THE GORGON
The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out
Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess), was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbour, or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes, or the bottle glass of certain spirits.
On my first morning, having come on to the natural terrace, the only recommendation of the hovel-like accommodation, to look over this strange green ocean, I saw the smaller island, lying like a little boat of land moored just wide of Daphaeu’s three hills. The day was clear, the water frilled with white where it hit the fangs in the interstices below the terrace. About the smaller island, barely a ruffle showed. It seemed to glide up from the sea, smooth as a mirror. The little island was verdant, also. Unlike Daphaeu’s limited stands of stone-pine cypress and cedar, the smaller sister was clouded by a still lambent haze of foliage, that looked to be woods. Visions of groves, springs, a ruined temple, a statue of Pan playing the panpipes forever in some glade—where only yesterday, it might seem, a thin column of aromatic smoke had gone up—these images were enough, fancifully to draw me into inquiries about how the small island might be reached. And when my inquiries met first with a polite bevy of excuses, next with a refusal, lastly with a blank wall of silence, as if whomever I mentioned the little island to had gone temporarily deaf or mad, I became, of
course determined to get to it, to find out what odd superstitious thing kept these people away. Naturally, the Daphaeui were not friendly to me at any time, beyond the false friendship one anticipates extended to a man of another nationality and clime, who can be relied on to pay his bills, perhaps allow himself to be overcharged, even made a downright monkey of in order to preserve goodwill. In the normal run of things, I could have had anything I wanted, in exchange for a pack of local lies, a broad local smile, and a broader local price. That I could not get to the little island puzzled me. I tried money, and I tried barter. I even, in a reckless moment, probably knowing I would not succeed, offered Pitos, one of the younger fishermen, the gold and onyx ring he coveted. My sister had made it for me, the faithful copy of an intaglio belonging to the house of Borgia, no less. Generally, Pitos could not pass the time of day with me without mentioning the ring, adding something in the nature of: “If ever you want a great service, any great service, I will do it for that ring.” I half believe he would have stolen or murdered for it, certainly shared the bed with me. But he would not, apparently, even for the Borgia ring, take me to the little island.
“You think too much of foolish things,” he said to me. “For a big writer, that is not good.”
I ignored the humorous aspect of “big,” equally inappropriate in the sense of height, girth or fame. Pitos’ English was fine, and when he slipped into mild inaccuracies, it was likely to be a decoy.
“You’re wrong, Pitos. That island has a story in it somewhere, I’d take a bet on it.”
“No fish today,” said Pitos. “Why you think that is?”
I refrained from inventing a tale for him that I had seen giant swordfish leaping from the shallows by the smaller island.
I found I was prowling Daphaeu, but only on the one side, the side where I would get a view, or views, of the small island. I would climb down into the welter of coves and smashed emerald water, to look across at the small island. I would climb up and stand, leaning on the sunblasted walls of a crumbling church, and look at the small island. At night, crouched over a bottle of wine, a scatter of manuscript, moths falling like rain in the oil lamp, my stare stayed fixed on the small island, which, as the moon came up, would seem turned to silver, or to some older metal, Nemean metal perhaps, sloughed from the moon herself.
Curiosity accounts for much of this, and contra-suggestiveness. But the influence I presently began to feel, that I cannot account for exactly Maybe it was only the writer’s desire to fantasize rather than to work. But every time I reached for the manuscript I would experience a sort of distraction, a sort of calling, uncanny, poignant, like nostalgia, though for a place I had never visited.
I am very bad at recollecting my dreams, but once or twice, just before sunrise, I had a suspicion I had dreamed of the island. Of walking there, hearing its inner waters, the leaves brushing my hands and face.
Two weeks went by, and precious little had been done in the line of work. And I had come to Daphaeu with the sole intention of working. The year before, I had accomplished so much in a month of similar islands—or had they been similar?—that I had looked for results of some magnitude. In all of fourteen days I must have squeezed out two thousand words, and most of those dreary enough that the only covers they would ever get between, would be those of the trash can. And yet, it was not that I could not produce work, it was that I knew, with blind and damnable certainty, that the work I needed to be doing sprang from that spoonful of island.
