The Greek Islands Read Free

letting the eyes of his mind loose to browse among these bewitching shapes and colours, will find much to remind him of such other momentous places as Orta or Taormina. The tall, spare Venetian houses with their eloquent mouldings have been left unpainted for centuries, so it seems. Ancient coats of paint and whitewash have been blotched and blurred by successive winters, until now the overall result is a glorious wash-drawing thrown down upon a wet paper – everything running and fusing and exploding. But more precise, though just as eloquent, are the streets between the houses, each a deep gully made brilliant with washing hung out to dry from every balcony – bright as bunting. This great spread of colour moves and sways in the light dawn breeze in a way that reminds one of tropical seaweed. The red dome of the Church of St Spiridion shines aloft with its scarred old clock face; the church which houses the mummy of the island’s patron saint. If he knows what is good for him, the traveller will make an indispensable pilgrimage to this dark fane, whose barbaric oriental decoration smoulders among the shadows like the glintings of a fire opal. He will kiss the sacred slipper or a suitable icon and light a candle to place in the tall sconce as he utters a prayer – the subject of which he will confide to nobody.In this way his journey will be under good auspices and the whole of Byzantine, modern and ancient Greece will be waiting with open arms.
    Coming out of the dark church into the market he will be almost blinded by the light, for the sun is up; and it is now that the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon will begin to intrigue him. The nagging question, ‘In what way does Greece differ from Italy and Spain?’ will answer itself. The light! One hears the word everywhere, ‘To Phos’, and can recognize its pedigree – among other derivatives is our English word ‘ phosphorescent ’, which summons up at once the dancing magnesium-flare quality of the sunlight blazing on a white wall; in the depths of the light there is blackness, but it is a blackness which throbs with violet – a magnetic unwearying ultra-violet throb. This confers a sort of brilliant skin of white light on material objects, linking near and far, and bathing simple objects in a sort of celestial glow-worm hue. It is the naked eyeball of God, so to speak, and it blinds one. Even here in Corfu, whose rich, dense forestation and elegiac greenery contrasts so strangely with the brutal barrenness of the Aegean which he has yet to visit – even here there is no mistake about the light. Italy has no such ray, nor Spain. Flowers and houses and clouds all watch you with a photo-electric eye – at once substantial and somehow immaterial. Each cypress is the only one in existence. Each boat, house, donkey, is prime – a Platonic prototype of a sudden invention; maybe an idle god’s quite arbitrary invention, as if he had exclaimed, ‘Let there be donkey .’ And in each donkey (by now they are braying all along the Esplanades, waiting for their children) one sees the original, the archetypal donk: the essence, the quiddity of the idea of donk.
    He is not of course the first visitor to be electrified by Greek light, to be intoxicated by the white dancing candescence of the sun on a sea with blue sky pouring into it. He walks round thelittle town of Corfu that first morning with the feeling that the island is a sort of burning-glass.
    Later, sitting in a tavern built out over the Venetian mole with its sombre lions of St Mark, he thinks of other light-drinkers in the past who have, like himself, suddenly felt that they were moving about in the heart of a dark crystal.
    The first impression of the country, from whatever direction one enters it, is austere. It rejects all daydreams, even historical ones. It is dry, barren, dramatic and strange, like a terribly emaciated face; but it lies bathed in a light such as the eye has never yet beheld, and in