A Rough Map of Greece: The Night Boat

THE best hotel concierge in Rhodes, sure kinsman of Figaro, has a right to speak his mind. “Why do you want the night boat to Crete? You can fly there in an hour. This boat is slow and hot and old-fashioned, and the schedule — ha! You must be crazy to want this boat.”

Crazy or not, I held out for the boat, muttering of deck cabins. Figaro’s eye lit with reluctant interest. He hesitated, torn between airborne common sense and the Creek instinct for maneuver. Instinct won. “You mean way up top?” The higher the better. “I’ll see what I can do,” said Figaro, “but it won’t be the next boat.”

Since I didn’t want the next boat, this was satisfactory.

The ticket that finally appeared was an odd document: I wondered if I might perhaps be sailing under letters of marque. But the price was reasonable enough. It was officially claimed that the boat would come in at midnight and sail in half an hour. At midnight, therefore, 1 had myself taxied to the pier, although both the concierge and the taxi driver protested that there was no need to move until the vessel was actually at the dock. They were right, of course.

The new harbor, a long pier backed by freight

and customs sheds, was blazing with light and dithering with activity, but there was no sign of the ship. Her approach would be signaled by the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater dividing the new harbor from the old. So far, the lighthouse had indicated nothing. A number of tourists scurried about, asking questions of anybody who looked even vaguely official, but the islanders sat gossiping calmly on top of their luggage.

The taxi driver found me a baggage handler — the usual boy, unconcernedly heaving suitcases as tall as he was — and I sat down to wait in the dock cafe. It was full of Rhodians, talking sleepily over small cups of coffee. Unshaded lights glared on scarred tables and ironhard chairs, and the whole place had the penitential look of a restaurant where nobody ever comes by choice.

At half past one. the blue balloon rose invisibly into the black sky, followed by a feeble but more practical rocket. There was a hoot of triumph from the waiting multitude, answered by a screech from the packet’s whistle. She came around the breakwater blazing like a chandelier. Everybody leaped up and clutched luggage and then, observing that the ship’s progress involved more light than speed, sat down again.

Action nevertheless began. Truck engines sputtered into life. Loaded handcarts were trundled down the dock by old men with heavy sweaters, rolled-up pant legs, and bare feet. The customs shed opened. The night shivered with noise — whistles, bells, the clatter and creak of cranes, the bellows of the packet officers, the cafe jukebox, cries of welcome or farewell, and conversations between passengers already aboard and their friends outside the dock gate.

The deck cabin Figaro had acquired for me was on top of the world, a neat white box behind the wheelhouse, reached by its own small catwalk. It had a window looking aft into the energetic tangle of cranes, and a door giving, via the catwalk, straight on the sea. I thought then, and suspect still, that one of the ship’s company had been dislodged from it.

These splendid quarters had one eccentricity. The key locked the door from the outside only, and when unlocked, the door refused to stay latched. I found a bell, and the steward appeared with remarkable speed, considering the surrounding confusion. He solved my problem by removing the key. I pointed out that the door now wouldn’t shut at all. The steward shrugged. “No matter. Nobody comes up here.”

This seemed likely enough. I found a piece of string to anchor the door against swinging and went to bed in the dark.

Loading continued, noisily, until some time after three, when two final squeals on the whistle announced that we were under way. It was a warm night, overcast and starless. The afterdeck, with the cranes out of action and the hatches closed, was taken over by deck passengers, who clustered in heaps against anything that would prop a spine. Once we passed the lighthouse, most of our lights were turned off, and the ship, suddenly quiet and shadowy, moved evenly across an almost motionless sea. The engines purred. Water rustle and wood mutter filled the cabin, and next door on the bridge, voices exchanged mathematical conversation, “saranda” in the bass echoed by a dutiful tenor “saranda” and the slap of a hand on the wheel. We seemed to be on forty all night.

