The Golden Step Read online

  Like the Page in Good King Wenceslas, I followed the footprints of Pantelis over the brow of the corrie. An ice-cold wind gave me a shove tough enough to make me stagger. Beyond an intervening valley the high, ship-like prow of Psiloritis came into view at last, a magnificent white nape rising steeply to the summit. I put my head down, pushed my frozen hands into my pockets and plodded up the final rise. Up at the top at 8,058 feet, a giant cairn of roughly fitted stones poked out of deep snow. Pantelis and I embraced, yelling with delight, the highest men in Crete. Tiny icicles clung in the cropped hair of Pantelis’s moustache, and wind tears streamed down his cheeks. A huge grin split his goatee. The wind sang out of a royal blue sky. It was a wild and overwhelming moment.

  After the celebrations, the hundred-mile view: a compass-wide panorama to all points of Crete. I planted my stick in the snow and turned round and round while the wind tore at jacket and trousers, feeling the island revolve like a propeller around the hub of Psiloritis. Back in the east, cut out of blue lead, the jagged spines of mountains I had crossed: Lasithi, Dhikti and Thripti, Iouchtas and Skinakas standing proud and closer. To the north the sugar-lump sprawl of Rethymnon at the edge of the Cretan Sea. Down in the south the glinting strips of a thousand greenhouses reflecting the sun from the Mesara Plain, the twin humps of the Paximadia islands lying in Timbaki Bay. Fifty miles off on the southwestern sea horizon, the hunched cloud-like form of Ghavdos Island. And dominating the view to the west, straddled sternly across my future, the craggy white peaks of Lefka Ori, the White Mountains, bunched formidably together like turrets rising from a dour castle wall. A breathtaking panorama. I felt the breath actually leave my body in a rushing gasp. I took off my hat and faced the White Mountains bareheaded, an instinctive gesture, part propitiation, part admiration.

  ‘Come on,’ called Pantelis, ‘let’s eat.’ We crouched against the cairn in the lee of the stones where the wind could not get at us, nibbling goat cheese and olives, speculating on the identity of villages seen far below. Something was puzzling me. Where was Timios Stavros, the chapel of the Holy Cross that was said to sit like a jewel on the crown of Psiloritis? I had been treasuring in anticipation the moment of pushing open the door of the little summit church to see the flagstones on which Nikos Kazantzakis had surrendered his virginity in the clutches of an Irish girl, under the furious gaze of Christ from the iconostasis.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Pantelis, puzzled by my question. He slapped the rough stones of the cairn. ‘Timios Stavros, the Holy Cross.’ I stared at the stone pile. It did not look like a building, let alone a church.

  ‘But – how can I get inside? Where’s the door?’

  Pantelis grinned and poked a finger into the snow where we were sitting. ‘You’d better start digging, Christopher. The door is down there, two metres.’ Light dawned. The winter’s snows had completely buried the little church, and the spring melt had so far done no more than expose the topmost stones of the structure. We had been eating our picnic on the chapel roof.

  It was too goddamn cold and windy to stay on the roof of Timios Stavros, let alone that of Crete, for more than a couple of minutes. The wind literally blasted us off the peak and down the west face of the summit, chasing us down the contours until the angle of the slope shut its howling away. We descended a long, slippery valley where I had to learn the heel-and-toe technique all over again, in reverse this time. Drive in the heel, stamping out a little step in the snow; balance on the katsouna; a step down with the other foot. Repeat. Repeat. And repeat. Ever been tobogganing on your arse with your back hair in the snow? It’s a curious sensation. After a couple of hundred feet of acceleration I fetched up against Pantelis. Once I’d reasserted sphincter control, vast amusement all round. Back to the old one-step. Could this careless snow-stamper and involuntary glissader of the slopes be the old anxious me? It seemed so – for the present, at least.

