The Golden Step Read online

  After smiling to herself for a few minutes at my unavailing efforts to smash the shell by tapping it with a spoon, the taverna-owner took my gastropod education in hand. Look! Just twist a prong of your fork round in this little bubble thing on top of the whorl, and the snail’s foot will slide out of the hole at the other end – see? Then you just spear it and pull the whole thing out. OK? Well – sort of. It was a clever trick, but drawing the dark grey spiral out of its hole was horribly like excavating a giant bogey from a nostril. I had to swallow the image along with the snail. It was not as bad as all that. I unscrewed another. Better yet. I ended up clearing two big platefuls, and would have attempted a third if the son of the house hadn’t come in to practise his English and cense the table with cigarette smoke.

  It was as well that he did, since I now discovered the trumpet-major effect that boiled snails have on the human gastric system. I bugled both high and low. The lad informed me with plenty of pantomime that the taverna’s lavatory was temporarily out of use. This was a bit of a problem. There are many practical aspects to long-distance walking in Crete that the traveller only becomes aware of along the way, and here was one. Even without snails, the change from an English to a Cretan diet has its inevitable effect, as does all that healthy exercise. Once enthroned, so to speak, certain other considerations arise. One is the proximity of one’s hosts, only a few feet away on the far side of a thin plasterboard wall. Another concerns the vagaries of Greek plumbing. Lavatory pipes in rural Greece tend to be of a diameter too narrow to allow the passage of anything as bulky and cohesive as paper. After a couple of episodes of failing to note the absence of the establishment’s own paper until it was too late to alter course, I quickly learned to carry my own. A bin, however, is generally provided, and it is generally full of the ‘cleaning materials’ of previous occupants. Not necessarily the kindest influence on the senses. All these factors tend to combine to produce a state of increasingly uncomfortable egg-bondage in the recently-arrived walker. I paid extravagantly for an en-suite room in a hotel with modern plumbing on more than one occasion during the walk, solely to enjoy the pleasures of privacy and the relief of … well, relief. In Orino this evening, though, it was a case of grip and grin.

  Orino’s rent room, unused since last summer, was a comfortless den. It was full of ancient cooking equipment, and it stank of damp. But the hot water switch proved effective, and once I’d got my sleeping bag spread out on the manky mattress I was happy enough.

  At night Orino lay lit by a handful of twinkling white lights. Compared with the harsh lights that dominate the cities of north-west Europe as if a giant has smeared orangeade across the sky, the street lamps of Cretan villages look beautiful against the velvet black mountainsides. Up in the flanks of Thripti the stars shone perfectly clear in their millions, pricked into a night sky on whose horizons no city spread even the faintest of glows. I strolled up to the village phone box and put in my nightly call home. What a shock and a rush of joy as Jane gave me news I had never expected to hear. Some weeks before, I had sent off a collection of my poems to the Rockingham Press, in that mood of defensive resignation in which unpublished poets offer up their oft-rejected works yet once more to the judgement of yet another faceless editor. Now, said Jane, Rockingham had replied to say they’d like to publish the whole collection.

  I had been writing poems for several years with intense delight. In the midst of producing books and articles for a living, I found acute pleasure in shaping and refining those tiny, pungent pieces for myself alone. What makes a poet? Writing a poem? Writing a good poem? Is a published poem more valid, better in some way than one that stays in the writer’s drawer? I didn’t exactly know why I wanted others to read what was so absolutely personal to me. But I floated back to that stinky old rent room on a very sweet cloud, and turned in with Homer. Telemachus, son of Odysseus, had quarrelled with his mother’s boyfriends and was off in a huff, looking for his father. Great stuff to go to sleep on, one way and another.