MY CABIN proved, by daylight, an almost scandalous luxury. I could lounge on the bunk and watch the fire-blue water beyond the open door, or sunbathe on the catwalk, or read in the shade of the deckhouse eaves. Forward down a few steps lay the first-class deck, small and exclusive. Some unauthorized juveniles with an accordion were driven from it by the captain. But this deck was not as versatile as my catwalk, being dead in the eye of the sun as we ambled west across the placid sea.

The ship docked at an island composed of brown, treeless crags and a port where all the larger buildings were empty shells. The unglassed windows in their facades gave straight on the barren rocks behind. There was much business in this odd place, however; goods were hustled off, and crates and passengers were hustled aboard. The island passengers included an old woman and a girl in costumes of subdued but decisive chic. Their heads were intricately wrapped in scarves. They wore long, dark, coatlike overdresses with heavy embroidery inside the bottom of the sleeves and slit side seams which revealed more embroidery lining the skirts. The girl had turned back her cuffs and fastened the front corners of her coat at the back of her waist, the better to display this glory. Below their cream-white underskirts, small brown boots appeared, the seams up the heel emphasized with colored stitching and a large blunt arrowhead. Gray aprons edged with some supernormal form of featherstitching were tied over the whole rig.

I was entranced by these clothes and sat on the catwalk steps surreptitiously sketching them. The women were by the forward rail, gazing out to sea, but they presently became aware of my occupation. The older one came up, rubbing her fingers together and transferring them significantly to her apron pocket. Since I had neither asked her to pose nor caused her any inconvenience, I said no. She launched on what sounded like a phillipic. I offered her a cigarette. Thunderstruck, silent with amazement at such stupidity, she backed off and sat down in her deck chair.

A Greek who had watched the whole thing sidled up and asked, “Why did you offer the old woman tobacco?” Well — nothing else handy, and money for not posing is blackmail. He took this amiably and asked to see the sketchbook. It was handed around, with undeserved complimentary murmurs, and reached my sulky model. I wouldn’t have blamed her for tossing it overboard, but she looked, chuckled, and turned to grin at me, all complaint apparently forgotten.

Her clothes, my Greek acquaintance now explained, belonged exclusively to one hill town in Karpathos, the island we had just left. He couldn’t tell me what goes on in this town, but the construction of their wardrobes must occupy a good deal of the inhabitants’ time. The boots alone were masterpieces.

The ladies left us at the next stop, another bald, hilly island, where we anchored while beer, crates, and people were lightered off and onto the rocky shore. There were sudden loud shouts of woe. The ship was drifting, for the anchor had gone down and separated itself from the chain. The drift could be controlled by the engines, but where was the anchor?

Buckets with glass bottoms were produced, and all the lighters, plus one ship’s boat, anchor-hunted furiously among the rocks. One man rowed while another, seemingly hanging by his toes like a squirrel upside down on a tree, leaned over the gunwale to peer through the glass into the blur of limestone and weed.

Time passed. The schedule was long forgotten. The little boats crisscrossed around us like bird dogs checking a field, and at intervals the captain hauled on the line that blew the whistle. The firstclass passengers, most of us dour Northerners, wondered silently what good he thought the noise would do. After a particularly loud blast, he developed English; leaning over the bridge rail, he told us, “No help, but it shows we’re still interested.”

Luck or the whistle finally worked. The anchor was located and repossessed, after vast splashings, with a grapple, and we sailed on into the afternoon sun. There now began agitation about the time. The packet was due in Hagios Nikolaos before six, to meet a bus for Iraklion. Would we make it? Merry laughter from the captain. We might make it by eight. Would there be another bus? Certainly not. But Hagios Nikolaos isn’t a bad place. You can just as well drive up to Iraklion in the morning.

That ended that, except that he was wrong on several points. Hagios Nikolaos was a dim-lit rock pile manned by ghosts; we made it after nine; and the bus had waited.

THE travelers for Iraklion joyously dragged luggage up the long, narrow dock and hurled themselves and bags into the tin-can vehicle. We were six, all aliens — an Englishwoman, an American couple, two young men from the United States air base outside Iraklion, and me. We were the only passengers.

