Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu Read Free Page B

strikes his instrument; the small expressionless face of the boy is cocked over his cheap violin as he tunes it. Then they strike up one of the familiar Greek jazz songs—inevitably a tango; yet the words haunt, and the refrain is taken up to the accompaniment of knife and fork by the roystering Zarian, Peltours the lean Russian painter, Veronica and John, Nimiec, Theodore. The narrow white-washed room with its ugly tables and cheap advertisements rings.
    Loneliness, Loneliness,
    You are bitter company to us.
    Afterwards we walk down in the warm night to the dark slipway, and, as the moon is rising, shake out the jib of the Van Norden, start her engine, and put our noses northward into the night. Lights move on the darkness hardly grazing the surface of the consciousness. From the receding shore, clear on the water, we can hear Zarian still contending some majestic literary theme. N. curls in a rug and dips her grapes over the side in the shining sea. And hollow over the harbor, speeding us with the promise of a safe arrival, St. Spiridion strikes the hour of midnight.
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    We breakfast at sunrise after a bathe. Grapes and Hymettos honey, black coffee, eggs, and the light dear-tasting Papastratos cigarette. Unconscious transition from the balcony to the rock outside. Lazily we unhook the rowboat and make for the point where the still blue sea is twisted in a single fold—like a curtain caught by a passing hand. A shale beach, eaten out of the cliff-point, falling to a row of sunken rocks. A huge squat fig tree poised like a crocodile on the edge of the water. Five fathoms directly off the point so that sitting here on this spit we can see the dolphins and the steamers passing within hail almost. We bathe naked, and the sun and water make our skins feel old and rough, like precious lace.Yesterday we found the fetus of an octopus, colorless ball of gelatin, which throbbed invisibly in the palm of the hand; today the fisherboys have found our beach. They have written Angliin charcoal on one of the rocks, we have responded with “Hellenes” which is fair enough. We have never seen them. N. draws a little head in a straw hat with a great nose and moustache.
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    Yesterday was a fisherman’s holiday; first a great glistening turtle was washed up on the beach at the cliff edge. It was quite dead and its heavy yellow eyelids were drawn down over its eyes giving it a sinister and reptilian air of being half asleep. It must have weighed about as much as the dinghy. I expected the fishermen to make some use of the meat but nobody has touched it—except the village dogs which have been worrying its flippers.
    More exciting was the killing of the eel. We were unhooking the boat when a small boy who was helping us cast off pointed to something in the water and exclaimed “Zmϒrna.” I was about to probe about with an oar—for I could see nothing in the shadow of the great rock—when Anastasius came running like a flash from the carpenter’s shop. He held two heavy four-pronged tridents. For a moment or two he stared keenly down into the water; we could see nothing beyond the movements of marine life, the swayingof the seaweed fronds and the strange flickering passage of small fish. Then Anastasius lowered a piece of wood—simply the unshod shaft of a trident—into the darkest patch of the shadow. There was a small audible snap—as of a rat-trap closing—and his shoulders became rigid; maintaining his pressure on the wood he picked up a trident and lowering the point slowly into the water suddenly struck home at an angle. There was a sudden convulsion among the seaweed and the head of the eel emerged; it seemed to our terrified eyes about the size of a dog’s head and infinitely more senseless and wicked. The trident had pierced the skull and while it was still dazed from the blow Anastasius strove to dislodge it from its perch. Help, too, was at hand. Old Father Nicholas came racing down with a couple of sharpened