Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online

the Forty Saints in a strong western wind, but became totally becalmed in the lea of the headland, and lay off the Stephano lighthouse, watching a party refuel the lamp. It was strange to lie in this well of still water while not more than two hundred yards off the wind crisped the sea, and the air was wild with herring gulls. One of the lighthouse men tried to engage us in amiableconversation but at that range we could not understand a word he said, so we had to be content to wave to each other.
    Zarian and his wife had arrived when we got back for tea, to stay a couple of days. Zarian says he has read somewhere that Nelson once drafted a plan to take the Old Fort (considered impregnable in his time) by running a frigate aground by the seawall, and boarding her from the masts. From every point of view a bad plan for there is a sea ramp which would have grounded the ship before her boarding crews were within reach of the lower battlements.
    A letter from Zarian’s wife in the south of the island.
    You say I am your cruelest critic. I have been afraid when you seemed about to submit the island to the contamination of “fine writing”—but I need not have been. You will never touch it, my dear boy. Has the chapter upon Corcyra’s perpetual spring been finished? I had it so much in mind that this walk southward with Theodore and the child has been like wandering through your book ahead of you. But how can you do it—how can anybody? There is as you say, no sense of season for the small ones. I have thrown away my paint box. Soon you will be throwing away your typewriter. All the summer children like iris and anemone, are out again—glades of them falling away to the White Cape, revived by the first autumn rains. Hereit is your own underworld. My sketchbooks are fuller of notes than any Theodore could make it: speedwell, iris stylosa (?), marigolds, cranesbill, buttercup and pimpernel. Even the beady blue drops of grape hyacinth—how?
    You should do a sort of ballet of fruits and flowers; chorus the rough blue of sea, the staple olive-tone washed in rotation by the wild pearfoam, and the lands under Spartila by peachmist and asphodelcloud. It is too much. Mist of plum, pear, almond.
    Now we camped for the night in an orchard where nespoles in golden knots—but why go on? You must come and see for yourself. Utterly silent and out of prehistory lay a little olive grove shelving into the sea on a beach carpeted with brown dry seaweed. We have been cooking from a friendly cottage with an earth floor, the garden of it crammed with wistaria, carnation and stock—drunk-making and rich.
    High up above me when I look up from this pad I see two villages with cypresses on crags above us; where the ancient temple was is now a small whitewashed church—nothing has really changed as you said. And the crags are alive with golden broom. Kestrels hover and shriek over the blue gulf. A girl minds her sheep and is friendly. Here it is the habit to keep a flower dangling in the teeth—to set offthe wonderful flashing smile.
    This morning when we went down for a bathe we found the abbot of a local monastery sitting on a rock fishing for dear life. He accepted a sandwich with great politeness and exchanged it for a cigarette which he took from his stovepipe hat, which meant that he untidied his hair; he had to comb it out again and restore the bun at the back.
    So you see how terribly unearthly we are becoming, just three days in this haunted grove. And of course we have given your love to everyone here.
    8.13.37
    Father Nicholas is a great mythological character. He is a big-boned rosy-faced old man of close on sixty-five. He likes to sit and boast by the edge of the sea on calm days, like an Ionian Canute. He is the author of three fine sons, one of whom is young Nicholas the village schoolmaster. Under his pendulous trumpeter’s cheeks, under the sculptured fall of the great moustache, his mouth is always smiling. He still wears the