The driver got aboard and counted the house. He got sadly off again, and a hissing argument began under the bus windows. The Air Force men, veteran island travelers through a passion for skin diving, eavesdropped and reported trouble imminent. Six passengers were an unprofitable number; the bus company was not about to butcher its elephant for one cutlet. “No sweat,” they told us. The Air Force would cope. We began dragging out bags.

A taxi was acquired. The driver, a gray blur in the dark, named a price. “Po, po, po.” cried the Air Force, indicating incredulity and disapproval of highway robbery. “That is too much,” said the bus driver sternly. The taximan accused him, I believe, of treason and xenophilia, but the price came down to 300 drachmas for the party. This worked out to less than two dollars a head for some thirty miles.

Driver, six passengers, untold bags, and two fish spears were sardined into the old coupe, which sagged and sighed pitifully. The driver produced and swallowed two pills, and then, with cheers from the bus driver, the shipping agent, and the half dozen loafers who had assisted the entire transaction with their presence, we lurched uphill into darkness.

Hagios Nikolaos is a small harbor on the northeast corner of Crete. It lies wedged between the sea and the range of hills that follows the northern coast, and the only way out of it is up. We continued to go up. We passed three churches, at each of which the driver crossed himself. When we reached something resembling a level the taxi stopped. The driver got out, crossed himself, examined the radiator and encouraged it, and took two more pills.

The headlights revealed him as a sad, dumpy little man with droopy trousers and a pug-dog face. Why this specimen was out earning a living, I do not know, for he should have been protected in a museum; I never saw anybody else remotely like him in Crete. The Air Force diagnosed his misery as dyspepsia and added a general warning. “They have a quaint local habit here. When they meet another car, they turn off the lights.” Why? The boys shrugged. “Must have learned it from the Germans during the war.” The tone implied that this was the standard explanation of any Cretan vagary. (Turning off the headlights on meeting another car is not a uniquely Cretan whimsy, however. The habit flourishes all over the Peloponnese, and drivers lacking nerves of steel get off the roads soon after sundown.)

The road continued wildly up and suddenly down with nothing to be seen on either side but velvety blackness. Once a cluster of small lights appeared, evidently very far below to the right. Fishing village, said the Air Force. How far down there? “Far enough. This is a beautiful drive in daylight, but after dark it’s better not to think about it.”

We all fell silent and thought about it until the lights of the air base showed up flat as a rug. The boys extracted their gear and vanished. We lumbered on into Iraklion, which seemed to be a dreary, empty, half-lighted, half-paved outpost of nowhere. The dingy hotel had never heard of my reservation but located an empty room in which I went grumpily and unwashed to sleep.

Iraklion in the morning was another town entirely. The streets shone with water as each establishment washed down its sidewalk. Bicycle bells rang, a flag snapped in the breeze, and the hotel had activated its hot-water system. My balcony proved to be on the south side, with a view over neighboring roofs clear to Mount Ida, silver with snow against the sun-bleached sky.

Iraklion is a disorderly little city. It was founded by Arab pirates in the fourth century, and what stands today is the battered survivor of Venetian defense against the Turks, Turkish defense against the persistent and bloody rebellions of the Cretans, and German assault upon everybody. The place is not handsome (one guidebook goes so far as to claim that the Morosini fountain is the only object worth looking at outside of the museum), but it is interesting and friendly. The Cretans rather cultivate a reputation for ferocity, but they are as ready as any other Greeks to help a bewildered traveler; and bewilderment is easy in Iraklion, for the place is a maze. Crooked streets lead suddenly into unexpected parks and plazas, or into the market district, where fruits and vegetables are displayed like jewels below a frieze of lamb carcasses and dead rabbits, or into the brass-workers’ quarter, where dark sheds spout cascades of sparks and a continuous light tingle of beaten metal. An alley off the lountain square is lined on both sides with restaurants serving good Cretan food. Antique and local craft shops cannily follow a route leading from the hotel district past the tourist police to the post office. On quiet afternoons, a postal clerk teaches lady tourists to count in Greek, on their fingers.

