CRETE.
I returned to Athens towards the end of the same year to take up the
direction of the British School of Archaeology, but that task can
hardly be counted among the accidents of an antiquary’s life. Nor will
I describe the uneventful excavation, which it fell to me to conduct in
Melos, while waiting the day to put spade into a richer Aegean soil,
the soil of Crete. The day came with the year 1900. The massacre of
Candia forced a Great Power to rid the island for ever of the Turk; and
in the spring of 1899 I accompanied the future explorer of Cnossus on
my fourth visit to Crete. Arthur Evans had long laid his plans, and,
with the forethought of genius, cast his bread on troubled waters by
buying a Bey’s part share of the site of the Palace of Minos. He seemed
to waste labour and money; for under the Ottoman law his title could
not be made secure, and in the end his ownership lapsed to a partner.
But when others, who coveted Cnossus, put forward moral rights, he
alone could urge the convincing claim of sacrifice, and the Cretans,
for whom he had done much in their hour of danger, upheld his cause
in the hour of freedom. We journeyed, that spring, all round the
eastern half of the island, pegging out claims for future digging.
Known to the islanders as we both were (though I the less), we were
made welcome everywhere. The land still showed ghastly wounds of its
late long fight. Many villages lay gaunt skeletons of ruin; and where
olive groves had been, blackened stumps and pits bore witness to the
ethnicidal fury of religious war in the Near East, which ever uproots
the staple of a foeman’s life, after it has killed the mother and her
babe.
[Illustration: BLACKENED STUMPS AND PITS.]
In the East of the island the French were still guiding the new rulers
with the ready sympathy of Latin for Latin, and nearer to Candia the
government had been committed for the moment to the honest but ruder
hands of British subalterns. I spent a day or so with one of these. He
knew no word of Greek, and it was told of him that when he arrived on
a polo pony to be a father to some twenty villages, the local Bishop
called in state, bringing, as the ingratiating custom is, a turkey or
two and a clutch of eggs. Our young law-giver, nosing a bribe, put
him into the street, eggs, turkey, and all. I sat one morning in his
court-house to hear justice done to the people. The judge presided in
knickerbockers and a cricket shirt--for the day was warm--and smoked
his best loved briar. A peasant, whose sheep had been driven off, had
heard, after many days, a tinkling by night on a distant hillside, and
claimed he knew his bells again. Did then one sheep-bell so differ from
another? Solomon put it to the test. He sent his soldier servant to
collect bells from the village shepherds, and on his return locked him
in an inner room, while they waited in court. After a jangle behind
the door, the judge asked whose bell had tinkled, and, on the witness
of the servant, the shepherds were right every time. The peasant got
back his sheep. Then a woman stood forth to accuse a man of trying her
door by night with foul intent; but since he had neither prevailed nor
spoken with her, and it was black dark, how had she known what man he
was? It came out in evidence that this had not been his first visit,
nor had he been used to find the door barred and the lady all unkind.
Promptly he was fined a few piastres for disturbing the village peace,
while the coy accuser was sent to hoe the Bishop’s potato-field for a
fortnight of working days. “Ah! this is Justice,” said the delighted
Headman to me. “We have not known it before in Crete!”
For us, then, and no others, in the following year Minos was waiting
when we rode out from Candia. Over the very site of his buried Throne
a desolate donkey drooped, the one living thing in view. He was driven
off, and the digging of Cnossus began. All men who care for these
things know by now what was revealed in the next few weeks; and it
is another’s right to retell the tale. I did something to help my
colleague to start, for in digging, as in most ventures, the first
steps are most difficult: and I did more in the following months to
define the limits of his vast field, of which much still waits the
spade. But it grew clearer every day that the central hillock, which
in all reason was his peculiar preserve, held the key of the town’s
early history, and almost all its riches, and that exploration were
better left undone in the outskirts until the centre had all been laid
bare. Therefore I quitted Cnossus in early May, and with Gregóri of
Cyprus, who was still following my fortunes after a dozen years, set
out eastwards for the second of our claims, a Cave which was suspected
to be the mythic birthplace of the Father God of Crete.