The first day of the third week I had been swimming in the calm stretch of sea west of the harbour, and had emerged to sun myself and smoke on the parched hot shore. Presently Pitos appeared, having scented cigarettes. Surgical and government health warnings have not yet penetrated to spots like Daphaeu, where filtered tobacco continues to symbolize Hollywood, or some other amorphous, anachronistic surrealism still hankered after and long vanished from the world beyond. Once Pitos had acquired his cigarette, he sprawled down on the dry grass, grinned, indicated the Borgia ring, and mentioned a beautiful cousin of his, whether male or female I cannot be sure. After this had been cleared out of the way. I said to him,
“You know how the currents run. I was thinking of a slightly more adventurous swim. But I’d like your advice.”
Pitos glanced at me warily. I had had the plan as I lazed in the velvet water. Pitos was already starting to guess it.
“Currents are very dangerous. Not to be trusted, except by harbour.”
“How about between Daphaeu and the other island? It can’t be more than a quarter mile. The sea looks smooth enough, once you break away from the shoreline here.”
“No,” said Pitos. I waited for him to say there were no fish, or a lot of fish, or that his brother had got a broken thumb, or something of the sort. But Pitos did not resort to this. Troubled and angry, he stabbed my cigarette into the turf half-smoked. “Why do you want to go to the island so much?”
“Why does nobody else want me to go there?”
He looked up then, and into my eyes. His own were very black, sensuous, carnal, earthbound eyes, full of orthodox sins, and extremely young in a sense that had nothing to do
with physical age, but with race, I suppose, the youngness of ancient things, like Pan himself, quite possibly.
“Well,” I said at last, “are you going to tell me, or not? Because believe me, I intend to swim over there, today or tomorrow.”
“No,” he said again. And then: “You should not go. On the island there is a—” and he said a word in some tongue neither Greek nor Turkish, not even the corrupt Spanish that sometimes peregrinates from Malta.
“A what?”
Pitos shrugged helplessly. He gazed out to sea, safe sea without islands. He seemed to be putting something together in his mind, and I let him do it, very curious now, pleasantly unnerved by this waft of the occult I had already suspected to be the root cause of the ban.
Eventually he turned back to me, treated me once more to the primordial innocence of his stare, and announced:
“The cunning one.”
“Ah,” I said. Both irked and amused, I found myself smiling. At this, Pitos’ face grew savage with pure rage, an expression I had never witnessed before—the façade kept for foreigners had well and truly come down.
“Pitos,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“Meda,” he said then, the Greek word, old Greek.
“Wait,” I said. I caught at the name, which was wrong, trying to fit it to a memory. Then the list came back to me, actually from Graves, the names which meant “the cunning”—Meda, Medea, Medusa.
“Oh,” I said. I hardly wanted to offend him further by bursting into loud mirth. At the same time, even while I was trying not to laugh, I was aware of the hair standing up on my scalp and neck. “You’re telling me there is a gorgon on the island.”
Pitos grumbled unintelligibly, stabbing the dead cigarette over and over into the ground.
“I’m sorry, Pitos, but it can’t be Medusa. Someone cut her head off quite a few years ago. A guy called Perseus.”
His face erupted into the awful expression again, mouth in a rictus, tongue starting to protrude, eyes flaring at me—quite abruptly I realized he wasn’t raging, but imitating the visual panic-contortions of a man turning inexorably to stone. Since that is what the gorgon is credited with, literally petrifying men by the sheer horror of her countenance, it now seemed almost pragmatic of Pitos to be demonstrating. It was, too, a creditable facsimile of the
sculpted gorgon’s face sometimes used to seal ovens and jars. I wondered where he had seen one to copy it so well.