Although Crete is a great tourist attraction, thanks to the Minoan remains unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos and by subsequent archaeologists working all around the island, the Cretans do not treat their visitors with the cotton-wool courtesy of Rhodes (one of the oldest tourist traps in Europe) or the scholarly earnestness of the mainland. The tourist in Crete seems to be catalogued as an indolently unemployed archaeologist — a person who can shift for himself and. given time and clbowroom, will. The tourist police keep under the desk a pile of pamphlets describing bus trips to the Dictean Cave (not running - people kept spraining their ankles); Phaestos (you’ll have to find some friends to make up a load — they won’t go with less than live); Knossos and Malia (they’re on the city bus line).

Encouraged by this indifference to business on the part of the law, I became a criminal. Around a corner in the curio-shop section was a window given to coins and icons. Icons are beyond my comprehension, but the coins looked so aggressively unattractive that they couldn’t be serious merchandise. Still, there they were. They must be bait. I would attempt to acquire an illegal antiquity.

The shop housed a genial old fellow and three girls, who were, like many of the girls in Iraklion, long-legged, sloe-eyed replicas of the ladies in Minoan frescoes. The shop owner made a fierce attempt to sell me an icon. He pointed out that Cretan icons have, in addition to the virtues of age and beauty, a distinguished if tenuous connection with the work of El Greco. He exhorted me to go and see the work of El Greco’s teacher in a nearby church. He dove into the cellar to bring up a particularly fine specimen of icon — to my eye, an old board impenetrably varnished with layers of rich umber. When I finally got a word in, I repudiated all interest in icons. There was a long silence.

“Weaving?” suggested one of the girls. “Silver?” suggested another.

Coins were the idea. We looked at them for ten minutes, but all were uninteresting lumps. “Of course,” sighed the merchant, “the government forbids export of the fine ones.” What a pity. Heart set on a really lovely bit of silver. Pause, while we all turned over mildewed pennies. “I do have a few more in back,” he murmured.

We retired to the rear of the shop, behind a curtain. One girl lounged in the front door, looking down the street. One leaned on the counter, looking up the street. The third stood at my shoulder with her eye to the crack in the curtain. The boss sat down at his desk and with a bit of puffing opened a drawer concealed in the neighborhood of his left foot.

The coins he brought out were quite different from the stock on display. Satiny old silver or slippery electrum, they were ornamented with delicately modeled heads of goddesses, heroes, longdead kings, and they carried, worn but still legible with a little goodwill, the names and arms of once powerful cities. It took a long time to choose, but I finally left with one in my pocket, having repulsed a last resurgence of the icon campaign.

The whole thing was too neat and easy; I was positive that I had bought a fake. Possibly I had, but it was some reassurance to find similar coins openly on sale in Athens for the same price. I prefer to believe that I got a free theatrical performance.

THE bus for Knossos rattled out the cast end of town through suburbs that widened imperceptibly into farm country and dumped me off at the end of the line. Knossos was, precisely, a wide place in the road, which continued into the southeast hills, where an aqueduct soared over the valley on elegantly high, narrow arches. I was told, on unreliable authority, that it is the only aqueduct ever built by Greeks.

On the west side of the road, three or four small inns crouched in the lee of a low ridge. They were overhung by trees and surrounded by vine-covered trellises, and looked cool and comfortably shady. The east side of the road spread into a parking lot, a curio shop, a ticket gate, and some rising ground topped by a grove of black pine trees. In the distance, across what was evidently a wide, shallow valley, rose pale-brown hills striped with the dull green of olive trees, and now and then a black tick indicating a surviving cypress. Although the hills of Crete are barren and stony above the cultivated land, the Cretans claim that their island was heavily forested until the Turks lost a fleet and rebuilt it with Cretan timber.

Behind the grove, at the end of a tree-shaded walk up the slope, lie the ruins of Knossos. There is a plinth in honor of Evans, and beyond it, across a wide stretch of paved ground, the west facade of the palace rises like a low, yellow, irregular fence. Raised paths, little causeways really, lead southeast and northwest, for there is no entrance in the body of this west front. To the south, remains of roofless walls tumble away down the slope; at the north, a row of trees marks the route of the sunken road leading up to the northern gate.

