Leaving the pleasing altitudes of a general survey, the reader is invited to fix his gaze upon the little village of Xinara. Two things strike the observer on entering its single street; the quantity of pigs and unwashed children, and the signs of desolation and pre-existence upon the blackened ruins in suggestive proximity with the comparatively new houses and cottages. Near bright flowers and trellised verandahs, stand broken walls with fig branches and weeds struggling through a dismantled window, and curious Venetian symbols and legends wrought in marble, now black with age and exposure, above the doors and windows that have long since served the pigeons as convenient shelter. With the pigs and poultry peeping through the wooden chinks, you see blocks of marble crusted with gold and silver stones scintillating like flashes of light. Beside a little glaring church, jaunty in its hideousness, stand a row of houses burnt yellow and black, as if they had sustained all the sieges of the Middle Ages, and pierced with pigeon holes like a face with small-pox.
The street is divided in two by a dark stone arch. Instead of the provincial inn, there are three clubs, the blacksmith’s den, the carpenter’s rude workshop, and the single general store. This is kept by the village Lothario, Demetrius, a splendid fellow inclining to corpulency, who wears a ring, a fez, and even goes to the length of washing his hands and face and combing his hair once a day. One is not a village Lothario for nothing. He is married, and hence he adds a disappointed and hopeless air to his fascinating crimson tie whenever he serves or chats with a woman under forty. But he draws the line at forty. Kyria Demetrius has attained that respectable age.
There is a fountain close by, where the women gather with red earthen jars to draw water and indulge in cheerful social intercourse. It is enclosed in a deep, damp arch, black and lichen-grown, with heavy beams of wood supporting its roof, and higher up is the public laundry, a tank with a sloping stone under it, where the laundresses scrub their linen kneeling round, and converse in a dull undertone, varied by an occasional tendency to scream.
The houses are reached by a small flight of marble steps, and are always confined to one floor with a pretty terrace outside, and underneath is stabling for the mules and donkeys and other live stock.
Beyond the archway lies the Catholic Cathedral, with the Bishop’s Palace and Garden. The Church is of respectable size, but ugly, and the Palace a dreary yellow building enlivened by the red tiles of the pectinated roof. But the Bishop’s garden is charming. Goldfinches sing in the Persian lilacs, and the rippling rills are never silent. In the centre, there is a big stone tank and a sun-dial, and the oranges swing like gold balls against the dark cypress. The valley upon which it looks down is indeed a vale of delight. Olives paint a silver mist upon the sunny landscape, and the fig and mulberry foliage lend it colour. The girdling mountains of the neighbouring isles rise sharply against the sky, and in and out their curves, opening upon the roseate shores of Eubœa, breaks the sea like lapidescent blue, while through the moist, grassy plain of Kolymvithra twists and swirls a vein of silver water. The other side of the picture is a view of gloomy mountain, bare grey rock and broken blocks of marble, rising above the tangle of village gardens and trellised verandahs, with their showy display of geraniums, carnations, roses and cactus drapery, from whose bed of peaked leaves gleam large magenta stars. And here and there the windmills make gigantic shadows upon the earth, flocks of pigeons shoot like spots of illuminated snow through the sunlit air, and goats browse amongst the scented furzes of the rocks, in easy companionship with mules and kine.
To reach the house of Pericles Selaka, on the other side of the village, the traveller must make his own pathway with the loose stones in the bed of a minute down-flowing stream. The water is crystal-clear, and nothing can be more engaging than its gurgle and sparkle, but damp feet are the inevitable consequence of its acquaintance. After a wet passage through the torrent-bed, more or less torn and troubled by the neighbourhood of blackberries, thorny hedgerows and tall reeds, he will have to cut his way through a stony meadow, jump the low, loose walls that separate each field, tangle his limbs in a multiplicity of straggling branches and uncultivated growths, and trample ruthlessly upon the pretty heads of the wild flowers. Every shade in foliage, and every hue and odour in flower will charm him: the delicacy of the plane sets off the polished darkness of the oleander and myrtle leaf, the moist glitter of the maidenhair enriches the ferns that spread themselves like fans upon the rocks, and along the vine-branches the shooting leaves begin to uncurl. From the hedges there will be the song of the linnets and goldfinches, and under them the musical lapping of water against stones.
Pericles Selaka’s house had originally belonged to a Venetian noble family, and still showed the coat-of-arms wrought in marble on either side of the gate, with a Latin inscription under a Venetian gondola. It stood above the village, overlooking the two lovely valleys that divide the flanks of the empty encircling hills,—hills bare of all but the glory of their own tint, and the wavering clouds that sweep, soft and shadowy, over the everlasting sunshine. Behind it the mighty Castro, proud in its purple and grey desolation, bereft of its old splendour, but still dominating the island like an acropolis, and in through the openings of its crags, cleft in nature’s fury, runs the sea as through a frame. The courtyard into which the gate opened was gemmed with flowers. In the middle there was a well, and on either side a palm tree with wooden seats under its shade.
It was winter, so the vine-roofed verandah was a flood of sunshine. A short flight of marble steps led to the terrace above, whence Syra, Delos and Naxos might be seen, as well as the sloping fields that drop into the torrent below, and Selaka’s orchard and vineyard, which, at that time, showed pale, slim lines of green just opening upon the brown earth. A watch-dog dozing in view, lazily observed the regular rise and fall of the digger’s spade, and only wakened to sharp activity whenever a venturesome sheep or goat thrust itself upon his notice. An oppressive silence lay upon the land, and there was silence in the house whence the terrace opened.
The room into which you stepped from the terrace was simplicity itself. White everywhere; white sofas, white curtains and white chair covers, with a purple table-cloth edged with wonderful Byzantine embroidery. On a black cabinet there was a goodly display of old Greek jars and lamps; and inside, a tray of antique coins and exquisitely carved silver. These heirlooms are to be found in the poorest Teniote cottages. I have been served by a cottager with water and jam on a heavy silver tray, the water in a delicate Venetian glass with armorial bearings wrought in colours into the glass, and the jam in a costly silver chalice. In a recess there were shelves fitted with the Greek classics, from which the Latin writers were jealously excluded. Your scholarly Greek despises Latin. Sitting at a side table beside a window that looked out upon the Castro, was an old man bent over one of these classical tomes. He was reading in a leisurely, familiar way, as a connoisseur sips his port. Occasionally he lifted his eyes from his book, and removed his black cap, all the while unconsciously and swiftly rolling up cigarettes, and puffing with the same deliberate appreciation noticeable in his manner of reading. He was a keen, thoughtful-looking man, with a curious mingling of black and white in hair and beard.
His solitude was interrupted by the entrance of an old woman, dressed in a garment that may best be described as a black sack. She was a serene little woman, very tidily built, with an indefatigable and sturdy air, and in her brown face sparkled two preternaturally black eyes. She wore a Turkish kerchief of red muslin wound round her head, and outside this an enormous plait of false hair, as is the ungraceful habit of the Island women. This was Selaka’s housekeeper and servant in one. She was called Annunziata.