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

me in this game of bishops and kings, how can I believe you in other matters?”
    In this flow of banter they disguise their affection for each other; for when Theodore is hunting for malaria specimens Father Nicholas will walk miles beside him to show him the location of a particular pond or well. While, whenever illness visits the family, either the sufferer or a letter is despatched at once by caique to Theodore in his laboratory. And we, as Theodore’s friends, have become partly involved in these questions of the community’s health. The encyclopedia, a medicine chest, and a thermometer enable N. to perform miracles of diagnosis. So far we have successfully diagnosed two cases of whooping cough, one malaria, one case of rheumatic fever, and a case of incipient rickets due to malnutrition.
    11.15.37
    You wake one morning in the late autumn and notice that the tone of everything has changed; the sky shines more deeply pearl, and the sun rises like a ball of blood—for the peaks of the Albanian hills are touched with snow. The sea has become leaden and sluggish and the olives a deep platinum grey. Fires smoke in the villages, and the breath of Maria as she passes with her sheep to the headland, is faintly white upon the air. All morning she will sit crouched among the bracken and myrtle, singing in her small tired witch’s voice, while the sheep bells clonk dully around her. She is clad in a patchwork of rags, and leather slippers. In her hands she holds the spinning bobbin upon which she is weaving her coarse woollen thread. Later on the treadle loom in the magazine Helen will weave the coarse colored blankets which the shepherd boys take into the hills with them where they mind their sheep in the deeper winter approaching. Maria watches the younger women picking olives through her wrinkled violet eyes and spits contemptuously before taking up her little song—which is about two ravens sitting in an olive tree. Golden eagles hover in the grey. The cypresses hang above their own reflections like puffs of frozen grey smoke. Far out in the straits the black shape of a boat sits motionless—or dragging slowly and uncouthly with the flash of oars—like an insect upon a leaf. Now is the time to break logs for the greatfireplace we have built ourselves, and smell the warm enriching odor of cypress wood, tar, varnish and linseed oil. It is time to prepare for the first gale of tears and sunsets from Albania and the East.

Karaghiosis:
The Laic Hero
    W E TIE UP at the old port on Tuesday and find little Ivan Zarian dancing down the great staircase under the lion of St. Mark to meet us. He has been waiting to tell us the great news. Karaghiosis has come to town and there is to be a performance this evening. All the children of the town and of course numbers of peasants will be there. We send Spiro to book seats for us all, and spend the afternoon sitting on the esplanade drinking lemonade in the white pure sunshine, and listening to clinking of ice in glasses around us. It is one of the innumerable Saints’ days, and as such a whole holiday. The cafes are crowded, and the green grass of the esplanadestudded with the gay clothes of the Corfiot girls. Zarian, aroused from the abstraction into which his weekly Armenian literary article always throws him, discourses amiably about the art of the shadow play. He has come across Karaghiosis under different guises in Turkey and in the Middle East, where the little black-eyed man wore, instead of his enormous prehensile baboon’s arm, a phallus of equal dimensions. Translated into Greek he is no longer a symbol of pornographic buffoonery but something much more subtle—the embodiment of Greek character. It is a fertile theme. National character, says Zarian, is based upon the creations of the theatre. Huxley has remarked somewhere that Englishmen did not know how the Englishman should behave like until Falstaff was created; now the national character is so well established that