This is my first and last attempt to orient the reader on the layout of Knossos, for all the traditional connotations of the word labyrinth are inadequate to express the confusions of Daedalian architecture. The various maps provided by guidebooks look reasonable but prove unsatisfactory because they can account for only one level; in fact, what with restorations and the slope on which the palace was built, there are at least five levels, although they never occur simultaneously. I believe that by patrolling the place eight hours a day for a week, one might get all these staircases, light wells, halls, rooms, cellars, ramps, and courts firmly fixed in one’s mind, plus a file on what is old stone and what is Evans’ ingenious steel and cement fakcry. Without such thoroughness it is possible to say only that the surviving palace consists of innumerable small rooms oozing out from the edges of a rectangular central court, the long axis of which runs north and south, and that the whole complex stands on a slope dropping sharply from west to east. Even in its best days, when the upper stories stood intact and the outer walls glittered with slabs of pale-gray crystalline gypsum and the rooms of state were bright with frescoes, the house of the double ax cannot have been an easy place to navigate.

I found the ruins full of surprises. A corridor that ought, by all rules of reason, to have led into the main court, landed me among the magazines, where long, narrow storage chambers ran off at right angles from the corridor. The side chambers were dark and full of surly echoes that mumbled among the ranks of huge storage jars. These jars were higher than my head and elaborately decorated with patterns incised in the red clay, although they were purely functional objects and must rarely have seen the light of day. Evidently the makers of seven-foot-tall jars were proud of their work, whether anybody else saw it or not. A shallow trench ran the length of each magazine and ended in a well, I suppose to catch the contents of broken or leaking jars. Wine could have been siphoned out of these monstrous containers easily enough, but they must have been terrible work to fill. I have since read, with relief, that a stool for climbing has been found in the storage rooms of another Minoan structure.

THERE has been much acid and learned discussion of the propriety of Evans’ restorations, on which he lavished thought, His personal fortune, and the services of a good architect. From the point of view of an ordinary visitor, there can, I think, be no question at all; the place would be a meaningless jumble of rubble without Sir Arthur’s reconstructions. They do not extend over the whole site, and where they do exist, they are based on careful study of the fallen stone and fragments of decayed or burned timber found by the excavators. Except for the roof, clapped over a considerable area around the central court with the intention of preventing winter rains from starting the process of ruin all over again, most of the place remains pretty much the same as when the diggers found it.

The restored sections — where cement walls have been raised and painted to resemble plaster, and steel beams and cement columns have been camouflaged as wood — are open and honest fakes. Only an idiot could be deceived by them, and they provide an understanding of the building’s original structure that no one but an expert archaeologist could derive from a mere lattice of stone walls; and those mostly the walls of cellars and workshops. Even in the restored sections, the stonework —paved floors, lower wall panels, benches, and thresholds — is frequently genuine, and one is continually walking on soft, shimmering gypsum, which suffers badly from modern shoes.

There has been some restoration of frescoes as well as walls, and here a certain reservation of enthusiasm is possible. It is helpful to know that the inner walls of the palace were painted, larger than life, with charging bulls, handsome youths, and waves, fish, and flowers, and that these ornaments were outlined in black and brilliantly colored in blue, red, white, and yellow. There is, oddly, very little green. But the style in which the reproductions have been done is that of architectural drawing — every line hard and clean, unambiguous as a straight razor. The Minoan frescoes, surviving in fragments in the museum of archaeology, were drawn with a blurring line, which must have produced a softer effect and was certainly capable of subtle suggestions of modeling that Evans’ copyist never achieved.

Leaving the restored prince with the feather headdress, I wandered down a staircase into the central court and shortly found myself in the room with griffins on the wall. One side opens, through a pillared anteroom, onto the court, broiling hot in the sun. The room itself is cool, like a cave. There is a flight of steps to the left, leading down into a pit; columns above a stone bench give a view down into this area. Opposite, against the right wall, stands a stone chair, so shaped that its origin in a wooden model is obvious. The wall straight ahead is lined by another stone bench and broken by a single door.

