Captain Corelli's mandolin Read Online Free PDF

any of his goats.
    Far below him a feather of smoke rose straight into the air as a valley burned. It was uninhabited, and the maquis flamed unchecked, watched with concern only by those who feared that a wind might spring up and carry the sparks to places valuable for their dwellings, their herbs, or their tiny stony fields ringed with the piles of rocks that had been cleared for centuries and opportunely assembled into walls that rocked at the touch of a hand but fell only in times of earthquake. A Greek love of the colour of virginity had caused many of them to be painted white, as though it were not enough to be blinded by the sun alone. An itinerant patriot had daubed ENOSIS on most of them in turquoise paint, and no Cephallonian had seen fit to restore the walls to purity. Every wall, it seemed, reminded them of their membership of a family broken by the aberrant borders of senile rival empires, dispersed by an unruly sea, and victimised by a history that had placed them at the crossroads of the world.
    New empires were now lapping against the shores of the old. In a abort time it would no longer be a question of the conflagration of a valley and the death by fire of lizards, hedgehogs, and locusts; it would be a question of the incineration of Jews and homosexuals, gypsies and the mentally afflicted. It would be a case of Guernica sad Abyssinia writ large across the skies of Europe and North Africa, Singapore and Korea. The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide drat soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.
    But everyone admires strength and is seduced by it, including Pelagia. When she heard from a neighbour that there was a strongman in the square performing wonders and prodigies worthy of Atlas himself, she put up the broom with which she had been swooping the yard and hurried out to join the gaggle of the inquisitive and impressionable that had gathered near the well.
    Megalo Velisarios, famous all over the islands of Ionic, garbed as a pantomime Turk in pantaloons and curlicued slippers, self-proclaimed as the strongest man who had ever lived, his hair as prodigiously long as that of a Nazarene or Samson himself, was hopping on one leg in time to the clapping of hands. His arms outstretched, he bore, seated upon each stupendous bicep, a full-grown man. One of them clung tightly to his body, and the other, more studied in the virile arts, smoked a cigarette with every semblance of calm. On Velisarios' head, for good measure, sat an anxious little girl of about six years who was complicating his manoeuvres by clamping her hands firmly across his eyes.
    `Lemoni!' he roared. `Take your hands from my eyes and hold onto my hair, or I'll have to stop.'
    Lemoni was too overwhelmed to move her hands, and Megalo Velisarios stopped. With one graceful movement like that of a swan when it comes in to land, he tossed both men to their feet, and then he lifted Lemoni from his head, flung her high into the air, caught her under her arms, kissed her dramatically upon the tip of her nose, and set her down. Lemoni rolled her eyes with relief and determinedly held out her hand; it was customary that Velisarios should reward his little victims with sweets. Lemoni ate her prize in front of the whole crowd, intelligently prescient of the fact that her brother would take it from her if she tried to save it. The huge man patted her fondly upon the head, stroked her shining black hair, kissed her again, and then raised himself to his full height. `I will lift anything that it takes three men to lift,' he cried, and the villagers joined in with those words that they had heard so many times before, a chorus welt-rehearsed. Velisarios may have been strong, but he never varied his patter.
    `Lift the trough.'
    Velisarios inspected the cough; it was carved