  ‘I am weary with my groaning,’ keened the Psalmist to me in the morning. ‘All the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.’ Spot-on, as he very often turned out to be on my journey. I don’t know if it was rats or mice banging the cupboard doors and dancing in the water tank, but their party row woke me with a jerk in the middle of the night. The only way I could shut them up was by switching on the ceiling light. Unshaded and glaring at some tremendous wattage, it shone mercilessly into my face, throwing a pattern of veins as red and branched as coral onto the back of my closed eyelids. I got up, turned it off and fumbled back into my sleeping bag. Bang, bang, scurry, crash, bang. I got up, switched on, got back into the bag. Silence, and the hot red glare in my eyes. I shoved in some ear-plugs, got up, switched off, crawled back between the covers, closed my eyes, tried to think of something nice – the poems, Jane, the kids, the starry mountains. A muted scampering, a muffled bang. The unmistakeable sound of tiny incisors gnawing, not far away. Extremely close, actually. In point of bloody fact, right beside my plugged ear. Out with the swearwords, on with the light. It was a long night. Orino’s cockerels are early risers. Then rosy-fingered dawn did her bit. But at least her advent at the window meant I could put the light out. A couple of hours later I woke with a jerk, remembering I had to cross the Thripti mountains today and needed an early start. On the rent room floor and on my sleeping bag, shiny and black, lay the oval-shaped calling cards of those nocturnal party animals.

  I filled my water-bottle at a tap fixed among ferns in the base of a tree, then followed the dirt road out of Orino. The east end of Crete is far drier than the west, but even in these mountains there are unexpected pockets of fertility. I passed one half an hour into the day under a great rough mountainside, a narrow plain where terraces of vines and vegetable plots mounded into lazybeds were all running and trickling with water. The irrigation pipe had split. It must have lain like that for many weeks; the spray of water jetting out of the crack was falling in a miniature wetland of bright green grass, ferns and mosses that it had itself created.

  The morning was all uphill. On this kind of relentless ascent, gentle though the gradient was, the heavy pack forced me down to a dogged, first-gear plod. But with every piece of level ground, no matter how short, I would find second and then third gears engaging at once, as if stored-up energy had been pushing at the lid of the box all the while. The dirt road thrashed about, climbing and climbing, leading at last to a breathtaking view from up on the heights of Afendis Stavromenos. From here on the roof of the Thripti range at nearly 5,000 feet, the prospect forward over the slim seven-mile-wide ‘wrist’ of eastern Crete took in two seas – the Cretan Sea to the north, caught in the surf-edged scoop of the Gulf of Mirambello, and to the south the milky blue Libyan Sea where Chrisi island floated like a water horse fifteen miles off in the haze. West across the plain the bulky grey massif of the Dhikti mountains rose 7,000 feet, its peaks white against the blue sky. The birthplace of Zeus was still capped with winter’s snow. Gazing at it across twenty miles of country, I wondered how soon I would be there and how difficult its passage would be. The Thripti range, at all events, so large and impressive when I had viewed it from the ridge above Chandras (was that really only yesterday?), seemed to have shrunk under my boots and passed by almost unnoticed.

  An hour later I was down among the fields of the mountain settlement of Thripti. People who had spent the winter down on the coast in Sitia or Ierapetra were beginning to drift back to the mountains to spring-clean their houses and fields. Many of the house doors were still closed with the ‘Thripti lock’ – a vine twig pushed through the handles. I watched a ragged-jacketed man pruning his vines while his wife in blue headscarf and black boots laid open the soil with muscular swings of a mattock. The vine terraces were buttressed and given shape by walls of huge stones, some sloping at alarming angles. At over 3,000 feet above sea level these were the highest terraces in Europe, someone told me later in the journey. They cou
ld be extremely old, too; terracing in Crete is an art that goes back to Minoan times. Thripti is the driest of the island’s four mountain ranges, and its terraces make the most of whatever soil is available by allowing roots to dig further down to the moisture of the underlying rock. The terrace walls themselves reduce erosion by holding the soil together, and they make use of the stones that would otherwise be cluttering the fields and impeding the plough. The walker lucky enough to have time to stop, stare and ponder generally comes to realise that traditional methods of Cretan land husbandry, at first sight impossibly costly in terms of human sweat and effort, almost always turn out to be the best and most economical way to do the job in a particular location.

