The cocks of Matapan

Is there companionship in language, itself? A child will tell you. One does not have to be so wise to sense it, but this tongue is a heartbreak of resources given to such shattering largesse, that if there were anything to conserve from its hegemony it would be this, its charity. 

I give you the example of a traveler in his 30s at mid-Century, spinning out a speculation late at night with friends and wine, in the impenetrable seacoast of the southern Peloponnese - and so, you know who this is. But do you remember the luxuriant, persistently erotic flow of this protracted arc, through delectations fusing learning and experience with its mounting, measured, endless image of one abrasive, raucous sound,  over and over enriched with the particular, telling of the world? The trajectory is vast; I cite only its migration through all of Greece. Follow it. 

Satiric, picaresque, rapturous, merrily ridiculous, melancolic, matter-of-fact; how protean, how free can the mind be, that's given this thing for traveling, to give it its head, and pass it on? Or let it come indoors on Friday night, and know there is this gift involving you, of discovery unbound.

We sat on in the cool silence of the floating garden, talking of these phantom cockcrows; and with a special reason. If the reader knows Mr Henry Miller's book about Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, he will remember an appendix, a letter from Lawrence Durrell to the author soon after his departure; it describes how, following a tremendous dinner in Athens, Durrell and his fellow diners climbed up to the Acropolis but found the gates shut; Katsimbalis, suddenly inspired, took a deep breath and "sent out the most bloodcurdling clarion I have ever heard: Cock-a-doodle-doo..." and then, after a pause, 'lo from the distance, silvery-clear in the darkness, a cock drowsily answered - then another, then another. Soon, the whole night was reverberating with cockcrows: all Attica and perhaps all Greece. 

Perhaps all Greece. The distance between Cythera and Cape Matapan on the tattered map in my pocket, was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. This enormously extended the possible ambit of Katsimbalis' initial cockcrow. If the Maniots, with a helping wind, could hear the cocks of Cythera, the traffic, with a different wind, could be reversed, and leap from the Mani (or better still, Cape Malea) to Cythera, from Cythera to Anticythera,  and from Anticythera to the piratical peninsulas of western Crete; only to die out south of the great island in a last, lonely crow on the islet of Gavdos, in the Libyan Sea ...

But a timely west wind could carry it to the eastern capes of Crete, over the Cassos straits, through the islands of the Dodecanese, and thence to the Halicarnassus peninsula and the Taurus mountains... The possibilities became suddenly tremendous and in our mind's ear the ghostly clarion travelled south-west into Egypt, south-east to the Persian Gulf; up the Nile, past the villages of the stork-like Dinkas, through the great forests ..

We thought with sorrow of the silent poles and huge bereaved antipodes, of the scattered islets and archipelagos that were out of range; of combed heads tucked in sleep under many a speckled wing that no salutation from the Parthenon would ever wake ..

Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE

Mani: Travels in the southern Peloponnese

John Murray, 1958©


i, photo Paschalis