In our theology He, who shall be to all time, from all time has been;
but the Greek, conceiving Immortality more easily than Eternity,
branded the Cretans the liars of antiquity for showing on one hill the
tomb of Zeus, while he believed devoutly in the divine birthplace,
which was pointed out on another. Other lands, indeed, claimed the
honour; but the beautiful peaks, which rose in pale mornings and
opalescent evenings out of the southern sea, prevailed with the
Faithful. If, however, the Greek was sure of the island to which he
owed his God, he was not, in his latter days at least, so sure which
precise spot had been hallowed by the divine birth. The God was
certainly cradled in a cave; but there were two caves, the one in the
central peak of Ida, the other in the lower but still majestic easterly
mountain group of Dicte. Some, like the Sicilian Diodorus, who knew
these rival claims, tried to reconcile them by telling that the babe,
born on Dicte, was reared on Ida. But more voted for one or the other
hill, and those of the best authority for Dicte. There the birth was
placed by Hesiod, the eldest poet who relates the story; there, too, by
the great Romans, Lucretius and Virgil, to say nothing of lesser lights.
This Greek tale, become more familiar to the West than many myths of
its own primitive creeds, varies little in the authorities. Cronus,
King of Heaven, warned that a son shall cast him from his realm,
determines to devour his male issue as soon as born. But Queen Rhea,
wrathful and feeling her hour nigh, flees to Crete, and on Dicte is
delivered of a boy, whom she hides in a cave, while the blind old god
swallows a stone in place of his child (and ever since stones have
been mansions of godhead in the Near East). The baby’s whimpering is
drowned by the clashing shields of faithful servants or, as one story
has it, by the grunting of a fostering sow. In Hesiod’s narrative all
this story concerns the city of Lyttus. Thither the pregnant queen was
sent by the kindly Earth Mother to wait her time, and thence she set
forth by night to bear in a cave of the neighbouring mountain a babe
who would find the same cave convenient in later days. For thither, as
Lucian tells us in his best manner, he led the maiden Europa, flushed
and half suspecting; and there too the son, whom she conceived that
day, would seek his Father when, another Moses, he wished to be the
Lawgiver of his people. While the Cretans waited above (so runs the
story), Minos descended into this Holy Grot, and when he reappeared
with the Code, gave out he had it of Zeus himself.
A primitive sanctuary was to be looked for, therefore, in some grot
on Dicte, and by preference near Lyttus, whose scattered ruin lies on
a spur of the north-western Lasithi peak, which is still climbed by a
yearly pilgrimage and called the Lord’s Mountain. In so well defined
an area such a cave, if any there were, must have been identified
long ago, had the upland fastnesses of Crete been any place for the
scholarly explorer these many centuries past. But the Lasithi region,
which excluded the Venetians and only once admitted the Turks in arms,
long remained less known than even the rest of the island, and nothing
was heard by the outer world of any cavern in Dicte till less than
thirty years ago.
At last reports reached Candia touching a large double grot which is
seen as a black spot on the hillside above Psychró, a village of the
inner Lasithi plain. It was said that shepherds, folding their flocks
in it at night or in storm, had grubbed up strange objects of bronze
and terra-cotta from the black bottom mould. Their finding continued,
and three years later the first archaeologists came to Psychró and
recovered divers antiques from peasant hands--figurines of men and
beasts, miniature battle axes, knives and other weapons. They climbed,
moreover, to the Cave itself, and scraped away the earth from its mouth
in vain hope of uncovering such an altar as had existed without the
Zeus grot on Ida; but inside they found little to do, so heavy was the
cumber of fallen rocks in the upper hall. What they had recovered,
however, was plainly part of a votive deposit, and the cave was marked
holy and a prize for explorers to come.
To Psychró, therefore, I betook myself with a few trained men, some
stone-hammers, mining-bars, blasting powder, and the rest of a
cave-digger’s plant. The villagers proved willing, nay eager, belying
my fear that a cold reception awaited anyone who came to poach this
preserve of illicit searchers. Just then Lasithi, like all Crete, was
anxious before all things to justify its new won freedom in European
eyes, and Psychró was not less alive than any other Greek village
would have been, to the glory to be shed on its little self by notable
discoveries in its Cave. Furthermore, from week to week the Prince
High Commissioner was expected in Lasithi. He had announced he would
visit the Cave, and here in the nick of time was an Englishman offering
to make, at his own charges, the needful path for the royal mules.
Therefore, on a stormy morning, while the hillside was swept by clammy
mists and half-frozen showers, I found no lack of hands to make me a
zig-zag mule-track up five hundred feet of rock. Knowing that the path
would serve them thereafter to bring down the black cave mould, which
the farmers of the plain prize above all top-dressings, the Psychró men
finished it in less than a day; and while a camping ground was being
levelled and embanked before the yawning mouth, we began to blast a way
into the cave itself.