  At last the snow lay behind us, and we descended through woods of maple and prinos trees, following a zigzag shepherds’ road. The shepherds of Psiloritis had spoken for centuries of a wild cat, a fourokattos or ‘fierce cat’, glimpsed by them from time to time in these mountains. Nonsense, scoffed the scientific community; Crete could never support such an animal. Sheer old wives’ tales. Then in 1996, only three years before I walked through Crete, an Italian research team found a fourokattos in their trap cage one morning – five and a half kilos of spitting, snarling, tawny-coated ferocity, according to their understandably awestruck report – not far from the mountain slope that Pantelis and I were descending. The Cretan mountains, evidently, still held signs and wonders.

  Down at last in the village of Kouroutes, eight hours after setting off from the Nida plain (‘Kalo tempo, poli kalo,’ said Pantelis), we sat on the terrace of a kafenion and drank hypovrichio, ‘submarines’ – a lump of icing-sugary vanilla paste apiece, sunk in a glass of water and clinging to a spoon whose handle rose like a periscope above the surface. Deadly sweet, and deadly good. We chatted and dozed above the empty, sunny street. A taxi staggered by eventually, and we headed off up the valley to Thronos and the Taverna Aravanes.

  Here Pantelis and I said goodbye. In prospect for me, a week at least of lotus eating in the Amari Valley, the Shangri-La of Crete. For the tireless aegagros Pantelis, a bus ride back to Iraklion, ‘and a little training at the stadium tonight, Christopher. Only one-two hours – and of course a little run also. I am quite tired, so maybe just up Mount Iouchtas and back. Or maybe little further …’

  Lotus Land: Amari interlude

  ‘I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.’

  Psalm 52

  Each morning I am woken around five o’clock by the braying of the old donkey that lives on the hillside below my bedroom window. The donkey belongs to Nikephoros, the white-bearded healer of Thronos, and eats its own weight of God knows what, all day, every day. It never utters except to roar in the dawn, a signal for the village cocks to tune up and make with their one-word salutation. They in turn set off the dogs, who have been observing – more or less – their nightly three-hour truce in the barking war they have been waging with the dogs of Kalogeros and Vistagi for the past 4,000 years.

  I groan, swear, turn over and thump the hard pillow to make a barrier between me and the dawn choristers outside. In the rooms along the balcony each side of mine I can hear Patricia Clark and David and Wanda Root doing much the same thing. Snoring resumes on both flanks. But it’s no good as far as I am concerned – now the bloody finches have noticed the first flush of morning light touching the horn-shaped apex of the mountain of Katsonissi that stands opposite the village, and they, too, begin to chip their four eggs in. More groaning, more swearing, and I slop out of bed and go out on the balcony, scratching and yawning like a tramp.

  Of course it’s beautiful out there. The light is between pearl and peach, the air cool but holding the promise of a warm spring day. There’s a hint of wild sage and a breath of wood-smoke. Beyond the balcony, the picnic terrace and miniature vineyard of the Taverna Aravanes give way to an enormous prospect. The whole of the eastern side of the Amari Valley is in view, sloping away south-eastwards for the best part of ten miles. To my right, across the donkey’s hillside and a steep little valley beyond, rise Katsonissi and other hills nameless to me, the dawn light broadening across their slopes, their ridges marching down towards the bulgy and ill-shaped lump of 3,300-ft Mount Samitos which hunches like an island to split the smooth south-eastward flow of Amari. It’s all green and pleasant enough over there, as it is far below along the valley floor where well-watered meadows and pale green cornfields lie among the trees. But my gaze, as always, is drawn towards the east, high above the villages scattered on the slopes there, over the tight white huddles of Kalogeros and Vistagi, above Platania and Fourfouras beyond them, way up over the zigzag dirt roads and the dark forests of pine and prinos, up 6,000 feet by bare rock canyons and the skirt of the snowline to the twin-horned head of Psiloritis, still velvet dark with its ba
ck to the sunrise, outlined against the last of the night’s stars.