Evans thought the room had a religious purpose (it is only fair to mention that he thought almost any room at Knossos had a religious purpose), and no one has seriously disagreed with him. Certainly there is something a little eerie about the place. Light from the upper stories falls into the dry well and reflects dimly into the room, blurring the restored frescoes to a convincing Minoan subtlety of drawing. The great pale griffins sit in improbable flowery fields, heads arrogantly raised, peering down at the trespasser who dares to sit on “the oldest throne in Europe.”

That was what the guide called it, leading in a party of tourists. By this time, I was sitting on the floor with my sketchbook, cursing Evans’ beams, which seemed to defy the laws of perspective. The guide was a tall, thin young man with a pipe and a cavalry mustache. He also had the startling violet-blue eyes that occur now and again in bronzed Cretan faces, and an actor’s voice, effortlessly musical and resonant.

The tourists, invited to try the throne, shied off in dismay and settled on the benches like starlings on a telephone wire. Unsurprised, the guide enthroned himself and launched into the tale of Theseus, gesturing now and then with the empty pipe. The story had obviously been composed with care, although not actually memorized, and he told it well, dwelling on the distress of Athens, the excitement of Theseus’ voyage to Crete, the dark terrors of the labyrinth with its monstrous occupant, the beauty and generosity of the princess Ariadne. There was nothing exaggerated in the performance — it was good storytelling by a man who respected a great legend and gave time and thought to telling it well.

There was a sad irony in the situation. 1 he guide, by the look of him a Minoan of the old thin-waisted, long-limbed stock, perched on the throne of Minos, surrounded by the ruins of a great civilization. In the second millennium before Christ, this civilization produced gold work un bettered in its day (and seldom since); sophisticated pottery; carved stone vessels alive with active, beautifully composed scenes; bronze weapons inlaid with hunters, warriors, animals in gold and silver. It built great palaces, traded all around the eastern Mediterranean, and taught manners to the newcomc northern states on the Greek mainland. And the guide was telling the story of an Athenian hero, a story which, if it has any bearing on reality at all, must represent the defeat of the native Cretan dynasty by the piratical mainlanders. There is no other story to tell. Not a word of identifiable Cretan myth has survived.

Evans began digging in Crete with the intention of deciphering the signs on old Cretan seals as soon as he found enough examples to work on. He found instead a palace and a forgotten civilization, and in working on this trove, never got further with the writing than the identification of two types, called, for convenience, Linear A and Linear B. He was hardly dead when younger scholars pounced on the dried-clay tablets carrying this writing. Linear B was quickly cracked by the British code specialist Michael Ventris, and it proved to be antique Greek, the same language that was found on similar clay tablets at Mycenae and Pylos on the mainland.

There went Evans’ claim that the Cretans were a unique and mysterious race. At least for the last two centuries of its glory, Crete was ruled by well-greaved Achaeans from the mainland. They may have dressed and worshiped and married in Cretan style, as the Ptolemies later learned the manners of Egypt, but they kept their books decently, in Greek. And bookkeeping is all that the Linear B tablets have yielded so far or are ever likely to yield. Who would write poetry on a clay block if papyrus were available? And why wouldn’t it be available in a state that traded regularly with Egypt? Papyrus burns. Knossos, like the other Cretan palaces excavated so far, was burned. Linear A, the older language of the two, has not been officially deciphered, but there is no reason to think that it will cover anything but olive oil and horse furniture when it becomes readable. There is no story to tell at Knossos but the legend of the men who conquered it.

Ariadne was deserted at Naxos; Aegeus leaped into the sea. The guide wound up his tale with a fine balance of tragedy and triumph, while the tourists wiggled their toes, baked from hours of tramping over hot stone, and made no response at all. But the story hooked me. When the son of Homer had gathered up his audience and led it off to view the theatral area (so called because it is a very ambiguous sort of theater at the north gate), I looked at my sketch and found a shadowy Minotaur standing in the black inner doorway. I had no recollection of drawing him.