free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
could be done until morning. Julie made a brief search without success.
She went back to bed and lay sleepless with worry till first light, when
she went out again. Aleko was in the middle of a vineyard, entangled in
his own rope. He had stripped three vines clear of leaves, and looked
ashamed of himself. When we found the owner later in the day, he
would not hear of repayment,
(Some days later we tethered Aleko at blackest midnight to the
only available tree, and woke – or rather Julie woke – to find that he
had eaten two or three square yards of a field of barley. The agrophylax
(country warden) arrived immediately, as if by magic, and was quite
rightly annoyed. In the end, however, his natural courtesy towards
mad foreigners overcame his anger. A Cretan would have copped it.
Putting a donkey on to your neighbour’s land would be as malicious as
slyly moving his boundary stone.)
So we had acquired a donkey. I must admit I was a little uneasy,
Stevenson only had to deal with Modestine’s whims and tantrums;
but in Crete there are other dangers – beasts are not always what they
seem. Inside the body of a dog may lurk the soul of an infidel Turk.
The hare changes its sex every year. The crow has a hole pierced in its
throat. The donkey may be an anaskelas. I remembered a story about
one Statheroyiannis of Voriza and a donkey.
This palikari was going one night from his village to another, when he
saw a donkey standing loose in the middle of the road. The donkey
looked tired. Statheroyiannis resolved to ride him.
He mounted. They hadn’t gone ten paces when the donkey began to
grow taller.
‘Hey!’ shouted Statheroyiannis. ‘To the devil with this donkey I’ve
got here!’
The donkey laughed and enquired, ‘Does the devil himself go to the
devil?’
A sinister reply. Statheroyiannis at once realized he was dealing
with an anaskelas. He kept his grip on the monster despite its diabolic
size. He drew his knife (which had a black handle – the magic colour
for evil things) and pinned it to the beast’s rump. Immediately the
anaskelas shrunk and became a normal donkey again.
‘Devil-believer!’ said Statheroyiannis. ‘Now see who you’re up
against. The very devil of devils!’ And blow by blow he beat it all the
way to his destination, riding on its back.
As a matter of fact the anaskelades (upside-down-ones) do not seem
ever to have been really dangerous, in the way that vampires can be. 2
The fear that they inspired was never excessive, simply a part of that
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