The Colossus of Maroussi Read Online Free PDF

after a typhoon. The houses too, when their solidity burst through the mirage, seemed to be suspended in space. The whole atmosphere was ridden with a shuddering Biblical splendor punctuated with the tinkling bells of the ponies, the reverberations of the poison song, the faint boom of the surf far below and an undefinable mountain murmuring which was probably nothing more than the hammering of the temples in the high and sultry haze of an Ionian morning. We took spells of resting at the edge of the precipice, too fascinated by the spectacle to continue on through the pass into the clear, bright work-a-day world of the little mountain village beyond. In that operatic realm, where the Tao Teh King and the ancient Vedas fused dramatically in contrapuntal confusion, the taste of the light Greek cigarette was even more like straw. Here the palate itself became metaphysically attuned: the drama was of the airs, of the upper regions, of the eternal conflict between the soul and the spirit.
    Then the pass, which I shall always think of as the carrefour of meaningless butcheries. Here the most frightful, vengeful massacres must have been perpetrated again and again throughout the endless bloody past of man. It is a trap devised by Nature herself for man’s undoing. Greece is full of such death traps. It is like a strong cosmic note which gives the diapason to the intoxicating light world wherein the heroic and mythological figures of the resplendent past threaten continually to dominate the consciousness. The ancient Greek was a murderer: he lived amidst brutal clarities which tormented and maddened the spirit. He was at war with everyone, including himself. Out of this fiery anarchy came the lucid, healing metaphysical speculations which even to-day enthrall the world. Going through the pass, which demands a sort of swastika maneuvering in order to debouch free and clear on the high plateau, I had the impression of wading through phantom seas of blood; the earth was not parched and convulsed in the usual Greek way but bleached and twisted as must have been the mangled, death-stilled limbs of the slain who were left to rot and give their blood here in the merciless sun to the roots of the wild olives which cling to the steep mountain slope with vulturous claws. In this mountain pass there must also have been moments of clear vision when men of distant races stood holding hands and looking into one another’s eyes with sympathy and understanding. Here too men of the Pythagorean stripe must have stopped to meditate in silence and solitude, gaining fresh clarity, fresh vision, from the dust-strewn place of carnage. All Greece is diademed with such antinomian spots; it is perhaps the explanation for the fact that Greece has emancipated itself as a country, a nation, a people, in order to continue as the luminous carrefour of a changing humanity.
    At Kalami the days rolled by like a song. Now and then I wrote a letter or tried to paint a water color. There was plenty to read in the house but I had no desire to look at a book. Durrell tried to get me to read Shakespeare’s Sonnets and, after he had laid siege to me for about a week, I did read one, perhaps the most mysterious sonnet that Shakespeare ever wrote. (I believe it was “The Phoenix and the Turtle.”) Soon thereafter I received a copy in the mail of The Secret Doctrine and this I fell on with a will. I also reread Nijinsky’s Diary. I know I shall read it again and again. There are only a few books which I can read over and over—one is Mysteries and another is The Eternal Husband . Perhaps I should also add Alice in Wonderland . At any rate, it was far better to spend the evening talking and singing, or standing on the rocks at the edge of the water with a telescope studying the stars.
    When the Countess again appeared on the scene she persuaded us to spend a few days on her estate in another part of the island. We had three wonderful days together and then in the middle