  This view never ceases to do the trick and bring a smile to my face, no matter how sore my fingertips from yesterday evening’s laouto-playing or how many tumblers of Lambros Papoutsakis’s glutinous home-made wine showed their bottoms to the moon after midnight. I drink a glass of water, fetch pen and notebook from my bedside, and stealthily ease the balcony chair to the table. Nikephoros’s donkey has stowed its gab for the day, but Maria Papoutsakis is already at work below, picking tender vine leaves to make dolmades with soft, crisp plucking noises. There’s a sputter of two-stroke across the valley as another early riser scooters along the back road through Kalogeros. While my fellow guests and carousers continue their interrupted slumbers, I sit in the soft blue light of early morning and make up some doggerel – or donkerel – in tribute to Thronos’s long-lived and long-eared public alarm clock. Apart from eating a few more of the oranges I bought from the fruit-man, this – unbelievably, deliciously – is all I have to do today.

  Donkey dawn

  Before the sun begins to glow

  On valley fields or mountain and thick, snow.

  Before the day is truly born,

  Thronos awakes to donkey dawn.

  I lie cocooned inside the deep

  Contentment of a sweet night’s sleep,

  Until I hear that first forlorn

  Unearthly sound of donkey dawn.

  How pleasant it would be to glide

  To morning’s shore on songbirds’ tide,

  Instead of being rudely torn

  Out of my dreams at donkey dawn.

  I jerk awake when first I hear

  That opening, long-drawn, brassy blare –

  No Cretan driver honks his horn

  More stridently than donkey dawn.

  A breathless silence then ensues,

  As at receipt of awful news;

  A second’s hush, that soon will spawn

  The real row of donkey dawn.

  Is that a smoker being sick

  With laboured heavings hoarse

  Or is it timber being sawn

  Inside my head at donkey dawn?

  It sounds as if the village pump

  Is being worked with wheeze and bump,

  Slowly, with handles old and worn,

  By sadist fiends at donkey dawn.

  And now the roosters raise their din,

  And all the village dogs join in;

  The last vestige of peace is shorn

  From hill and grove at donkey dawn.

  I will not stand it one day more

  My bags are packed and at the door;

  By all the curses I have sworn,

  I will be quit of donkey dawn.

  Yet when I wake in Bristol town,

  Where noisy cars roar up and down,

  And students vomit on my lawn –

  I’ll miss the sound of donkey dawn.

  During the Second World War, Allied officers working clandestinely with the Cretan resistance nicknamed the Amari Valley ‘Lotus Land’. They came to love its abundance of the earth’s good things and the open-handedness of its villagers. Nothing has changed. Amari is green, Amari is fruitful. Amari has mineral-laden streams off the mountains to water its gardens and carpets of wild flowers to clothe its roadsides. Floating in its wide cradle of mountains 2,000 feet above the noisy, nervy, tourism-orientated world of the coast cities, Amari tends its gardens, its olives and vines, its figs and walnuts. Individual sounds travel far between the echo-boards of the mountains, muted and softened by distance: the orange-seller groaning ‘Portokali-aaaaaa!’ through his cab-mounted speaker, a radio sending a whining snake of a lyra tune out through the almond blossom, the dogs of Vistagi issuing their eternal sore-throated warnings. Everyone takes time, everyone gives you a nod and a word: Nikos the joker with the walnut tree in his yard, George the taverna laouto-player and conversationalist, Andonis the church cantor and lyrical lyra-player, and the three men named Kostas whose path I cross most days: Kostas Pervolia the green-handed gardener, Kostas Raki the village raki-maker, and Kosti Lyra the goat-eyed musician from neighbouring Kalogeros, a master of the lyra who can make those three strings scream, sing and sob as if an angel were behind them – or maybe a devil.

  Now between the horns of Psiloritis the high saddle of the mountain darkens. A fingernail of silver pokes up behind the snowy ridge, turning to gold even as I squint at it. The cocks of Thronos redouble their monologue. The crescent becomes a spinning silver-golden ball, unbearably bright, appearing to dance between the bull-horns a second before lifting off to float free into the china-blue sky. Minoans must have watched this daily crowning of the great mountain from their peak sanctuaries across the valley, Dorians from the city state of Syvritos on the flat hilltop behind Thronos, Byzantines and Venetians from the square by the little frescoed church, Turkish janissaries and German soldiers on reprisal duties from the smoking ruins of Amari villages. Now it is this middle-aged tourista who raises his eyes from his half-finished verses to the dazzle and drama over Psiloritis.

