The Golden Step Read online

  Psiloritis had taken root in my mind, and had grown there. I had read of its herby phrigana scrub, of the cores and crusts that formed it, its ledges and gorges. Friends in Crete had talked of their love for the mountain, of their fear and awe in the face of it. I heard about its stormy moods, and grew aware of the human dramas played out in peace and war in its caves and down among its skirting villages. Demons and gods stalked its hinterlands. This was Mount Ida of Cretan mythology, the place where the infant Zeus was raised in a cave by the goat goddess Amaltheia while his cannibalistic father Kronos searched the hills to find and eat the young godling. Psiloritis sheltered freedom fighters against both Venetian and Turk. At Arkadi monastery on the northern slopes, 2,000 Turkish besiegers and Cretan defenders died in November 1866 when Abbot Gabriel ordered the powder magazine to be fired. From cave mouths high on Psiloritis, British radio operators and Cretan andartes watched the Germans of Hitler’s occupying forces burning the villages below the mountain. Psiloritis stood drenched in blood and history, grounded in defiance: the apex of the island, a potent symbol, its cold white head held dauntingly high against the clouds.

  Back at the Piperakis house we found Pantelis Kampaxis, contorting himself aerobically on the veranda according to his early morning routine. As usual, the sight of those hawser-like muscles writhing to his scientific bends and stretches put me in deep shame of my own pale and flabby body. We sat round the table and ate a hero’s breakfast: iron-hard rusks called paximadia, softened with a drizzle of Manoli’s own olive oil and honey. Piperakis bent his arm in the strong-man sign, a clenched-fist salute to the mountaineers. ‘This is food for palikares,’ he grinned. ‘You will be strong all day.’

  Half an hour up the mountainside I put my hands on my knees and bent double, head hanging, retching as the leafy taste of Manoli’s mountain tea washed back into my throat. I felt bloody. My heart was pounding halfway out of my chest. Breath gasped in flattened lungs. Sweat and suncream trickled blindingly into my eyes. Strings of saliva and snot, the result of an unsuccessful attempt to blow my nose Cretan-style straight on to the ground, hung humiliatingly from nostrils and beard as from a beaten bull in the bullring. Balanced on a rock beside me with eyes tactfully averted, Pantelis in his spandex suit of lights breathed elegantly in and out, hands on hips, not a hair out of place. ‘Please to clean your nose, Christopher,’ was his polite request. ‘We will rest five minutes.’

  The bout of distress was a wholly self-inflicted wound, easily diagnosed: too much roast lamb and red wine last night, too much breakfast this morning, and too much fast climbing while the body was still not properly awake. Nearly half the journey behind me, and still I had not yet learned these basic rules of moderation. Or more accurately: I had thoroughly learned them through uncomfortable experiences, but still lacked the self-discipline to apply them. The singing and music making round the Piperakis table, the exhibitionistic pleasure of playing my harmonica, the hum of talk and laughter had blended all too smoothly with Manoli’s rich old wine, brought from its sweet smelling wooden barrel and poured with open pleasure by its author. I hadn’t even tried keeping a check on the filling and refilling of my tumbler. Who in their right minds would? And this morning, who could have resisted Maria Piperakis as she spread herb-baked paximadia with oil and honey like some Homeric hostess?

  Pantelis Kampaxis, that was who: honed Pantelis the water-drinker, the polite refuser of second helpings; steel-sprung Pantelis the stadium trainer, pounder of pavements and dedicated high priest in the temple of his own body. Pantelis had focus where I had none, which was why a thousand feet of straight-up climbing had reduced me to a jellyfish while hardly disturbing the even tenor of his breathing.

  Once my eyeballs had stopped thudding, I leaned on my katsouna and admired the view back over Asites and the lowlands. Mist rose from the olive groves and vineyards. Mount Iouchtas and the distant Lasithi mountains stood flat like cardboard cut-outs of themselves, washed with muted blue, each receding wave of hills a delicate shade paler than the one in front. Near the rocks where we were resting rose a six-foot pole of faded yellow and black stripes, with a familiar tin square seized to its top. ‘E4’ it announced. I fetched the pole a pre-emptive admonitory whack with the katsouna. Small chance of seeing any more of those where we were headed.

