copy. Psychoundakis was a shepherd boy from Asi Gonia in the eastern skirts of Lefka Ori, otherwise known as the White Mountains. In his lat
e teens in 1941 when the Germans invaded and took over his native island, he joined the andartes or resistance fighters as a runner and carrier of messages. He ran, climbed and walked all over Crete in his cracked shoes. The book he wrote about his experiences among those incredibly brave and hardy men and women of the Cretan Resistance, translated after the war by his field commander Patrick Leigh Fermor, filled me with passion for the mountains of Crete and gave me a goal – to walk one day in the footsteps of George Psychoundakis.

  I loved wandering the high back country of the island, stumbling on village dances and church feasts, watching people take the kind of time and care in the steep mountain fruit and vegetable gardens that most coastal places with their tourist money seemed to have turned their backs on. In the upland villages of Kritsa and Thronos I made local friends who took me hiking among the hard clinkery hills, orange and white limestone wildernesses splashed with a brilliant palette of small flowers, sun-baked villages on dirt roads that snaked among olive and citrus groves. One evening in the Taverna Aravanes at Thronos when friends were singing mantinades, pungent little verses that fly back and forth across the table to tease, provoke and point up the singer’s cleverness, someone – it was a stranger, and I never found out anything else about him – produced a phrase as he tried to translate one of the mantinades into English for my benefit. ‘They are singing,’ he said, ‘that Crete is a place of earth, and it is also a place of dreams.’ I never heard that mantinade again, but the phrase stuck fast in my mind as entirely apt, complete in itself. I told myself that I’d learn more and better Greek than my few rudimentary ‘yes-no-please-thanks-hello-goodbye’ phrases, and I’d set out one day to explore the island of earth and dreams on foot in one continuous end-to-end burst, with a walking stick in my hand.

  A nice romantic pipe-dream, not to be taken seriously for a moment. And there it would probably have rested, if it hadn’t been for the advent of my 50th birthday and the present that my wife had secretly decided to give me. It was a wise gift, a loving and a generous one. ‘I don’t want to give you any thing,’ Jane said. ‘What I want is to give you a stretch of free time. Two months, say. I’ll hold the fort at home, I’ll look after the children and pay the bills and all that stuff. Just go and do something wonderful, something you’ve really longed to do. Something for yourself.’

  Middle-aged men in the midst of their working lives don’t get offers like this. We push our ostrich heads down the burrow labelled ‘too busy to live’, and the other one signed ‘time running out’, and there we stay, pinned to the ground by our own lethargy and fears and nice comforting tunnel vision. Now I was to be jerked out into the open – a scary prospect. What on earth should I do with this unlooked-for slice of freedom? Something that would take about two months; something entirely selfish, something for myself. There was only one answer, really. I’d do the Cretan mountain walk. And I’d do it as much in the spirit of George Psychoundakis as I could, with as little technology as possible. I didn’t want buttons and switches and batteries to get between me and the raw experience, and anyway machines always fell to pieces if I tried to employ them. I wouldn’t take a Global Positioning System device – partly because I’d have to learn how to use the wretched thing, but mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness. Map and compass would do. No mobile phone to help me if I got into difficulties; I’d rely on any common sense I might discover in my possession, and on any Greek I could manage to scrape up along the way. No collapsible walking poles or high-tech trainers or other fancy-dan apparel to distance me yet further from the shepherds and farm women and village children I’d be talking to. I’d wear ordinary boots and clothes and I’d carry the katsouna, the white figwood walking stick, that I’d been given by friends in Kritsa. Just how much of an ice-breaker that katsouna was to prove, I did not then imagine.

  The one electronic device I would allow myself, thanks to a well-honed apprehension about stray dogs (I had encountered on past occasions the immense wolf-like beasts the Cretan shepherds called dogs, far from their masters and keen to show me all their teeth), was a Dog Dazer, a clever little gizmo that emits an ultrasonic scream, inaudible to humans but highly unpleasing to dogs. It had saved my ankles several times before, and also provided a moment of high comedy on a previous occasion when, walking with a party of Americans in the hills of Provence, a pair of local Cerberuses had come racing at us out of a farm track. When I pressed the Dazer’s button the dogs screeched to a halt cartoon-style, did a music hall double take, and ran off yowling into a cornfield. ‘What happened to them?’ my companions wanted to know. ‘Oh, it’s a kind of high frequency ray that jellies their brains,’ I deadpanned, trying to be funny. ‘I killed ’em.’

  Never in the field of human irony-bypass can eyes and mouths have opened so wide. ‘Oh – my – Gaahd!’ they gasped. ‘You … you killed them? Oh, the poor, poor things! Quick, we must find their owner and … Oh my God, what if he sues? Who’s got any cash?’The whip-round was well under way, and the Somerville name turning to the muddiest shade of mud, by the time I managed to demonstrate the Dazer’s harmlessness on a nearby cow. But I don’t think the Americans ever quite believed anything I told them after that. I kept catching them looking sideways at me.

