Лоренс Даррелл - Prospero's Cell

Confused by our clumsy gestures of interpretation, history is never kind to those who expect anything of her. Under the formal pageant of events which we have dignified by our interest, the land changes very little, and the structure of the basic self of man hardly at all. In this landscape observed objects still retain a kind of mythological form — so that though chronologically we are separated from Ulysses by hundreds of years in time, yet we dwell in his shadow. Like earnest mastodons petrified in the forests of their own apparatus the archeologists come and go, each with his pocket Odyssey and his lack of modern Greek. Diligently working upon the refuse-heaps of some township for a number of years they erect on the basis of a few sherds or a piece of dramatic drainage, a sickly and enfeebled portrait of a way of life. How true it is we cannot say; but if an Eskimo were asked to describe our way of life, deducing all his evidence from a search in a contemporary refuse dump, his picture might lack certain formidable essentials. Thus Ulysses can only be ratified as an historical figure with the help of the fishermen who to-day sit in the smoky tavern of 'The Dragon' playing cards and waiting for the wind to change. The Odyssey is a bore, badly constructed and shapeless, dignified by poetry everywhere degenerating into self-pity and rhetoric; the characters are stylized to the point of irritation, and their conventionalized drama serves simply as a decorative frame for the descriptive gift of the author which is a formidable piece of equipment.

Yet with what delightful and poignant accuracy does the poem describe the modern Greeks; it is a portrait of a nation which rings as clear to-day as when it was written. The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis. The unloving humour and the scolding. Nowhere is it possible to find a flaw.

17.9.37

Three towns contend for Ulysses and Nausicaa; Kassopi in the north, with its gigantic plane-tree and good harbour, its bluff ilexgrown fortress where the goats graze all day, might have well been a site for such a fantasy. Fronting the ragged scarps of Albania, the north wind fetches in the blue sea with a crisp lazy power quite foreign to the gulf. South of Corfu town, the peninsula of Paleopolis is supposed to be the site of the ancient town; but there is nothing left of the arcades and the fountains and columns of the fabulous capital. The shadow of the marshy lake is hardly disturbed by the ripple of water from Cressida's stream. Dried out Venetian saltpans have eaten away the original form of the lake and here the sea settles in tideless green stagnation, a haunt for pelicans, wild duck and snipe. In the dazzle of the bay stands Mouse Island whose romance of line and form (white monastery, monks, cypresses) defies paint and lens, as well as the feebler word. This petrified rock is the boat, they say, turned to stone as a punishment for taking Ulysses home. It might have been here.

Last and most likely is Paleocastrizza, drenched in the silver of olives on the north-western coast. The little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection — a conspiracy of light, air, blue sea, and cypresses. The rock faces splinter the light and reflect it both upward and downward: so that, staring through the broken dazzle of the Ionian sun, the quiet bather in his boat can at the same time look down into three fathoms of water with neither rock nor weed to interrupt the play of the imagination: so that, diving, he may imagine himself breaching the very floor of space itself, until his fingers touch the heavy lush sand: so that, rising to the surface borne upward by air and muscle he feels that it is not only the blue sky that he breaks open with his arms, but the very ceiling of heaven. Here are the grottoes. Paleocatrizza has two of them, one reachable by boat and beautiful. The walls are twisted painfully out of volcanic muscle, blood-red, purple, green, and nacreous. A place for resolutions and the meetings of those whose love is timid and undeclared.

For the benefit of the more recondite, or for the mere specialist, one must record the existence of a great cave in the point immediately before the beach marked Hermones on the maps. It is approachable only when there is a calm, and the entrance is imposing, being formed in the style of a great gateway. Empty plagues of metamorphic stone stand above, as if the inscriptions have been melted from them. The entrance is knee-deep in water and slimy with rock; but this first cave leads to a second, higher and drier. The walls of this are palpitant with the bodies of bats, which hang like a heavy curtain, trembling and squeaking at any intruding noise. This second cave is perhaps ten yards across and as high — and in one corner, like the secret to one of those puzzles one has sought for a lifetime, opens a door. There is space enough to pass if one stoops. Nothing is revealed beyond this barrier. For those who have the courage and the curiosity to proceed, a torch is necessary.

At first nothing; a rubbish-heap of broken stones at the beginning of a corridor. But a clearly defined corridor leading, it seems, into the very heart of the earth. Within twenty paces it branches into a multiplicity of corridors — like a dream, or a poem too charged with allusions — and the walls become heavy and damp, as if with mist. It seems a thousand miles away that the summer, with its quickened heart-beat of cicadas and wind, livens the meadows of Corcyra; we are here, deep in the ground, and our voices are low as if they sensed the dreadful unyielding rock which surrounds us. The many corridors menace us.

'We will never remember the way back,' says N.

The torchlight is barren and futile with its white beam moving along the walls. Holding N.'s hand I am aware of the small resisting pulse of the heart-beat like a message to say that we are not really part of it — the echoing and uncomfortable night of the rocks.

In 1912 a scientist tried to negotiate the corridor, using a light twine as a guide; but somewhere in the heart of the world the twine broke, and, it is presumed, his torch gave out, for he never reappeared in the light of day. This story, which I invent to frighten N., brings back to us both the seducing sweetness of life there outside the cave; the fishermen at their lobster-pots, and the whole endearment of the Valley of Ropa, with its dapple of vines and figs. The soft throaty call of turtles in the arbours above Perama. The poison-green line of water perching and falling upon the shoals off the northern point.

The walls of the outer cave tremble in their membrane-like covering of bats; strange shudderings and copulations, strange disturbances and awakenings, strange departures and arrivals-like the unconscious in its outlawed slumber. One's own flesh has become chill and puckered by the cold of the place. Very dimly now the sea can be heard outside, familiar as snoring, rapping and licking its way among the rocks. The pools are empty of fish.

The little white boat rides glib and pert in the shadow of the cliff, with Niko anxious at the tiller; wind has sprung up from the south-west, and the breakers are beginning their clock-like momentum sheer from the shores of Africa. It is time to make the half-hour run for the narrow harbour of Paleocastrizza. Shaken free, the sails immediately draw like a white fire, and crisp at the lips of the Van Norden, the sea draws her seething line of white. In the spaces of the wind the ear picks up the dry morse-like communication of the cicadas high above on the cliffs; while higher still in space sounds the sour brassy note of a woman's voice singing. N. caught in one of those fine unconscious attitudes sits at the prow, head thrown back, lips parted, long fair hair blown back over the ears — the doe's pointed ears. Drinking the wind like some imagined figurehead on a prehistoric prow one cannot tell from the sad expression of the clear face whether she hears the singing or not. Or whether indeed the singing is not in one's own mind, riding clear and high above the white sails to where the eagles, broken like morsels of rock, fall and recover and fall again down the invisible stairways of the blue. How little of this can ever be caught in words. The last clear point comes out to meet us with the little rock-chapel and lighthouse standing clear. The Van Norden turns, trembles for an instant between opposing intentions, and then dives clear through the towering walls of rock, into the bay where Nausicaa found the timorous Hero, washed up as naked as Adam but twice as intelligent.