“God have mercy on my soul,” he murmured, firing with closed eyes, and shot—not his enemy but himself.
CHAPTER XI. TENOS.
Like a roseate jewel in a circle of sapphire, with opal and mauve and purple lights struck from it by the sun’s rays, lies Tenos upon the deep and variable bosom of the Ægean waters. The Greek islands seen from the sea are untiringly, unspeakably beautiful. Shadow and shine, delicate hues and strong ones melt into an inextricable haze, as do the sensations of the spectator, incapable of analysis as he watches them. Energy oozes out through the finger-tips, the pulses quiet in lazy delight, and the eye is filled for once with seeing. But the heart is tranquil, unutterably content, and of speech there is no need. Here at last is forgetfulness of sorrow and unrest. Here is the Eastern sage’s dream realised, out of the reach of the envenomed shafts of Fate,—floating indolently on a just stirred field of liquid blue, all land and sky and water is a harmonious blending of the purest tints. An infinitude of azure melts by tranquil degrees into milk-white; a flame as bright as the heart of a pomegranate and blinding as unshaded carmine, steals insidiously into the mountains of mauve, and changes them to pink.
But it is only when your barque draws nigh the sleepy little hollow of a very sleepy little town, that you are shaken out of your exquisite dream of Paradise. You see the harsh subdued contrast of the white houses and their green jalousies, looking as if they had fallen asleep in the Middle Ages, and nobody had remembered to awake them since,—a break of dim barbaric life upon a background of desolate rocks and empty mountain sides. Tenos is certainly not Paradise. It has a little pier, and is a perfect maze of misshapen arches, and filthy lanes, calculated to make the least fastidious stranger shudder in mingled fear and disgust. There are unsavoury little cafés, outside which, at all hours of the day, uncouth men, in dirty costumes, sit drinking and smoking narghiles, which the café-clods carry from one to the other with the long tubes between their lips, and then pass it to the lips of their customers, who are vivaciously, and in passionate earnest, discussing the affairs of Europe, while Providence and the womenfolk are equal partners in the care of their own.
But the town, as you skirt the lanes and arches that crowd down upon the sea-line, has a charm exclusively its own. The tiny streets, when they are paved, are paved with marble; and the houses on either side have a cheerful conversational way of reaching across to shake hands and exchange other amenities. An occasional palm tree lifts itself up against the pure sky, as do the sails of wind mills, circled like monster spiders webs. There is music in the trickling descent of the mountain rills flowing over the marble and silver stones, in and out of which the lizards, quick with life and the joy of the sunshine, are ever coming and going. Then there is that singular construction, the great shrine and pilgrimage of the Virgin of the East, a marble building containing an expansive courtyard, a square of cloisters and pilgrim-houses and a curious semi-Byzantine church, full of monstrous treasures in gold and silver. Over the little town it towers in glistening splendour, on the top of an inclined street, called “Virgin Street,” enframed in silver olives and stately palms, and elegantly paved outside and inside. The sloping way that runs from it right down to the sea, might be ground of shining snow; it is moss embroidered, and lit by the double geraniums that look like roses, and shaded by the gloomy cypress.
The isle of Tenos has pretensions of its own that it were idle for us to dispute. It is divided into sixty-two villages, some of which consist of three churches and four houses, and none show less than three churches for the accommodation of every dozen inhabitants. It will be satisfactory for the law-loving reader to learn that these villages are apportioned into four mayoralties, governed by one mayor and three justices of the peace, and that,—late crown of representative existence, until M. Tricoupis cruelly brought in a bill a year or two ago, which affiliated this “tight little island” with her near neighbour Andros,—it actually sent three members to Parliament, to look after its interests in King George’s Boulé at Athens. But all glory is evanescent. It has been proved by history that it is idle to place any trust in ministers or princes. Heaven knows why Tenos was shorn of her parliamentary splendour, but alas! what is to be expected of an economic minister, who prefers to consider the debts of Hellas rather than her greatness, and who rashly decided that the work left undone by three Members of Parliament may be efficiently accomplished by one? The chief and most exasperating neglect of these late illustrious persons is the formation of roads. There is not a single road throughout the island, and only two level spots, the lovely plain of Kolymvithra, and a quarter of a mile round the great purple Castro, where once the Venetians held their seat of government, their solitary fortress towering over the ruined little town of Borgo. This oasis of pathway, in a desert of precipices and rocky altitudes, runs from the top of the episcopal village of Xinara to the Greek monastery in the village of San Francisco. It is unknown whether it is a remnant of Venetian civilisation or of Turkish barbarism. But it is quite certain that it is not the result of the crown of triple representatives Tenos until lately wore. For the rest of the time, the rider is conducted by an unmanageable mule, which indulges a lively weakness for the dizzy verge of a ravine, along which he phlegmatically picks his way. From almost perpendicular escarpments he drops into awful depths of rock and furze and nettle, to trail his anxious and unhappy burden through the musical bed of a torrent, and damage irretrievably a new pair of boots by forcing them into an inconvenient affinity with rough walls and jutting branches.
After a while, when the frame becomes physically inured to the sensational extremities of this kind of exercise, the traveller discovers that, however dreadful the eccentricities of his mule, the brute is very sure, if leisurely, and that though his position be invariably a discomposing ascent or descent, no harm to his head or his limbs will come of it. He gradually learns to take his troubles philosophically, and look about him with perfect security. If it is evening, he will note the heavenliest sky, and watch the soft mist burn out the sapphire stealingly, while the strata of gold and rose fade to pink and pearly opal. He will delight in the contrast of marble mountain and purple thyme, cyclamens waving the meadows mauve, or poppies covering them in scarlet flakes, and the tall daisies white above the green like the foam of the sea, or anemones making a delicate haze upon the landscape. There will be patches of white heath over the hill curves, and poignant scents to stir the senses. And in and out of the twilit gray of the olives, the darkening glance and sparkle of the sea that is never out of sight,—now laughing through a network of fig branches, then through the stiff spikes of the cactus, or the graceful foliage of the plane, and white villages studding the orchards and gardens like jewels. Over all hangs a strange note of happy indifference, a rude naturalness that seeks no concealment and cares not for shadow, hymns the smiles of blue water and the glory of the sky; the sharp broad beauties of seashore and mountain and valley.
The people are as simple as their landscape. Their lives are spent in Arcadian ignorance and unaccomplished simplicity, as unconscious of the evils of destitution as of the temptation of wealth. They dislike work, and manage to shirk it, for every one owns a garden, a few fruit trees, a goat, a pig, and perhaps a donkey. Dirty in their persons, their houses are invitingly clean, and stand always open.