UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Tir Nan Og
By STEWART SANDERSON (University of Edinburgh)
THE island lies many miles away. Its cliffs rise sheer from the water, even where the constant waves have corroded long inlets and tortuous channels, a chasm big enough for a battleship and creeks that will hardly take a dinghy. There is only one place where the land slopes in gentle welcome to the
sea, where a curving embrace of sand hugs the waters of Alinda Bay. Elsewhere the enmity of land and sea is apparent ; the island, proud as Achilles, has not compromised. The cliffs rise sheer from the sea, marked with red naked scars where huge sections of the grey-brown rock have collapsed. Only at Alinda Bay are the elements of earth and water yoked peacefully together.
The town climbs up the rock-face at the southern point of the bay. It dares not intrude on the fertile soil of the plain. Fruit and vegetables from the plain, fish from the bay ; from the air comes winter rain, to be guarded in underground cisterns from the jealous fire of the sun. The elements govern the lives of the people and shape the plan of their town, a straggling town of square houses washed white or blue or red, a town that clambers up two narrow lanes to the square on the shoulder of the hill. A ruined castle, carved out of the rock by the knights of St. John of Jerusalem, straddles the crest of this hill. It looks proudly across the town to the other hills of the island, and its crumbling battlements command the town and the plain and the sea, a sweep of the Aegean that wrinkles its way across to the mountain-wall of Turkey. One other building perches on a spur of the hill. it is a red-tiled Byzantine church, dominated by the Crusader castle. Three windmills, round and squat, shorn off unexpectedly at the top, stand on the ridge between the castle and Platanos Square. Their wooden vanes creak uneasily in the light winds of summer and whirl like Catherine- wheels in the winter gale. Apart from these, there are no buildings in the island except the square houses of the town, spilt like a box of bricks down the rocky slopes of the hill. A stone jetty noses out into the bay.
The fishing-boats lie along the jetty, nudging each other with the laughing waves. They are painted the colour of the sea, blue for the deep water, green for the sandy shallows. Some of them have brightly-painted eyes, others a name on the transom. There is a smell of diesel oil and fish and tar about them ; their brown sails and canvas-dodgers are smudged with grease. The phut-phut-phut of their single-cylinder engines, a haze of blue smoke and the rattle of anchor-cables show that they are putting out to sea. When they return they will bring catches of silver tunny, which are weighed out in pailfuls and sold to the women on the jetty.
Other boats are to be found here, too—a trim little boat with orange sails ; dinghies which the youths take out at night along
the shallows of the bay Their carbide-lamps can be seen bobbing like fireflies over the water as they spear the red mullet and collect octopus and langouste from their baited pots. The ribs of a half- built boat are chocked up on a crude slipway. Sometimes a big caique of fifty or seventy tons will run of an evening into the bay. The anchor splashes. The caique swings round its cable and drops stern to the jetty. The lettering on the transom is spelt out ; Samos, Chios, even the. Piraeus. The brown-skinned crew speak with a different intonation ; they have strange tales to tell and curious news. At sunrise two stooping figures swing rhythmically before the stumpy mast, and the caique draws away from the jetty as the cable clanks home. There is a splutter from the motor, the anchor is aweigh, and the strangers depart. The island once more remains withdrawn from the world.
Life on the island is concentrated on Platanos Square. It radiates from here in ever-diminishing intensity down the hill, across the plain, and up the further slopes till it reaches the last scattered goat- herd with his melancholy flute. Only at certain times of day and at certain seasons of the year does the centre shift—to the jetty when the boats come in, to the fields at planting and harvest, to the church at the Easter festival. Otherwise Platanos Square is the focus of life on the island.
Despite its name, there are no plane-trees in the square. At mid- day not a scrap of shade is to be found in the dusty rectangle ; in the late afternoon the walls throw lengthening shadows across, and men emerge from their shuttered sleep and congregate in the café. They do not sit outside, for drinking is a man's business and to be conducted away from the prying eyes of women. The café has a bare wooden floor, four pitted tables and a varnished bar. Gnarled knuckles in a corner clap dominoes into angular patterns. Glasses of ouzo and of strong red wine are poured from wicker- covered demijohns. On the bar there is a bottle of ouzo with the pungent twig of a mountain-plant in it. Nobody drinks from that bottle. Nobody knows why it is there. There is plenty of ouzo in the demijohns, and there are plenty of topics to discuss without turning to a bottle which has always been there and always will. In the café there is talk of women, of prospects for the harvests of land and sea, of guile on a heroic scale, of dollars remitted by sponge-fishers in the Gulf of Florida. The steady click of dominoes punctuates the conversation.
Towards evening the workers come back from the fields. Many of them are boys ; many of them the wives of the men in the café. The women wear black, and have kerchiefs round their heads. Their figures are thickened and bent with toil and with child-bearing. In the café their men talk of the lissom girls who will emerge in the evening, to climb the streets of the town and stroll in groups around the square. In the evening there will be music in the café, a thrumming guitar and voices singing together. The drinking will be deeper, the gaming more reckless. Sometimes a solitary youth will break into a dance, swooping and backing to the rhythm of the guitar. Sometimes the whole town will dance, young and old, shoulder to shoulder, in a daft caper round the square.
Next morning there will be work again. There are goats to be tended, vines to be trained, olive-groves to be tilled. The market in the square will be piled high with egg-fruit and melons, grapes, currants and figs.. Mimosa and oleander, asphodel, hibiscus, bou- gainvillea, even the yellow broom, have their time and place in the square. At midday the town retires. Children run shrieking from school, while the priest meanders behind them, head bent over the cobbles. His hair is wound into a bun beneath his black stove- pipe hat, and horn-rimmed spectacles distinguish him as a man of learning. He, too, will rest after his meal. There is a smell of salted fish cooking in olive oil, a whiff of burnt coffee and pungent tobacco. The other smells of the island are not found in the town—crushed eucalyptus-leaves, thick incense, mountain- thyme ; towards the end of the summer the heavy fumes of the vintage.
The seasons come and go with an easy gait. In the last days of winter the sea is stained yellow with soil washed down from the terraced hills. Spring comes overnight with sunshine and clear flowers. As the summer unrolls itself colours grow richer and darker. Only the olive-trees purl silver in the breeze, cutting across dull vines and grey-brown rock Autumn domes late in the year, brooding over the island. . .
One can never visit that island with its steady life between the earth and the sapphire sea. One can never relive one's youth, the green years devoured by the locust. There will be other islands, of course, breasting the Atlantic or sweltering in jungle heat ; but not that island. It lies many miles away.
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