  ‘Go where you want and do what you like,’ Jane had said. ‘There’s just one prohibition. No writing.’ That was a shrewd blow. I had been making a full-time living as a travel writer for the previous ten years. Travel writing is a precarious business, very much subject to the whims of fashion and the caprices of commissioning editors. He who keeps a full wall planner survives. Every trip taken, every family holiday, every walk in the country becomes a means of generating income. A Sunday afternoon stroll with friends in the Cotswolds? Turn that into a Walk of the Month for the Daily Blah. A family week in Cornwall? ‘How to Amuse Stroppy Teenagers on Holiday’ for the Sunday Sloth. A sudden summons to London? ‘Ten Museums in Half a Day’ for Jabberwocky Magazine. And so on. Without my wife’s embargo I’d be scurrying round for Cretan commissions; I’d take every sidestep to every famous site; I’d arrange ‘just an hour, honestly’ meetings with tourist representatives. I’d be note-taking all day and scribbling all night. There would be pressure to perform, to move along, to get somewhere and do something. In other words, I’d be tense all the time and I wouldn’t see a thing.

  Drop all that, was Jane’s injunction. Go with the flow. If you want to stop, stop. If you want to walk on, keep going. If someone invites you, say yes. If you can’t be arsed to visit this or that site, then don’t. You’re not writing a guidebook, or any sort of book. You’ve been living by timetables and in the future far too much. Don’t plan this adventure; let it happen to you, day by day. Live in the moment, just for once. If you’re going to have this experience, then for heaven’s sake have it to the hilt and beyond. Otherwise, do something else.

  That was fantastically liberating, and also quite frightening. How was I actually going to cope with two months of not working, of not worrying about anything except how to get from A to B over tough terrain, and how to secure a plate of food and a bed for the night when I got there? How could I prevent myself transferring my time-of-life anxieties to the trip, to the route, to my welfare, to a hundred and one potential bugbears? There and then I made a resolution to try to trust to common sense and the kindness of strangers. The latter I knew I could rely on – Cretans, especially mountain dwellers, are some of the most hospitable people on earth. The former I was more dubious about.

  The fact is that travel writers, in their operations for national newspapers and magazines, have a very unreal experience of travel. Someone offers, arranges and pays for your flight, your hire car and hotel. A charming sticky-haired girl in a red bolero meets you at the airport with a sheaf of booklets and maps, with complimentary passes and a timetable which, if you don’t hold out against it, will skewer you to five dawn calls, five long lunches, five very long and boozy dinners, ten coffee meetings (‘including the Mayor of the Regional Co
mmune and the Head of the Bureau of Local Initiatives Touristical’), and twenty trips with a driver and interpreter whose English is just a little better than yours to visit a brand new tourist attraction that will make you an hour late for your next coffee meeting with the promoter of a rival attraction forty miles down the highway. Unless you are very firm about being left to your own devices and finding your own story in your own way, you can wake up one day to find that your powers of planning and thinking and acting for yourself have leached away. You can actually discover that you are frightened of travel, in the sense that proper travellers of the calibre of Freya Stark or Wilfred Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor would have understood it: a setting off into the unknown and unpredictable. And you can certainly find that those powers you once took for granted as innate – knowing intuitively the direction to head for, finding the right place to doss down under the stars, making the best of a bad job in adversity, lucking across the very person who can help you out of a fix – have become blunt and unreliable. I wasn’t sure just how much I had declined towards becoming a tourist rather than a traveller, and this was the perfect way to find out.

  I petitioned for, and was granted, permission to keep a journal of my wanderings. Other than that, it would be Jane’s way for me. And as soon as I decided to let it all just happen, things became a whole lot easier. I fixed up a few lessons in Greek with Aglaia Hill, a charming Greek-born teacher who lived a few streets away from me. We had great fun devising a personalised phonetic phrase-book, all the way from Meé-pos échete thomátio ya ména? (‘Do you by any chance have a room for me?’) to Oníra gliká! (‘Sweet dreams!’) and my favourite, a fiercely shouted Páre ta skiliá! (‘Call off your dogs!’). Preparing for the walk now was merely a question of deciding how little I could get away with carrying on my back, filling my pockets to bursting with drachmas, and fixing a date. Greek Orthodox Easter seemed a good and suitable time to start the walk in Kato Zakros. Springtime in Crete should guarantee decent weather (I could take a risk and leave the tent at home), and there would be sheets of wild flowers all the way. I could hope to reach Hrissoskalitissas monastery just in time for Whitsun, which would nicely book-end the adventure. And a Cretan Easter with its processions of flowers and candles, its midnight feasts and shattering volleys of firecrackers would be a great send-off, too.