Mani Read Online Free PDF Page B

and of the medieval Basilian hermits—can be kept for months. Hard as fossils, they are excellent; especially with garlic, when soaked to the right consistency. (The baked oblongs are fluted with deep clefts for easier breaking, and the detached fragments look like nothing so much as the brown treeless islets scattered round the coasts of Greece; in fact, many a small archipelago—notably the crags jutting from the Libyan sea off the south of Crete—are called Ta Paximadia .) Unwrapping the cloth, he put them on a stone, sprinkled the onions and tomatoes and peppers and cucumber with rock-salt and poured oil over them. Then he picked a fig leaf on which he piled a handful of olives in a black pyramid and pulled out a small bottle of wine. We joined him, he crossed himself three times, and we all fell to. When we had finished, emptying the glass in turn and mopping up the last puddles of oil with lumps of paximadia , he produced somesmall green pears which were hard and sweet. While we leant back smoking against boulders, he scrupulously collected what remained of the paximadia , kissed it, and knotted it in a cloth. There is a superstitious veto against throwing away all but the smallest crumbs of bread and the kiss is a thanksgiving and a memento of the Last Supper. He was a fair-haired, friendly but rather silent man.
    â€œYou shouldn’t go to sleep under a fig tree,” he said, observing our falling eyelids.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThe shadow is heavy.”
    I had heard this before, especially in Crete. There is never an explanation of this heaviness, except that it is alleged to bring on vertigo and bad dreams; it is as odd as the Caribbean superstition that sleeping under the bells of a datura tree in flower drives the sleeper mad. I shifted a few inches out of politeness, though I have never felt the ill effects. Yorgo lay with his head on a stone.
    When we woke up half an hour later, two small figures were standing at gaze a little distance off and behind them half a dozen goats had materialized, their presence unheralded by the clash of bells. We called to them but they neither answered nor moved, and it was only by dint of long coaxings and assurances that we were neither robbers nor outlaws that they ventured closer. They were two barefoot, raggedly dressed and ikon-faced little girls of ten and twelve, both of them extremely beautiful. They were tanned to a gypsy darkness, their hair was inexpertly bobbed and their brown legs were criss-crossed with the scars of thorns and thistles. They sat side by side on stones with their hands clasped round their knees and drank us in with immense black luminous eyes strangely compounded by innocence and wisdom under brows like arched and sweeping penstrokes, which seemed to fill their entire faces. Delicate, fine-boned and solemn, they could have been nothing but Greek; not so muchthe Greeks of the pagan world as the spiritual etiolation that gazes from the walls of St. Sophia and Ravenna: the bewildering combination of aloofness and devouring intensity that radiates from the eye-sockets of eastern Madonnas and empresses. They were called Anastasia and Antiope. Too shy to talk, almost their only utterances were an occasional cry—accompanied by a flung stone or a menacing flourish of their crooks—directed at a goat straying too far from the flock. Then they would sink into their silent and wide-eyed scrutiny. We gave them our remaining pears, and they thanked us with a polite gravity, but kept them, they said, to eat later. The pears remained like votive offerings in their cupped brown hands. When we rose and said good-bye, they asked us, suddenly articulate, why we didn’t stay on, and the eldest waved her hand round the rocky landscape as if to say that their house was at our disposal. But we hoisted our bundles and set off downhill.
    â€œGo towards the Good,” one of them said, and the other, “May you have the Good