Captain Corelli's mandolin Read Free Page A

of Apollo as a Cephallonian cult is both the most and the least mysterious. It is the most inexplicable to those who have never been to the island, and the most inevitable to those who know it, for Apollo is a god associated with the power of light. Strangers who land here are blinded for two days.
    `It is a light that seems unmediated either by the air or by tie stratosphere. It is completely virgin, it produces overwhelming clarity of focus, has heroic strength and brilliance. It exposes colours their original prelapsarian state, as though straight from the imagination of God in His youngest days, when He still believed that all was good. The dark green of the pines is unfathomably and retreatingly deep, the ocean viewed from die top of a cliff is platonic in its presentation of azure and turquoise, emerald, viridian, and lapis Iatre b. The eye of a goat is a living semi-precious stone half way between amber and arylide, and the crickets are the fluorescent green of the youngest shoots of grass in the original Eden. Once the eyes have adjusted to the extreme vestal chastity of this light, the light of any other place is miserable and dank by comparison; it is nothing more than something to see by, a disappointment, a blemish. Even the seawater of Cephallonia is easier to see through than the air of any other place; a man may float in the water watching the distant sea bed, and clearly see lugubrious rays that for some reason are always accompanied by diminutive flatfish.'
    The learned doctor leaned back and read through what he had just written. It seemed really very poetic to him. He read it through again and relished some of the phrases. In the margin he wrote, `Remember; all Cephallonians are poets. Where can I mention this?'
    He went out into the yard and relieved himself into the patch of mint. He nitrogenated the herbs in strict rotation, and tomorrow it would be the turn of the oregano. He returned indoors just in time to catch Pelagia's little goat eating his writings with evident satisfaction. He tore the paper from the animal's mouth and chased it back outside. It skittered out of the door to bleat indignantly behind the massive trunk of the olive tree.
    `Pelagia,' remonstrated the doctor, `your accursed ruminant has eaten everything I've written tonight. How many times do I have to tell you not to let it indoors? Any more incidents like this, and it'll end up on a spit. That's my final word. It's hard enough to stick to the point without that animal sabotaging everything I've done.'
    Pelagia looked up at her father and smiled: `We'll be eating at about ten o'clock.'
    `Did you hear what I said? I said no more goats inside the house, is that understood?'
    She left off slicing a pepper, brushed a sway hair from her face, and replied, `You're as fond of him as I am.'
    `In the first place, I am not fond of the ruminant, and in the second place you will not argue with me. In my day no daughter argued with her father. I will not permit it.'
    Pelagia put one hand on her hip and pulled a wry face. `Papas,' she said, `it still is your day. You aren't dead yet, are you? Anyway the goat is fond of you.'
    Dr Iannis turned away, disarmed and defeated, It was a most damnable thing when a daughter pulled feminine wiles upon her own father and reminded him of her mother at the same time. He returned to his table and took a new sheet of paper. He recalled that in his last effort he had somehow managed to stray from the subject of gods to the subject of fish. From a literary post of view it was probably just as well that it had been eaten. He wrote: `Only an island as impudent as Cephallonia would have the insouciance to situate itself upon a fault-line that exposes it to the recurrent danger of cataclysmic earthquakes. Only an island as lackadaisical as this would allow itself to be infested by such troupes of casual and impertinent goats.' 2 The Du Duce Come here. Yes, you. Come here. Now tell me something; which is my best