The Greek Islands Read Free Page A

which it rejoices as though now first awakening to the gift of sight. This light is indescribably keen yet soft. It brings out the smallest details with a clarity, a gentle clarity that makes the heart beat higher and enfolds the nearer view in a transfiguring veil – I can describe it only in these paradoxical terms. One can compare it to nothing except Spirit. Things might lie thus in some wonderful intelligence – so alert and so lulled, so divided and yet so closely linked. Linked by what? Not by mood; nothing could be more remote from that floating sensuous soulful dream-element: no, by the Spirit itself.
    Pondering these words of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the traveller feels within him the first premonitory signs by which the heart recognizes the onset of a great love affair – the light in the eyes of the beloved. He is falling in love.
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    Enough of our hypothetical traveller; once he was myself, or one of my Victorian ancestors. Today and tomorrow he will be yourself, gentle reader. And how glad you will be to discover that in spite of tales of tourist ravages the island’s real beauty and vitality are still there, still palpable. From now on, all day long you will wander about in a delightful daze, drinking in the light. Evening will find you once more seated at your little café – you will already have adopted one – drinking ouzo .
    Now the sunset-gun booms from the tower of the citadel,and a faint military music sounds within, recalling the garrison to its duties or to some unspecified recreation. The gun of course is a Crimean echo, though the fortress is Venetian. You sit, as so many before have done and as so many will do after you, quite still and silent over your drink, watching the dusk fall, veil on magical veil, over the blue gulf which itself will soon be turned to lead and then to silver under the visiting moon. You will have heard stories by now of people who came for an afternoon and stayed for a lifetime, or who came for a week and stayed a century and a half; and you will realize the danger of your position. Moreover there is a sacred spring, Kardaki, on the other side of the town which, if drunk from, will clinch things, ordaining a return to the island. ‘Yes,’ you will find yourself saying, ‘I will stay one more day, just one more …’
    After this first radical experience with the Greek light, you will be surprised at the ease and simplicity with which the island surrenders its charm. Like the great courtesan she is, a real Circe, she leads one first among the sweet inland valleys thickly carpeted with wild flowers and studded with old gnarled but silver-hale olives, or to the dense groves of black brush-strokes , the self-seeded cypresses which seem like something out of prehistory – remember that ancient Greece was densely wooded and watered by broad rivers and rich springs. An exceptional winter rainfall, tropical in intensity, must explain the paradisiacal lushness of everything. You begin, without sophistry, to re-live the arrival of Odysseus here. There is so much to see, but distances are mercifully short and the whole island can be inspected at leisure (as it is today) by motor-scooter or by car: it is some sixty kilometres long, with a tenuous thread of navigable road uniting the choicest places. In the north a stout, blunt mountain and a bare land of limestone hafts and grimly poor villages. Even the peasant dress is magpie-sombre in the north – just black and white; by contrast,in the midriff and south of the island it is rich in its variety and range of plumage.
    There may well be a village wedding in progress in some small hamlet near the town of Corfu, and you will marvel at the vivid and sumptuous island costumes from the various villages. The old hieratic circular dances are there too. The dancers look as vivid as a pack of playing cards, circling in the deep dust of some swept threshing floor. You will be assailed by profuse free drinks in honour of the bride, and