  ‘Good morning, Lord Christopher,’ says Maria Papoutsakis, coming into the big taverna room with her arms full of greenery.

  ‘Good day, Lady Maria,’ I riposte, ‘and how are you today?’

  ‘Well, thank you, Lord Christopher. And you also?’

  ‘Yes, very well, thank you, Lady Maria.’

  We are still at the stage, Maria and I, of addressing each other with some formality – she, because her manners are excellent; I, not to be outdone in the offering of courtesies, but also because I like the sound of this stately ‘Kyrie Christophere’ and ‘Kyria Maria’. It lends a graceful gallantry to our exchanges that transcends the generally mundane subject matter:

  ‘Lady Maria, do you perchance have a plug for the basin in my room, if you please?’

  ‘Why, certainly, Lord Christopher, here is one.’

  ‘Thank you so very much, Lady Maria.’

  ‘Lord Christopher, please – the pleasure is entirely mine. Thank you.’

  Patricia Clark, my Canadian next-room neighbour, is mightily tickled by this, and insists on addressing me at all times as ‘Lord Christopher’. Patricia is a classicist from Victoria University, Alberta, a fluent speaker of Greek, over in Crete for three months to continue her long-term study of the islanders’ traditional methods of healing – by herbs, by folk remedies and by magic. She says that all three of these branches of practical medicine are alive and thriving in the Amari Valley. Last year, researching traditional use of plants in the Amari, Patricia stumbled across a handwritten book of medical recipes and treatments, spells, charms and magical rituals, compiled in 1930 by a local healer – an incomparable treasure. Now she sits with Maria Papoutsakis, sorting vine leaves into various sizes on the big taverna table. They mean to make a big pile of dolmades for today’s memorial ceremony for an old man of Thronos who died six months ago. It is proper to remember the dead at certain intervals after their passing.

  I take a cup of coffee and sit out on the steps barefoot in the early sunshine. Since crossing Psiloritis yesterday and descending into Lotus Land I have scarcely given my feet a thought. Now I make a damage inspection, the first in the hundred miles since Kritsa. Left foot, existing damage: little toenail now turned from blue to grey, and hanging loose (it falls off as I touch it, and another, pink and perfect, is revealed in its place). Blister inside front heel still there; blister on ball of foot now flattened. The whole ball and heel a rather disgusting, rubbery yellow hide, pitted with black holes – none of this, strangely, to be seen on the other foot. Blister on outside of big toe still there, and has been joined by a little friend. New stuff: big burst blister on 4th toe, rubbing against and partly underneath 3rd toe. Large and bloody abrasion blister on outside of ball of big toe. Curious blemish like a double wart on top of root of big toe. Hmmm. Right foot, rather better. Existing damage: Achilles abrasion almost healed, rub marks ditto, blisters now burst an
d healing nicely. New stuff: small blister on outside of big toe. And something very new and sensitive to the touch coming up on the outside. Watch this space. As for olfactory forensics: Stinkerismo Grandissimo would about cover it. Memo: why do feet smell of goat? Why not of bread, or dog, or roses? I hobble back upstairs. I intend to spend at least a week here in the Amari, maybe more, to give the snow that now covers the White Mountains the maximum possible chance to melt away and leave me clear passage. In the meantime, bed calls, and those oranges. Maybe another poem, too.

  Towards evening I sit on my balcony and stare out at Psiloritis. There is no escaping the dominance of the horned mountain, rearing like a breaking wave over Amari. A saddle of snow lies between the peaks. High over Vistagi the snow has part-melted into a curious figure like that of a football-headed man with no arms, a long torso ending in two straddling white legs. It reminds me of Karen Raeck’s Andartis flattened in midstride to the Nida plain, or of one of those giant figures cut into the chalk downs of southern England. With bees buzzing murmurously among the hillside herbs below and the sun striking warm through the valley, I contemplate the mountain and my own fears and falterings.