Let it be understood that this great cavern is double, having a shallow
hall to right, and an abysmal chasm to left, which is not unworthy to
rank among the famous limestone grottoes of the world. The rock falls
sheer at first, but, as the light grows dim, you find your feet on
an easier slope, and can clamber down safely into deeper darkness.
Having groped thus far, stand and burn a flare. In front an icy pool
spreads from your feet far into the hill about the bases of fantastic
stalactite columns, and hall opens out of hall, each with fretted
roof and black unruffled floor, while behind and far above a spot of
luminous haze shows the way you have come from the upper world. It is
a fit scene for Minos’ colloquy with his father Zeus, and for the cult
of a chthonian God. To-day the hill-girt plain of Lasithi, laid level
as a sand beach, drains to a stream which is sucked into darkness below
an overhanging cliff, and reappears, perhaps, in certain large springs
which rise among the northern roots of the hills; but its floor, which
is seen now from above as a huge chequerboard, has not always been
dry. A lake, lapping the mountain flanks five hundred feet above, once
poured its overflow into the hill through the Cave of Psychró, and
made it such a natural marvel as would appeal to the superstition of
primitive peasants.
Blasting powder made short work of the boulders in the upper hall,
whose threatening roof held good to the end, and crowbars and
stone-hammers finished the work. In four strenuous days we had not
only hewn a path into the upper hall, but cleared a large area of
black mould, and the real search could begin. But preparations for
further blasts had still to go on, with an incessant ringing of mining
bars; and what with their metallic din, reverberating from roof to
walls, what with the heavy hanging fumes of powder and the mingled
reek of hot, unwashed men and chill, newly turned earth, we had not
too pleasant a task in that dim, dripping cave. All soil was carried
out of the dark up the steep incline, and to sifting it and washing
the blackened potsherds it contained was set a gang of women, who are
always more patient in minute search than men, and less apt to steal.
It is always well to have a few women among your diggers. The men
labour better in their company, and with a vivacity which is of no
small value where boredom spells failure. The day, which else might
drag its slow length along, goes merrily in chatter and laughter, and
the task is sought cheerfully at dawn, and not willingly left at eve.
As a master of labour, I have met with least reluctance from women in
Moslem lands. The Bedawi wives of the northern half tribe of Walad Ali,
which has settled about the mounds of Gaif in the Nile Delta during the
last fifty years, came without the least demur to help their husbands
and brothers dig Naukratis. They even brought their sucklings; and on
the first day more than one mother tried to carry her basket of earth
on one shoulder, while a brown babe nestled at her breast. As the poor
mite received a deluge of sand in mouth and eyes whenever the load was
tipped unhandily, I forbade babies in arms for the morrow; but no one
seemed to understand why. In Cyprus, too, Turkish mothers flocked to
our work, and their little girls, enlisted more for the pleasure of
the sight of them than anything else, used to turn the Paphian Temple
into a riotous playground. But Eastern Christians are usually more
prudish or more fearful, and I had expected that no Lasithi woman would
work. Sure enough they proved coy, and at first would only watch from
afar two trained girls brought up from Cnossus as lures; but on the
third morning a cosmopolitan villager, who had fought--or looted--in
France in 1870, sent up his wife and a daughter to help his son, and
the ice was broken. A laughing mob ran up the hill tossing sieves and
clamouring to be listed, and with their sisters, cousins and aunts,
who brought up the midday meals, made the terrace before our cave the
gayest spot in Lasithi.
Above a thick bed of yellow clay, laid long ago by water, and
productive only of bones and scraps of very primitive pottery, lay
black earth five to seven feet deep at the back of the Upper Hall.