“All right,” I said. “O.K., Pitos, fine.” I fished in my shirt, which was lying on the ground, and took out some money to give him, but he recoiled. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t think it merits the ring. Unless you’d care to row me over there after all.”
The boy rose. He looked at me with utter contempt, and without another word, before striding off up the shore. The mashed cigarette protruded from the grass, and I lay and watched it, the tiny strands of tobacco slowly crisping in the heat of the sun, as I plotted my route from Daphaeu.
Dawn seemed an amiable hour. No one in particular about on that side of the island, the water chill but flushing quickly with warmth as the sun reached over it. And the tide in the right place to navigate the rocks. . . .
Yes, dawn would be an excellent time to swim out to the gorgon’s island.
• • •
The gods were on my side, I concluded, as I eased myself out into the open sea the following morning. Getting clear of the rocks was no problem, their channels only half filled by the returning tide. While just beyond Daphaeu’s coast I picked up one of those contrary currents that lace the island’s edges and which, tide or no, would funnel me away from shore.
The swim was ideal, the sea limpid and no longer any more than cool. Sunlight filled in the waves and touched Daphaeu’s retreating face with gold. Barely altered in a thousand years, either rock or sea or sun. And yet one knew that against all the claims of romantic fiction, this place did not look now as once it had. Some element in the air, or in time itself, changes things. A young man of the Bronze Age, falling asleep at sunset in his own era, waking at sunrise in mine, looking about him, would not have known where he was. I would swear to that.
Some thoughts I had leisure for in my facile swim across to the wooded island moored off Daphaeu.
As I had detected, the approach was smooth, virtually inviting. I cruised in as if sliding on butter. A rowboat would have had no more difficulty. The shallows were clear, empty of rocks, and if anything greener than the water off Daphaeu.
I
had not looked much at Medusa’s Island (I had begun jokingly to call it this), as I crossed, knowing I would have all the space on my arrival. So I found myself wading in on a seamless beach of rare glycerine sand, and looking up, saw the mass of trees spilling from the sky.
The effect was incredibly lush, so much heavy green, and seemingly quite impenetrable, although the sun struck in glistening shafts, lodging like arrows in the foliage, which reminded me very intensely of huge clusters of grapes on a vine. Anything might lie behind such a barricade.
It was already beginning to be hot. Dry, I put on the loose cotton shirt, and ate breakfast packed in the same waterproof wrapper, standing on the beach impatient to get on.
As I moved forward, a bird shrilled somewhere in its cage of boughs, sounding an alarm of invasion. But surely the birds, too, would be stone, on Medusa’s Island, if the legends were correct? And when I stumbled across the remarkable stone carving of a man in the forest, I would pause in shocked amazement at its verisimilitude to the life.
Five minutes into the thickets of the wood, I did indeed stumble on a carving, but it was of a moss-grown little faun. My pleasure in the discovery was considerably lessened, however, when investigation told me it was scarcely classical in origin. Circa 1920 would be nearer the mark.
A further minute and I had put the faun from my mind. The riot of waterfalling plants through which I had been picking my way broke open suddenly on an inner vista much wider than I had anticipated, while the focal point of the vista threw me completely. I cannot say what I had really been expecting. The grey-white stalks of pillars, some temple shrine, the spring with its votary of greenish rotted bronze, none of these would have surprised me. On the other hand, to find a house before me took me completely by surprise. I stood and looked at it in abject dismay, cursing its wretched normalcy, until I gradually began to see the house was not normal, in the accepted sense.
It had been erected probably at the turn of the century, when such things were done. An eccentric two-storeyed building, intransigently European, that is, the Europe of the north, with its dark walls and arched roofing. Long windows, smothered by the proximity of the wood, received and refracted no light. The one unique and startling feature—startling because of its beauty—was the parade of columns that ran along the terrace, in form and choreography for all the world like the columns of Knossos, differing only in colour. For these
stems of the gloomy house were of a luminous sea-green marble, and shone as the windows did not.