  Trudging on up the rocky track I gradually fell into the liberating rhythm that steals like a blessing on mountain climbers. The feet thump down regularly, one per second. Breathing heaves in the same pattern: left foot down, inhale – right foot down, exhale. The eyes cease to look hopefully upwards, and stay fixed dead ahead on the couple of yards of rock, shrub and earth unrolling downwards like a film under the sun-hat’s brim. On this treadmill of the will, thoughts swirl lazily in an opiate soup. A sunken part of the mind registers with irritation the small breaks in rhythm caused by stumbles on loose stones; but most of the self rises almost without effort, a drugged spirit floating upward oblivious of blisters and aching muscles. Pleasurably adrift in a sea of blood chemicals, you only become aware of the thousands of feet you have climbed when you make a halt. ‘Kalo tempo,’ Pantelis called this zen state of consciousness, ‘good time.’

  The Greek Mountaineering Club’s Prinos hut, when we reached it nearly 3,000 feet above Asites, turned out to be a grim two-storey building with windows shuttered and barred against thieves. Not a tempting place to pass a night on the mountain. Bright metal splashes and dents made by large-calibre bullets in the steel shutters hinted at just how exciting the local wild men could make life for benighted walkers obliged to bunk down here.

  Above Prinos the gradient eased. Pantelis and I made kalo tempo for a couple of hours, up into a bare stony wilderness and then further up to the lower slopes of Mount Koudouni. E4, according to the map, had sneaked off south and westwards; but we men of the mountains, scorning both map and waymark, were intent on sterner courses. Here was proper scrambling, hanging by fingertips and boot grips to the sheer scaly sides of Koudouni. I inched up the dark grey flank of the mountain, scraping my knuckles on its rough limestone hide. Pantelis climbed high above me, foreshortened to a pair of gouged trainer soles and two thick brown tubes of muscle encased in black shorts. Not far below the top, the handhold I was pulling down on gave way. I swung sickeningly out over a 50-foot drop. The sang-froid with which hand and boot reached for safe perches seemed to have nothing to do with me.

  On the rock-strewn summit of Koudouni, Pantelis and I shook hands with the satisfaction that comes from climbing nearly 5,000 feet before midday. Peaks stood stamped on the blue sky. The upper shoulder of Psiloritis turned to the north, magnificent in a cloak of snow. Around this time tomorrow, if all went well, we would be up there in the eagle’s eye of Crete. Ahead rose Skinakas, topped with the mosque-like domes of modern temples of science: the astronomical telescopes of the University of Iraklion. Down in the south-west, by contrast, the blue sky was snagged by the twin-horned peak of Mavri, the Dark One. To Mavri the Minoans came, filling the great cave of Kamares with the cream of their artistic creation in propitiation of gods beyond dreaming by contemporary minds.

  Looking north from the central court of the palace at Phaistos on the Mesara Plain, a modern-day visitor can make out the mouth of the Kamares Cave as easily as could the Minoans who worshipped there 4,000 years ago. The cave is seven miles distant and some 3,500 feet above the plain, yet it shows clearly as a sizeable black smudge high in the mountain wall, with the twin peaks of Mavri curving above like the horns of a bull.

  It’s a hard morning’s hike up from the plain, on a poorly marked track that is often obscured by clouds. But the cave, and the immense view, make the climb worthwhile. Kamares is an enormous hole. Its mouth yawns well over a hundred feet across. The roof is sixty feet high, while the cave runs back a hundred yards into the hill – roughly the dimensions of a cathedral, and with the same sense of presence in the shadows.

  As with all the major Cretan archaeological sites, a local man made the first
finds by chance. It was in 1890, at the start of the golden era of archaeological discovery in Crete, that a shepherd picked up some shards of old pottery in the great cave high in the southern flank of Psiloritis. When Italian archaeologists made the first scientific exploration of the cave in 1892, they unearthed pottery of a beauty and delicacy far beyond anything yet dug out of Cretan soil. Further excavations in the early 1900s, and a British dig in 1913, brought to light still finer examples of this ‘Kamares ware’.