It proved to hold countless burned things, and, also, many unburned
offerings, which had been laid or dropped at all periods, from about
the early classical age back to a dim antiquity, roughly coeval with
the Twelfth Dynasty of Pharaohs. Bronzes from many moulds were hidden
there, a little chariot, for example, drawn by an ox and a ram,
unequally yoked; many miniature effigies of bulls and sheep; knives,
pins, lance-heads, needles, and little necessaries of the toilet; and
also hundreds of clay cups, and some finely painted potter’s work,
and rough libation tables of stone. These lay thickest about a rude
structure, bedded on the yellow clay, which was doubtless an altar of
burnt sacrifice. The dark innermost recess, shut off by a rough and
ruinous wall, was long shunned; for the rock-roof was unsound above
it, and great fragments overhung perilously. But when we ventured into
it at the last, nothing worse happened than sudden thunderous slides
of rock and earth, which at first sent the scared diggers scampering
for their lives, but soon came to be held harmless. This sacrosanct
area was soil untouched by the modern searcher, and it proved
extraordinarily prolific in broken vases, mostly of painted ware, but
less rich in metal things. To clear the whole Upper Hall took no more
than a fortnight; and I was well enough pleased on the whole when I
gave it back to its fluttered bats and owls. The altar and temenos wall
had proved the place holy, and nothing less, in all likelihood, than
the Birth Cave itself.
It remained, however, to search the Lower Hall for objects that might
have slipped down during the secret digging of the past fifteen years;
but I did not expect much spoil, since I was told that no native had
ever found anything among these dim stalactite pillars except a few
scraps of water-borne pottery. Unwilling and not hopeful, the men
clambered down into the abyss, and the women especially, who had been
working hitherto in sunshine at the Cave’s mouth, moaned at sight of
the clammy mud in which they must now stand and search by the smoky
light of petroleum flares. But complaints soon ceased, as first one and
then another picked a bronze out of the soil which had lodged on the
upper rock slopes. Two objects among the handfuls which I was called
to collect from time to time were especially welcome, one a little
statuette of the god of Egyptian Thebes, Amen Ra (how came he there? in
the hand of an Egyptian or a Cretan devotee?); the other a miniature
battle-axe, earnest of more to come.
There was not room, however, for all hands on the steep slope, and
I bade a few of the best workers rake out the little pockets of
lime-encrusted mud, which had been laid in cups and hollows on the
lower stalagmitic floors. There, too, blades and pins were found; and,
working down and down into the darkness, till their distant lights
shone no brighter than glow-worm lamps to the men above, the pioneers
reached the margin of the subterranean pool, and began to scrape the
mud-slides left by the water as it shrinks in summer time into the
hill. So much did this slime yield that some went on unbidden to dredge
the shallows of the chill pool itself, and find there many rude bronze
statuettes, male and female, nude and draped, vicarious deputies of
worshippers who had wished to be specially remembered of the God, and
also signet gems and rings, pins, needles by the score.
By this time more than half the workfolk were splashing in the nether
pool, eager for the special rewards promised to lucky finders; and
the tale of bronzes had already been doubled. But Chance had reserved
her crowning grace. A zealous groper, wishful to put both hands to
his work, happened to wedge his guttering candle in the fluting of
a stalactite column, and by its light espied in the slit the green
edge of a bronze blade. I passed the word to leave mud-larking in the
pool and search the colonnades. Men and girls dispersed themselves
along the dark aisles, and perching above the black waters on natural
crockets of the pillars, peered into the flutings. They found at
once--found blades, pins, tweezers, brooches, and here and there a
votive axe, and in some niches as many as ten votive things together.
Most were picked out easily enough by the slim fingers of the girls;
but to possess ourselves of others, which the lights revealed, it was
necessary to smash stalactite lips that had almost closed in long ages.
For about four hours we discovered at least an object a minute, chiefly
on the columns at the head of the pool: but above the stature of a man
nothing was anywhere found.
When nothing more could be seen in the crevices, which had been
scrutinised twice and thrice, and we had dredged the pool’s bed as far
as wading men could reach, I called off the workers, who were falling
sick of the damp and chill; and two days later we left silent and
solitary the violated shrine of the God of Dicte. The digger’s life is
a surfeit of surprises, but his imagination has seldom been provoked so
sharply as in that dim chasm. One seemed to come very near indeed to
men who lived before history. As we saw those pillared isles, so with
little change had the last worshipper, who offered a token to Zeus,
seen them three thousand years ago. No later life had obliterated his
tracks; and we could follow them back into the primaeval world with
such stirring of fancy as one feels in the Desert, which is the same
to-day as it was yesterday, and has been since the beginning of things.
