Roumeli Read Free Page A

base, as naked of projection or foothold as the glass mountain in a fairy tale. High in the void, the fabric of the monastery overflowed its monolithic pedestal in a circle of jutting walls and eaves and storeys.
    The abbot drew rein and let out a roar. The echoing syllables of the name “Bessarion!” dwindled and died down the valley. High above, on the ledge of the monastery, a pale spectacled face peered over the bar of the penthouse and a faint greeting came sailing down. “Let down the rope and come and look after the mare,” the abbot’s voice boomed up. The hook, taking two minutes on the way, revolved down to us as the thick steel cable was payed out. This, until the steps were cut in 1932, was the only way into the monastery. In those days, the traveller squatted in a net whose topmost meshes were hitched over the hook, which then floated gently into the air and, revolving and unwinding on itself, was slowly hauled up to the platform on a winch. The net, on its arrival, was fished in with a hooked pole and lowered to the boards. The traveller was then released. In the past century a rope as thick as a man’s wrist was used. Answering the query how often it was changed, a former abbot is reported to have said: “Only when it breaks...”
    The Deacon Bessarion, breathless from his run down the steps, helped the abbot secure the luggage and supplies to the hook, unsaddled the mare, and led her off to the stable on the flank of the opposing rock, joining us then in the long climb. The staircase twisted back on itself again and again under the overshadowing rock from which it had been hollowed and brought us at last, panting and tired, to a heavy iron doorway. This opened, through a hole, into a dark stepped grotto through the heart of the rock. We rose at last into a courtyard of the monastery that was only divided from the gulf by a lowstone wall. A spacious loggia, paved with square black and white slabs, lay at the top of another short ascent, built out at a recent date from the Byzantine brickwork of the monastery. A cypress tree, stooping in the wind, miraculously flourished there. The tiles and the cupolas of the church in the light of the moon, the patina and disorder of the monastic buildings looked domestic and human after the chaos of rock through which we had come up. Turning round, the abbot—a portentous figure on the top step, with his beard and his robes blown sideways in the sudden tramontana—opened his hands in an ample gesture of welcome. Then, leaning over the rail of a penthouse which shook with every gust of wind while Father Bessarion toiled at the windlass, we watched the burdened hook ascending. The luggage, the saddle and the demijohn were safely unloaded on the planks. Leading us into the chapel, the abbot lit a taper at the sanctuary lamp and the gold and silver of the iconostasis and the innumerable haloes of frescoed saints twinkled among the shadows. Making the sign of the cross and kissing the main ikons, the abbot and Father Bessarion retired. We followed them out into the moonlit yard. There was nobody about and no lights in the windows. The buildings appeared aloof and spellbound.
    I half remembered the details of the guest-room, as Father Christopher turned up the wick of an oil-lamp, from the few days I had spent there four years before the war—the table with a glass bowl full of the cards of visiting ministers and prelates and Byzantologists, the sofa under the window, the faded Russian print of a panorama of Jerusalem. It seemed curious that anything as human and welcoming as this golden lamplit chamber could exist on so windy and austere a height. But soon Father Bessarion was cutting up apples and goat’s cheesefor a mézé to accompany the ouzo with which the abbot replenished the little glasses the moment they were emptied; and when we sat down together to a frugal supper of beans, the great demijohn was uncorked. By the time