  The pottery had been made in the palace workshops at Phaistos and neighbouring Agia Triada, in two distinct phases between 2000 and 1700 BC. The earlier type of pottery, probably thrown on a slow hand-turned wheel, featured red and white designs on a dark background. The later style must have been fashioned on a more sophisticated potter’s wheel, perhaps foot-driven, certainly capable of much faster speeds. This type of Kamares ware is astonishingly delicate, some of it dubbed ‘eggshell’ in reference to its thinness, as fragile as the finest porcelain. There are wide-mouthed cups with slender handles and out-turned rims, decorated with floral bands that narrow and widen to emphasise the flowing lines of the vessel. There are spouted jugs of yellow, black and orange, and kraters for mixing wine and water whose bowls are studded with exquisite eight-petalled flowers sculpted in three dimensions. To put the sophistication of this Old Palace-era pottery in context, much of northwest Europe in 1900 BC had not yet lifted itself out of the Stone Age, while in Britain the architects of Stonehenge were still labouring to fix their crudely-cut monoliths together. Many of the best pieces of Kamares ware, retrieved whole or painstakingly reassembled, are on show in the Iraklion Archaeological Museum, where their beauty lights up the display rooms.

  It turned out, after analysis of the Kamares finds, that the cave had been in continuous use as a religious centre since earliest Minoan times, around 2,500 BC: at first chiefly for burials, later for a variety of ceremonies that probably included fertility rites. Most important of all, perhaps, was the stimulus that the early Italian excavations gave to the British antiquarian Arthur Evans. Archaeologists had already pinpointed the site at Knossos, just south of Iraklion, where they suspected a great Bronze Age settlement lay buried, but it was the news of the sumptuous painted pottery found in the cave on Psiloritis that determined Evans to come to Crete in 1894 and start his enquiries into the early civilisation of the island in earnest. Six years later, having bought the suburban site outside Iraklion after the end of Turkish rule in Crete, Evans began to dig there and immediately struck gold in the form of an enormous palace. That was the epic moment of Cretan archaeology, with light flooding in on the Minoan civilisation for the first time since its collapse and descent into oblivion 3,000 years before.

  An hour after breasting the rise of Koudouni, Pantelis and I were sitting (one of us greasy with sweat) gulping water on top of Mount Skinakas. It had been a thousand feet down and a thousand feet up again, a straight slog with no respite. But now a proper mountaineer’s reward was in prospect: five long miles of gentle downward road, smoothly tarred, descending to the Nida Plain. Halfway down we heard a tinkle of bells. Round the corner of the road came scampering a flock of fluorescent red sheep. A hallucinatory moment. I blinked, wondering if the climb from Asites had been too much for me. A hundred crimson-coated sheep braked to a halt as one, took a horrified look at the two humans marching down on them, and went bouncing off the road and away uphill like a swarm of giant ladybirds. No trouble for the shepherd in charge of this flock in picking out his dramatically-dyed charges among the white screes of the mountain.

  Shadows were beginning to lengthen, and the blister on my middle left toe (the big, burst one that came into intimate contact at every step with the neighbouring toenail) was making me limp painfully, by the time we got down to where the road petered out in the great green saucer of the Nida Plain. Shaped more like a lake than a saucer, in fact, this dead flat three-mile-wide grazing meadow, roughly circular, fed with mineral-rich silt and water from the mountains that surround it on all sides. In winter snow lies several feet thick on the plain; in spring, at snowmelt, the shepherding families from the mountain village of Anogia a dozen miles to the north bring their flocks up to pasture for the next six months on the rich grass of Nida. In the days before the road was tarred, the flocks would be brought up on foot, ceremonially, all on the same day. Nowadays they are jammed into the backs of battered Japanese pickups and whisked up from Anogia to the plain in half an hour.

  The stone-built mitata or cheese-huts of the shepherds stand dotted round the rocky perimeter of the plain and along the road to Anogia. Each is laid out on roughly the same lines: a simple stone room with a plain sling bed, a stone-built bench seat with brushwood padding and several layers of rugs thrown over the top; a wooden table and couple of chairs; a recess for the raki and oil bottles, the plastic wine flagon, the salt and matches; a deep hollow fireplace where the big iron milk cauldron can be set to boil for cheese-making. Making cheese up in the hills alongside the grazing flocks is still a healthy part of the rural economic tradition in upland Crete, with its roots in the practical necessity of former times. Before modern transport or refrigeration, when everything had to travel on mule-back along rubbly mountain tracks, shepherds were obliged to use up their milk as quickly as they could. The cheese they continue to make in the mountains is beautiful. Some say it is best eaten warm and sweet from a wicker basket into which the shepherd’s hands have just scooped it straight from the cauldron. Others prefer it matured for a few months in a cool crack in the rock. All agree it is better than the insipid stuff turned out by the ton in the lowland cheese factories.