I have never struck tents with sharper regret, for there could be
no pleasanter abode than a camp on that rocky shelf of Dicte. All
day handsome folk went and came, who dealt as honourably with the
stranger as he wished to deal with them, showing neither distrust nor
presumption, but a frank highland gentility; and as evening fell, they
would turn merrily down the hill, only lingering to exchange a word
or to load a mule with soil for the gardens below. By night we were
alone, free and irresponsible as Bedawis, and far safer; for in that
distressful isle of Crete, where every peasant had his tale of rapine
and murder in his own or his father’s time, there was no suspicion
of fear. Sometimes the scourge of the Cretan spring, a hot Libyan
gust, would swoop unheralded from the higher gullies, and set the
cook’s coals scurrying towards the big powder canister and himself in
frantic chase, calling on the Virgin Mother; and half a dozen times it
seemed our tents must go by the sheer way to the village, whose lights
twinkled five hundred feet below. But poles and ropes held out against
the worst of the wind, and soon the moon rode in cloudless heaven once
more, and the flags drooped motionless on their standards. So the night
would pass, and with the dawn the chatter be heard again, coming round
the shoulder of the hill.
* * * * *
[Illustration: SPONGE BOATS IN ZAKRO BAY.]
A year later I was camped still further east on the uttermost Cretan
coast which looks towards the Levant sea. Broken pieces of painted
vases had been found some time before about the mouth of a large pit
near a little natural harbour, now known as the Bay of Zakro; and
the vineyards of a little hamlet on the lower slopes were embanked
with walls of primaeval masonry. The bay was much frequented. Often
one waked to find a dozen or so of small craft at anchor, whose
sailors would land in the morning to draw water, seek the blessing of a
priest, and be gone after noon. Some came to talk with me, and declared
themselves strangers, sponge-divers, gathered from many coasts, but
chiefly from the Isle of Symi. They were men of swarthy skin, somewhat
boisterous and given to drinking and dicing,--bent on a merry life,
because in their trade it is short. Zakro, said they, was their last
customary port of call before they adventured over the broad strait
to the Libyan fishing grounds. As they do now, so Cretans must have
done in the days of Minos; and by trade Zakro grew so rich nearly four
thousand years ago that it possessed some of the finest vases in the
Aegean, and became cosmopolitan enough to use the products of Syria and
inner Asia.
I began to search my ground and reached the fourteenth of May by
our reckoning, the second in the older style. The weather had been
boisterous for a fortnight past, and under some unseasonable influence
shifting gales, lowering skies, and frequent rains had succeeded the
serenity of April. A heavier fall than usual began in the afternoon,
and during the windless early hours of night grew to a tropical deluge.
I was encamped in front of a large magazine, the only building upon the
beach, about a quarter of a mile from the mouth of a river which comes
down from the upland shelves of Sitía. The noble gorge of its middle
course, cleft sheer as a Pacific cañon, was set so thick with old trees
and tangled undergrowth, when I saw it first, that a man could scarcely
pass along its floor; in the broad upper valley above high-water mark,
complots, orchards, and terraced gardens flourished abundantly, and the
deltaic plain about the mouth was even more fertile still.
Presently I had to abandon the tent, though it had been proof against
former rains, and seek sleep in the rat-ridden magazine. Its mud roof
was leaking apace, and the four dripping walls dismally reflected the
lamplight; but, thankful for even such shelter, I fell asleep. I woke
to hear fierce hissing of wind and rain driven on the sea-front of the
building, and by the roaring of breakers knew that an onshore gale had
risen during the night. It was grey-dark, and, striking a light to see
how long it might still be to sunrise, I wondered to find the hour past
already, and day dismally come.
For lack of anything better to do, I tried to sleep again; but my Greek
servants, moving restlessly about the building, infected me with their
uneasiness. Though the magazine was built on shingle and sand, it lay
so far out of the course in which the river had flowed for centuries,
that there could hardly be danger where we were, however damp our
discomfort. But that untimely gloom, riven by the fitful shimmer of
lightning, that steady splash of rain, reinforced by cascades of
driven sea-spray, and that intermittent thunder, which could be heard
even above the ceaseless roar of breakers rolling to my threshold,
were not heartening. Water stood deep on the plain behind; but it was
finding its own outlets to the sea, and I took more heed of the deluge
overhead, which so thoroughly penetrated the mud roof, that there was
nothing for it but to disturb the careful order of stores and baggage,
and the results of my digging, and collect all under waterproof sheets
in the middle of the magazine.
I was making a cold and sodden breakfast, when I heard suddenly a
shout, “The river! The river!” I splashed outside, and, wading to
the south end of the long windowless building, saw that the flooded
surface of the plain behind had begun to flow as one stream. Torrents,
growing momentarily stronger and deeper, swept round each end of the
magazine, under-cutting its shallow foundations; and even as I looked,
a crack ran like a lightning fork down the masonry of the north end.
