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Sphakia – Impressions
general fear of the dark which holds unaccountable mysteries. Methods
of dealing with the upside-down-ones abound. If your donkey expands
and takes you past your destination, it needs only the sign of the pent-
alpha (the five-pointed star of Solomon, infallible against demons) to
put him on to the right track. And a prayer to the Virgin will take you
back to where you started from with your foot raised ready to mount.
The donkey will then vanish from before you, filling the air with fire
and sparks from his unrestrained farting. As usual the devil turns out
to be somewhat ludicrous.
But the best way of coping with an upside-downer is to unmask him
before you even mount, by an obscene threat. Seize him by the tail
and shout, ‘Thus shall I f... you!’ Again, if he is diabolic, he will disappear
in a sulphurous cloud, farting as he goes.
Needless to say, we did not test Aleko in this way when we first met
him, or at any time later. It would have been an insult to the owners,
and to Aleko, who looked so gentle, sweet, yet lively, that any spirit
which possessed him must surely have been saintly, not devilish.
Besides, if I remembered rightly, the upside-down-ones, like vampires,
Nereids and other supernatural phenomena, appear at night. It is only
Pan, the midday demon, who disturbs the unwary at noon.
We came on to the Omalos in the evening, passing shepherds and
distant goats whose tinkling music of bells sounds like spring-water in
the poets’ descriptions. Up here the stink lilies are still in bud – purple
spear-like flowers a foot long. The bearded barley rustles; the asphodel
shimmers in the late sunlight. Tucked away beside the road on the way
up there are cheese huts where rich graviera and creamy mizithra are
squeezed from the milk of thyme-fed sheep.
The Omalos (‘the level’) is the strangest of the upland plateaus which
distinguish Crete; such as the Nidha plain on Mt Ida, the plateau of
Anopolis, and Lassithi. Lassithi is large, fertile and beautiful; especially
in springtime when the upland grass is of Alpine greenness, the flowers
are manifold, and the snow on Dicte is gashed by black outlines of
ravines. Then at the beginning of May the windmills start to turn,
pumping water to irrigate the plain. If you look down on Lassithi from
the cave where Zeus was born you can see thousands of white-sailed
windmills riding the plain like tall ships. The Omalos is different; it is
much smaller, and lacks the cultivated apple trees, the mills, the
populous villages which fringe Lassithi. It is a simple patch of produc -
tive land, a thousand metres high, ringed with mountains. In the winter
it is uninhabited. Snow covers the plain, and for some time after it
melts the land remains flooded and unworked. In summer, from May
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