I expected in vain that his narrative would slip at some point from oratio obliqua to oratio recta the collusion of his glance, however, was something more than a hint. A mass of circumstantial detail suggested that he had played a considerable part in those ancient doings but it was never explicit. The utterances of this fluent old man revived them with great vividness. ‘They are laughing.’ It is true that the gaps between the uppers and the soles curled in the semblance of dark smiles. Those have seen their day.’ ‘Don’t you worry about them,’ Uncle Elias answered from his cloud. ‘Barba Flial,’ someone said, pointing to his disintegrating footgear, ‘you ought to get a new pair of boots. Blowing until the glow had spread, he laid the smouldering fungus on his pipe-bowl and puffed until a cloud of illegal and aromatic smoke embowered him. A faint whiff as of singeing cloth told us that the sparks had ignited it. ’Īs we talked, he fished a little bar of steel out of his pocket and then, holding it between finger and thumb with a disc of dried fungus held tight against it, he struck it repeatedly with a chip of flint. ‘Contraband from Agrinion,’ someone murmured. Laying his thick stick across the lamp-lit table he slowly crushed tobacco leaves in the palm of his hand and stuffed them into a home-made pipe. He came from a different village and the locals treated him with a mixture of affectionate teasing and respect. ‘The teeth are all right,’ Uncle Elias observed, flashing them once more, ‘but they’re out of work.’Įveryone laughed. ‘Those teeth are all his own, too,’ the hunchback said. The compliment called two new fans of wrinkles into play and his smile revealed long palisades of teeth from which not one was missing.
He looked much younger than ninety and I said so. A handsome, humorous and slightly actorish mobility stamped his features. When he took off his cloth cap of mockleopard’s skin-headgear which has long enjoyed an intermittent proletarian vogue in Greece-a snowy shock fell thick and straight over his corrugated brow. His long, clean-shaven face was a network of wrinkles but his dark eyes darted eagerly. ‘He’ll tell you all about the old Kravarites in the epoch’-this vague term, ‘stin ipochí,’ always refers to an indeterminate yore, a vague period of old days long sped. Uncle Elias is the man,’ they told me in the lamp-lit tavern.
To his surprise, they were willing and eager to talk about the skills of their ancestors. Paddy longed to find out whether these stories were based on fact, though he feared that raising the subject at all might cause indignation among the modern-day Kravarites. They were quack doctors, relic-pedlars, beggars and pickpockets-in fact every means of parting the unwary from their money had been raised, by the Kravarites, to a fine art. The Kravara is a wild region of western Greece, whose inhabitants had been famous for living exclusively by mendicity. * Identical with the rebeck which angels play in trecento paintings and on the capitals in cloisters. Here and there, especially in the south, one can detect a line of nose, a curl of brow, that may ultimately spring from this piratical sojourn. Rather more than a century later they were driven into the sea the island was seized for Byzantium again by Nicephorus Phocas and seven half-legendary princes. † The island was captured from the Byzantines by the Saracens of Spain in the eighth century, and turned into a nest of corsairs. * Cretans of the towns and the lowlands who had abandoned this mode were referred to, with some scorn but more pity, as makrypantalonáder. * Before beginning, all signed themselves with the cross, their thumb and two first fingers conjoined to honour the Trinity, the cross-bar going from right shoulder to left in the Orthodox way and, at the meal’s end, before storing away any fragments of bread left over, they would kiss them in memory of the Mystic Feast.
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