  Manolis Xenakakis was rotavating the plot opposite his taverna. He shouted for his wife, and she came down from the roof, cigarette in mouth, to prepare me a brunch of souvlaki and salad, the rural taverna staple. A tumbler of Manolis’s sharpish, cloudy red went with it; then another. I ate and drank in the cool dark room, serenaded by the house band of soprano flies and the occasional percussive sneeze from the dogs snoozing outside. Lethargic beasts, Cretan dogs, when they are not raving at you from the end of a chain. After the meal I went on, slowly, following occasional E4 signs along the dirt road that began an endless succession of hairpins as it zigged and zagged down the west face of Thripti beside the crack of the Monastiraki Gorge, a fearsome cleft full of indigo shadows that only a few intrepid cavers had ever managed to traverse. Stray stones lumped continuously under my boots, and the dust rose thickly. By the time I got down to the valley floor I was hot in the face, whacked to the wide and seeing double. The nearest hotel would do just fine. Flopping face down on the bed and sliding down the slope of oblivion in mid-afternoon seemed the most delicious of decadences. I’d have to watch that village wine at lunchtime from now on.

  That evening the televisions on hotel walls and kafenion counters showed terrible images. The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia had been going on for three weeks now, initially with the aim of destroying the country’s air defences and major military targets. A thousand aircraft were reported deployed; Tomahawk cruise missiles were seen flying into bunkers and barracks. Serbian forces in Kosovo had responded by stepping up their aggression against Albanian Kosovars. 300,000 refugees were already said to have fled west or south across the border into Albania or Macedonia – though the Serbian take on this exodus was that the refugees were actually fleeing the bombs of NATO. Now, so Greek television was reporting with a certain air of injured self-righteousness, there had been a murderous catastrophe in Kosovo. NATO planes had attacked a convoy of refugees south of Djakovica by mistake, and had killed more than seventy of the very people they had sworn to protect. If the pictures shown on television were anything to go by, the planes had made a very thorough job of it. A tractor driver dripped in his cab, a smoking heap of chopped meat. Decapitated corpses sprawled. Babies lay blackened. These were images far more graphic than any I had ever seen. Customers commented vehemently on what they were watching. I did not want to raise my eyes to encounter anyone else’s, and soon left my kafenion seat and returned to the hotel.

  The grandfather of the owner was still pottering about. He invited me courteously to sit with him and his wife for a little conversation. I deployed the phrase-book until my thumb and forefinger were tired from riffling the pages. Albania, said the old man – I was there. Recently? No, no – during the war, fighting the Germans. ‘Many mountains,’ he said, ‘much war. And now …’ I waited for it. ‘Amerika in Yugoslavia! Bombing Belgrade!’ He slammed down his fist among the glasses. ‘Poof ! Boom! All epano – blown up!’He grasped me quite gently by the hand. ‘Why?’

  I fumbled out the phrase I’d learned for just this occasion. ‘Polimos … foveros. War … it’s terrible.’ Then I went to bed. There didn’t seem anything else to say. If there was, the Psalmist was the man to say it. ‘God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent his bow and made it ready. He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; he ordaineth his arrows against the persecution.’ Wasn’t that a first-class description of NATO in the run-up to the bombing? Yet hard on its heels came: ‘He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.’ Beel or Slobodan? It was hard to say. One last thought occurred before sleep: Cretans seemed quick to condemn the entire World of Beel as exposed on TV news, but were quite happy to watch, applaud and nod their heads in admiration at the spectacle of Beel’s countrymen screwing, taking drugs and beating the crap out of each other on Hollywood film sets immediately after the news bulletin was over. Exactly like the rest of the world, then.

  Before sunrise next morning I was sitting on a block of stone, greasing my boots for the day’s march and listening to a bird in a bush singing Siga-siga-siga! Slow down … slow down … slow down … Here at Vasiliki, idling by the Minoan house among pink spears of Cretan ebony, the temptation to laze away the morning was strong. Half buried in the ground behind me was a tight nest of deep rooms with walls two feet thick, small enough to cross in a couple of strides, interconnected by low arched doorways. Some of these basement rooms still showed patches of the pale red plaster that the house-builder smoothed across their walls more than 4,000 years ago. Other dwellings and lesser buildings lay spread across the hillside round about. When the site was excavated at the turn of the 20th century, among the ruins were found some of the finest examples of the potter’s art ever unearthed in Crete. This ‘Vasiliki ware’, at its most striking in the form of tall jugs with spouts pointing upwards like the beaks of startled birds, had been semi-fired to produce mottled swirls of iridescent colour in red, black, brown and orange – a marvellous stroke of artistic achievement by its early Bronze Age creators.