It opened ever so little, and I watched my kitchen slide into the
flood noiselessly; for nothing was to be heard above the roaring of
sky and sea. It was high time to be gone. In the farther chamber of
the magazine a mare was standing, but mad with terror of the lightning
and the water, she would not budge, even when one wall of her stable
followed the kitchen, and after a frantic struggle she had to be left
to her fate. I plunged with the stable boy into the northern mill-race
and staggered through; but the overseer and the cook, who lingered a
moment to search for a much-loved pinfire gun under the ruins of the
kitchen, found the water already too deep and strong, and had to wait
for a life-line; whereof the cook lost his hold, and was all but swept
to the sea. Fortunately, the higher ground was not far distant, and to
it we all fled.
For the next two hours, wet to the skin--and feeling, too, as if wet
from skin to skin--we had to crouch in what shelter we might, and
watch the ruin of the valley. The deluge from the skies never abated a
moment, and the solid earth seemed to melt. Where yesterday a foot-fall
had rung on the flinty hillside, one now sank ankle-deep. The very
heart of the storm was hanging over us. Lightnings forked ceaselessly
on one hand or the other, and each thunder-peal confused the echo of
the last. The gale, a full-bodied “Levanter,” was still freshening;
and under its awful lash the seas, stained red with the ruin of the
fields, reared higher and higher against the boiling race which the
land was pouring in. The river now filled the whole valley from hill
to hill, here sliding with swift, malignant smoothness, there, broken
by some obstacle or penned in a sunken gully, heaving, shouldering,
writhing and tossing turbid waves one across the other. Gnarled
planes and centenarian holm-oaks from the river gorge, with olives
and charubs, which told the fate of the higher gardens and orchards,
rode past us in an endless tumult--all horribly tangled with horned
carcasses, which were sucked spinning below, to be spewed up again and
swept to the sea. It was a Homeric combat between two floods. Great
trees, hurled into the jaws of the breakers, reared, plunged, and broke
back like hunted monsters of the deep; till at last, where the forces
of propulsion and resistance neutralised each other offshore, they
gathered in an ever-broadening vortex and still found no peace.
During the last hour of the storm the gale seemed to master all the
other cataclysmal forces. The southern point of the bay, where a reef
sheers up in jagged iron cliffs, provoked the most horrid turmoil; and,
above all rival sounds of land and sky, came down wind a ceaseless roar
of riotous seas, leaping to the summit of the rocks. Two misty trails
streamed far inland like smoke from chimney stacks on the summit of the
cliff. They were, of course, two storm-cataracts caught in their leap
and whirled to spray; but the Cretans, who watched with me, finding any
wonder credible in that convulsion of all nature, would have it the
central fires of earth had broken out, and I doubt not they still add
that crowning portent to their tales of an unforgotten day.
While the tremendous spectacle continued, none of us gave much thought
to his own miserable state. We cowered watching how primaeval earth was
carved. When the veil of rain was withdrawn at last, I saw the whole
face of the landscape changed. The old estuary of the river existed no
more; and a broad and shallow mouth had been opened far to the north.
The bay, which since Spratt’s visit in the ’fifties had afforded deep
anchorage close inshore, now shoaled gradually for a mile, and was
studded with the toppling crests of grounded trees; and the mile-long
strand of pebbles and grassy dunes had been replaced by a stretch of
mud at a level some six feet lower. Over two-thirds of the plain,
where fertile fields and olive gardens had been, lay sand and stones;
and such trees as had held their ground were buried to mid-trunk.
Looking up the river gorge, I saw nothing but naked rock, where
terraced vineyards had clothed the cliff face; while all the ancient
tangle of forest below had vanished to the last shrub, and the sinuous
valley-floor, as far as the eye could follow it, glistened clean as a
city pavement after rain.
When the flood had subsided, a part of the shell of my magazine was
found standing, saved by the yielding of the beach to right and left;
and the mare, quite unhurt, shivered still in the only remaining
corner of her roofless stable. My personal loss was not so very great.