Before the house was a stretch of rough-cut lawn, tamarisk, and one lost dying olive tree. As I was staring, an apparition seemed to manifest out of the centre of the tree. For a second we peered at each other, before he came from the bushes with a clashing of gnarled brown forearms. He might have been an elderly satyr; I, patently, was only a swimmer, with my pale foreigner’s tan, my bathing trunks, the loose shirt. It occurred to me at last that I was conceivably trespassing. I wished my Greek were better.
He planted himself before me and shouted intolerantly, and anyone’s Greek was good enough to get his drift. “Go! Go!” He was ranting, and he began to wave a knife with which, presumably, he had been pruning or mutilating something. “Go, you go!”
I said I had been unaware anybody lived on the island. He took no notice. He went on waving the knife, and his attitude provoked me. I told him sternly to put the knife down, that I would leave when I was ready, that I had seen no notice to the effect that the island was private property. Generally I would never take a chance like this with someone so obviously qualified to be a lunatic, but my position was so vulnerable, so ludicrous, so entirely indefensible, that I felt bound to act firmly. Besides which, having reached the magic grotto and found it was not as I had visualized, I was still very reluctant to abscond with only a memory of dark windows and sea-green columns to brood upon.
The maniac was by now quite literally foaming, due most likely to a shortage of teeth, but the effect was alarming, not to mention unaesthetic. As I was deciding which fresh course to take and if there might be one, a woman’s figure came out on to the terrace. I had the impression of a white frock, before an odd, muffled voice called out a rapid—too rapid for my translation—stream of peculiarly accented Greek. The old man swung around, gazed at the figure, raised his arms, and bawled another foaming torrent to the effect that I was a bandit, or some other kind of malcontent. While he did so, agitated as I was becoming, I nevertheless took in what I could of the woman standing between the columns. She was mostly in shadow, just the faded white dress, with a white scarf at the neck, marking her position. And then there was an abrupt flash of warmer pallor that was her hair. A blonde Greek, or maybe just a peroxided Greek. At any rate, no snakes.
The drama went on, from his side, from hers. I finally got tired of it, went by him and walked toward the terrace, pondering, rather too late, if I might not be awarded the knife in my back. But almost as soon as I started to move, she leaned forward a little, and she called another phrase to him, which this time I made out, telling him to let me come on.
When
I reached the fool of the terrace steps, I halted, really involuntarily, struck by something strange about her. Just as the strangeness of the house had begun to strike me, not its evident strangeness, the ill-marriage to location, the green pillars, but a strangeness of atmosphere, items the unconscious eye notices, where the physical eye is blind, and will not explain. And so with her. What was it? Still in shadow, I had the impression she might be in her early thirties, from her figure, her movements, but she had turned away as I approached, adjusting some papers on a wicker table.
“Excuse me,” I said. I stopped, and spoke in English. For some reason I guessed she would be familiar with the language, perhaps only since it was current on Daphaeu. “Excuse me. I had no idea the island was private. No one gave me the slightest hint—”
“You are English,” she broke in, in the vernacular, proving the guess to be correct.
“Near enough. I find it easier to handle than Greek, I confess.”
“Your Greek is very good,” she said, with the indifferent patronage of one who is multi-lingual. I stood there under the steps, already fascinated. Her voice was the weirdest I had ever heard, muffled, almost unattractive, and with the most incredible accent, not Greek at all. The nearest approximation I could come up with was Russian, but I could not be sure.
“Well,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder and registered that the frothy satyr had retired into his shrubbery; the knife glinted as it slashed tamarisk in lieu of me. “Well, I suppose I should retreat to Daphaeu. Or am I permitted to stay?”
“Go, stay,” she said. “I do not care at all.”
She turned then, abruptly, and my heart slammed into the base of my throat. A childish silly reaction, yet I was quite unnerved, for now I saw what it was that had seemed vaguely peculiar from a distance. The lady on Medusa’s island was masked.
She remained totally still, and let me have my reaction, ...
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