  The Red House must have been a luxury residence in its day, the country villa of some grandee of the early Minoan period before any of the great palaces were built. Whoever the owner of the Red House may have been, he commanded a wonderful view east across the valley to the great dark split of the Monastiraki Gorge, north to the sea in the Gulf of Mirambello. But his house came crashing down in flames around 2,200 BC, and lay hidden out of sight and out of mind while kingdoms rose and fell, invaders came and went, and cultures flourished and crumbled in the island over the next 4,000 years.

  I sat on until the cocks of Vasiliki had crowed the sun up over the rim of Thripti, then walked up through the village where mules were being unloaded in front of the taverna, through the olive groves and on along the red dirt road into the hills. E4 signs led me into a wide upland of rocks and spiny cushions of astivitha. In a silent valley where pale mudslides held ranks of young olive trees, a tiny church and a solitary mitato marked the still deserted summer village of Asari. Here, reaching out to poke a shard of pottery from between two stones, I discovered that my figwood walking stick was not in my right hand. Tomorrow night, with any luck, I would be walking into Kritsa, the village where I had been given the white katsouna several years before. How could I do that without a twirl of my talismanic stick? Not for the last time on this expedition, I retraced my steps to look for the katsouna, and found it hanging on an E4 sign where I had stopped for a drink of water.

  As if sulky at being baulked of its prize, E4 began to give trouble once more. High in the hills the dirt road divided into three. No signs. I was getting a bit braver now, and spun a coin with a pleasurable feeling of fatalism. Left came up heads, right tails. The middle way ascended to a broad plain of pale baked mud from which four more tracks diverged unsigned. What now? Angry barking came from a farmyard below. An old dame hobbled out to see what the fuss was about. Here was my chance. ‘Pare ta skilia!’ I shouted. ‘Kala, kala, they’re good,’ piped back the woman, beckoning me down to the gate with one hand while she whacked the dogs into submission with the other. What about the path? ‘Epano!’ she said, pointing up the trackless hill
side. Up there, boy – get on with it, don’t be a nancy! Her son emerged from the house. What’s the trouble, mum? Oh, the path to Meseleri? He drew a map for me in the dirt. The track splits down there, see? Then again. Take the left one, then go left again, be sure to go left, OK? Then right. Then it’s just follow your nose, OK? You’ll be there in an hour at the most.

  An hour later, descending a lonely valley into which I’m sure the farmer never dreamed I would blunder, I admitted to myself that I was thoroughly lost. E4, if it even existed in these parts, was pursuing its baffling course somewhere over the hills and far away. There were two choices: burst into tears and wait for the robins to come and cover me with leaves, or keep on down this track and trust to luck. It led me to the Monastery of the Panagia Vryomeni, deserted and peaceful among the pine trees. The faded frescoes in the church showed a Nativity, a Presentation in the Temple, a Crucifixion, and over the north window a depiction of Jesus being laid very tenderly in the tomb by sorrowing friends.

  A pause, a prayer and a sip of water in this sunny, silent place were as good as a dose of Dexedrine. I subsided onto the bench outside and had a good look at the map. E4 ran on from Meseleri to the next village, Prina, and then took a great 20-mile swing across the heights of Dhikti before dropping towards the high oasis of the Lasithi Plain. That was, technically speaking, the way to go. But I had spotted something else – a big blob of settlement a little north of Prina, labelled ‘Kritsa’. I had friends in Kritsa, the Aphordakos family whom Charis Kakoulakis had urged me to look up. I hadn’t been there for years, but every previous visit had been a pure delight. What was more, a thread of dirt road seemed to connect Prina to Kritsa, and to run on towards the northern flanks of Dhikti. From there it looked as if a dodgy footpath might be my lot until I should rejoin the main route on the Lasithi Plain, but whatever its state it couldn’t be more unreliable or misleading than European Hiking Route E4. Could it?