I had to find new quarters, repair much that was broken, and put up
with the loss of many stores and utensils, but of nothing absolutely
indispensable to the camp. But if I had come off lightly on the
whole, not so had the natives of the valley. Its single village,
when the Headman came to make his official report, was found to have
lost thousands of fruit-trees, many score head of live stock, and a
number of houses and farm buildings. Communication with the rest of
the island was cut by the washing out of paths, made with the labour
of years; and the best springs of drinking water were smothered under
a landslip. Since all irrigated fields and gardens whatsoever, which
had been terraced along the stream, had been swept away, the villagers
had lost not only the crops of the year, nor only the fruit of their
trees for several years to come, nor only the trees themselves, but
also the precious, irretrievable soil on which there could be growth
again. The sum of their disaster came to this. Almost all members of a
community of poor husbandmen, who had nothing but their lands to look
to, had lost in a few hours all that they possessed over and above the
barest means of subsistence. For many years to come they would have no
more than the scanty produce of their higher and thinner fields to live
upon. If none would starve, thanks to the communism of Eastern society,
none would be able to grow for himself, or have the means to procure,
a seasoning of his daily bread. The slow increase of many generations
past was lost to a generation to come. The village, as it seemed to me,
was ruined.
Cut off all that day by the river, we could only guess what had
happened in the upper valley; but on the morrow two or three of the
villagers, who had held lands in the lower plain, forded the falling
stream at their peril, and came down to us. Their tale set one’s
imagination playing over the dull hopelessness of their outlook, over
this state of men, yesterday prosperous to-day face to face with the
prospect of a bitter, inevitable struggle for mere bread, their hope
of joy in life abandoned, and their local pride, so keenly felt in
Greek village society, for ever abased. To my Western thinking such a
fate seemed worse than death. Could nothing be done? I was the single
individual in the valley with any superfluity, and I represented a
foreign Society, whose duty and right it was to help. If I could not
recover their trees or put back their soil, I could still do what the
Briton always does in such emergencies--write a cheque. So word was
sent up to the Headman that I proposed to offer a certain sum to the
village, if he would tell me how it would be spent.
Next day the lower ford was just passable, and I rode across
country--for the path was gone--to see what I might. Every glimpse into
the gorge from above showed how completely vanished was its ancient
forest, the most valuable and rare possession of a Cretan village.
As the valley opened out and our way lay through the wrecked olive
gardens, now dreary stretches of drying mud, on whose caked surface
sand was beginning to swirl in the breeze, I saw that the tree-stumps
were banked up on their higher side with a matted scum of broken
boughs, of corn uprooted in the green ear and of other ruin of the
valley lands; while stranded boulders and stones were strewn so thick
on once fertile fields as to make all seem one broad riverbed.
In the village I found several houses destroyed, and men still
labouring to clear others of the mud left by the collapse of their
roofs. I was invited to go on to the Mill and see what evil work the
flood had done there. The coffee-house emptied itself behind me of
some twenty men, to whom were added presently half the women and
children of the village, all surprisingly cheerful, and vying with
one another to be first in pointing out this or that result of the
disaster. God had willed it! So each murmured piously at the end of a
tale, which lost nothing in the manner of its telling. The principal
sufferers were brought forward, and were plainly proud to be so
distinguished. They, too, said modestly that God had willed it. The
mill proved to be no more; and the miller pointed out its situation
with so manifest a pleasure that I almost suspected, absurdly enough,
that the blessing of excessive insurance was not unknown in remote
Cretan villages.
Returned to the coffee-house, I found still less to feed a pitiful
mood. Seven men in ten of the company were there, because they had no
longer any lands to till; but the outward demeanour of each and all
was not that which one looked for in despairing men. Nor, if I am any
judge of behaviour (and these were very simple folk), was the heart of
the Zakriotes heavy within them, while they talked so cheerfully. The
story of the day before yesterday was told again and again, with fresh
effects added to taste, and always with that pious refrain about the
will of God--a story of something past and done with, no longer taken
into account for the present or the future.
I rose with emotion not a little chastened, and went to the Headman.
He was writing out his report to the local prefecture, and laid down
his pen to relate with sparkling eyes the narrow escape of his own
family from a torrent which had come right through a house higher up
the hillside. But when I referred to my proposed gift, he showed less
interest. If I had looked to play Lord Bountiful in Zakro, I had
missed my mark. The man was evidently as much embarrassed as grateful.
It was not easy, he said, to spend such a sum on the village as a
whole. None was worse off than another. All were poor men. What did I
wish to do myself? The church would be the better for a belfry. I was
taken aback, having proposed to myself something of more eleemosynary
sort. Or should the water of a certain spring be brought down in pipes?