  ‘Terrible!’ growled the old shepherd we met on the edge of the plain. Dressed in full traditional rig of black shirt, wide breeches, cracked leather knee-boots and black fringed sariki headband, he pulled up his mule and sat swaying on its A-shaped wooden saddle. ‘Terrible! Going up and down to the village in their cars each day, like a set of commuters – that’s what these young shepherds do these days. No time to make cheese in the mitato, like I do; no, they’d rather sell the milk off to the factories.’

  ‘Why don’t they stay up here all through the summer?’ Pantelis enquired.

  ‘Huh,’ grunted the old man, ‘can’t put up with not having a television, I suppose. Tied to their mother’s apron-strings, or their wives’. I never used to see my family for months at a time when I was a young married man. Stayed right here on Nida with my sheep, like all the other shepherds. Never did us any harm. Worst day’s work they ever did, asphalting that road from Anogia.’

  Grumbling on, he adjusted his sweaty sariki and glanced over my pepper-and-salt hair and sandy beard. ‘Who’s this? A German?’

  ‘An Englishman,’ said Pantelis. ‘His father fought in Crete during the war.’ This statement, not strictly accurate, had smoothed my path already with one or two fierce old men whose finest hours had been as wartime members of a band of andartes or guerrilla fighters in their local mountains. They, like the younger Cretans, felt outraged at the continuing NATO bombing of Serbia. Some had given me a hard time on that subject. But their sense of an Englishman as an ally, forged once and for all when they were young impressionable men in circumstances of extreme danger and high drama, outweighed their disapproval.

  My father, as a young Royal Navy lieutenant in the destroyer HMS Hero, had helped to put ashore Allied reinforcements in Suda Bay in May 1941 during the Battle of Crete. At some time during the heavy bomb and torpedo attacks unleashed on Hero, a near-miss shook her so badly that she was forced to go into dock at Alexandria for a refit. So Dad missed the desperate nights at the end of May when Royal Navy ships ran the gauntlet of air, surface and submarine attack for several successive nights in order to evacuate exhausted Allied troops from the mole at Iraklion and the beach at Chora Sfakion. It was also Hero that was sent on 22 May in company with another destroyer, Decoy, to pick King George of the Hellenes and his entourage off the beach at Ayia Roumeli and take them to sa
fety for the remainder of the war. I had never brought out this particular nugget of personal history: Cretans are not known for their royalist sympathies.

  Just now, however, the old shepherd seemed delighted. He leaned down with a creak from the wooden saddle and shook my hand. ‘Your father must have been with us, the andartes. Up in the caves on Psiloritis, eh? I must have run across him.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he was in the Navy, a sailor.’

  ‘Ah, a sailor? Well, what was his name?’

  ‘John … um, Ianni.’

  ‘Ianni? Ianni? Let me see – yes, there was a Ianni, a radio operator who used to hide above Anogia. I didn’t know he was a sailor – I thought they were all soldiers. So that was your father, was it? Good, good!’ And he grasped for my hand again, shaking it as if he’d shake it right off.

  ‘No, no,’ I tried to put the old boy straight, ‘that was another Ianni.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Pantelis murmured. ‘He’s happy about it, whoever your father was. As long as he wasn’t a Turk. They have long memories around Psiloritis – even if some of them don’t work so well any more.’

  When the Italians, closely followed by the Germans, invaded Greece in October 1940 in the second year of the Second World War, the Allies sat up and took notice of the big island at the southern edge of Europe. Once again Crete’s geographical location – now within striking distance, by aircraft, of mainland Greece and the north-east African coast, and by naval forces of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean – would prove of vital interest to rival powers contending for mastery over this part of the world. By the spring of 1941 there were more than 30,000 Allied troops garrisoned in the island. But Germany was determined to have Crete as a forward base for attacking the Allied armies in North Africa and harassing the Royal Navy in the eastern Med.