Neither was this just what I had expected; but caring more to add to
fountains in a thirsty land than to ecclesiastical luxuries, I voted
for the pipes, and handed over my dole, not so much, after all, in pity
for stricken men as dislike to be worse than my word.
Those peasants had, perhaps, feigned a little, as a Greek will, half
unconsciously, if there be a chance to plume himself, even on misery.
But I saw and heard much of them after their excitement had long passed
and they were grown both familiar with me and fully aware of the
measure of their loss; yet still undismayed, they held on their simple
way after, as before a disaster which would have crushed or maddened
northern husbandmen. Nor was their mood either callous or light. The
peasant Greek is neither brute nor butterfly; but this he is--a man who
is essentially inert, a man born physically outworn. The whole race, as
it seems to me, is suffering from over-weariness. It lived fast in the
forefront of mankind very long ago, and now is far gone in years; and
in its home you feel that you have passed into the shadow of what has
been, into an air in which men would rather be than do.
No doubt, also, the passivity common to most tillers of the earth
reinforced the inborn nature of the Zakriotes. The husbandman is of
all men the most apt to surrender to the discretion of Heaven and take
its blows without thought whether they be deserved. Slave of the soil
which he turns, to it he looks for all his being. What it gives him
from year to year may vary in degree but not in kind. Much or little,
it is always food. To be poor or rich is to have his belly better
filled or worse; and, eating to live, he lives to eat only on a rare
day of festival. So his customary toil, than which he knows no other
business of his day, give him enough food, the shortening of it, or
the loss of its variety will affect him less than a being of less
simple life would think possible. Actual starvation he has not felt,
and knows he will never feel, so long as his neighbour has food. His
joys are found, not outside his day’s work, but in its course--in the
satisfaction of bodily appetite, in drinking when he is athirst, in
sleeping when he is weary, in warming himself in God’s sun, in cooling
himself in the shade, in communing with his fellows, his wife and his
babes. What should such a man know of the superfluity which we call
wealth?
Simple though the Zakriotes were, they showed often in their talk that
they knew themselves well enough to be preoccupied with this very
question of their racial decay. Why, they were for ever asking me, had
the Greeks fallen out of that front rank in which the schoolmaster told
them they once marched? How came the “barbarians” of Europe to be now,
nation for nation and man for man, so superior to the once Chosen Race?
The processes of generation and birth, processes which, whether in man
or beast, are never out of the thoughts or the talk of southern folk,
were canvassed to show cause. Their maidens, they said, were betrothed
as children, wedded at fourteen, and mothers in the course of months.
They had heard we discouraged wedlock before the age of sixteen. Had
they not better do so too? There was talk of a League of Hellenic
Ladies to promote mature marriage, and the Headman’s wife, who twirled
her spindle and bore her waterpot aloft among the rest, but with a
statelier grace, wished to join it. Zakro had long been famous among
Cretan villages for the easy delivery of mothers. A woman was not held
to have done herself credit there if she let the midwife be in time.
But what did I think? Did such easy bearing mean weak babes? I told
the Headman’s lady how hardly it went with the delicate mothers of my
own land, and she scarcely believed. Like Bedawis, who will halt but
an hour on the march while a wife is delivered behind a spear-propped
screen of cloaks, so too the sedentary mothers of the Near East make
little trouble of bringing to birth. John Barker, consul in Aleppo,
tells how once he halted with his wife for the night among the Syrian
hills at a hut, whose mistress was plainly very near her time. In the
morning the housewife gathered the family linen to wash it at the
stream a thousand feet below, and, deaf to the English lady’s protests,
went off down the hill. At sunset her figure was seen coming slowly up
the path again, the new-washed linen on her head, the new-born babe in
the crook of her arm.
I keep a very kindly memory of Zakro, despite its water fouled by the
flood, despite the stenches which came up from the lightly sanded
carcasses, despite the myriad mosquitoes of its shore. There was a
tepid sea to bathe in morn and eve; there were fair slopes, unpeopled
but not too wild, to ride over on Sabbaths and holidays; there was
peace from the post and the political Greek; and there were half a
score of buried brick houses of Minoan time to be explored, with all
their contents, as well as pits and tombs and caves, which yielded me
their secrets. I stayed till it was high summer, and what were left of
barley fields were ripe already to harvest.