Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (7 page)

After half an hour’s pause to meditate on the advantages of civilization, off we went again. The line immediately curved westwards round the sides of the blue and rose mountains we had seen the day before from the sea, rising from the golden carpet of flowers. Here and there were pale yellow or pink houses with flat, tiled roofs, standing among olive groves and vineyards. Great, dark cypresses stood up very still in the clear air. Then we reached a belt of red-trunked pine trees, which filled the air with their resinous perfume, and ever as we climbed the sea spread wider behind us.

Suddenly, as we reached a ridge, the whole gulf of Athens stretched out before us, surrounded by chains of high mountains; the sea was so blue that it looked violet against the ochre of the hill-sides. At certain points the railway hung directly over the sea, and through the crystal-clear water we could see the rocks and rose-coloured seaweeds, fading into the blue depths as the eye travelled farther from the shore.

These solitary beaches are barely skimmed by the waves of this ever-tranquil sea, which seems to spread itself languidly on the sand to sleep. No breaker ever comes to disturb the peace of these shores, which are sheltered by the near-by islands from the deep-sea swell, and in some places the olive trees grow so near the water that their foliage is reflected in it.

Our little train had got up speed, and for two hours we had been running at eighteen miles an hour through this fairy-like landscape, without stopping even at the rare stations which linked up the little villages with their gold-roofed houses to civilization.

About ten o’clock we crossed the canal of Corinth, cut perpendicularly through three hundred feet of rock, sheer down as if it had been sawn. A shabby tramp steamer was trailing along in the bottom of this groove, filling it with black smoke. Once over the metal bridge, we were in the peninsula of Morea, and soon entered the station of Corinth. We could not see anything of the famous city; after a few rapid glimpses of the blue gulf between gloomy houses which turned their back on the railway line, we plunged anew into the mountains.

From the foot of a valley hemmed in with hills, the little train climbed through a winding ravine up over the rounded shoulders of the hills to a great, wild moor. Not a single village was to be seen, or indeed any trace of human habitation. A vegetation of stunted bushes and rock plants
grew as best it could among the chalky boulders, and covered the spurs of the mountains with a mantle of heath. Here and there we saw small enclosures, surrounded by dry-stone dykes, in which had been planted scrubby vines. Old olive trees with black and twisted trunks stretched at their feet a carpet of blue shade on which their owner, tired of digging the ungrateful earth, could come and drowse under the silvery foliage in the hot hours of noon, lulled by the song of the crickets.

Then came herds of goats, stampeding wildly to escape from this panting train which had dared to disturb the quiet peace of the heights. The little shepherd boys in their pleated kilts and be-tasselled shoes ran up from all sides to intercept the passage of the train which was slowly zigzagging up the mountain. They had no difficulty in keeping pace with it, and ran alongside, asking for newspapers. The passengers, amused, threw out the papers bought that morning in Athens or the Piraeus, and in this way the most distant villages got news of the outside world every day. There were very few stations here, and even these few were far from the hamlets buried in the mountains. There were no roads, properly speaking, only mule-tracks, and very stony at that.

During the halts we drank dry white wine with a resinous tang. It was called
crachi retzina
and cost only a sou the glass. It was delicious once one got accustomed to the bitter flavour.

And now the train began to rush down towards Argos and Myli, at the end of the Gulf of Nauplia where Agamemnon once lived. It was now only a wide and smiling valley, with nothing to recall its heroic past, which, indeed, may be pure invention. Herds of cattle grazed indolently among the lush grass. The gulf opened out widely to the sea, from which the triremes had set out for the Trojan war.

The train had now descended to the sea-level, and begun to climb again, but this time into really high mountains. The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly, bringing out an intolerable heat from the welter of rocks. There were flowering brooms and lentisks; then as we got higher, forests of stunted pines twisted into strange shapes, and seas and seas of lavender.

One last zigzag up the face of a blue granite wall, and we were at the top, looking down over the picturesque masses of mountains, whose tops were gilded by the setting sun, while the valleys were filled with
purple shadow, and the capes and inlets of the coast stood out sharply against an immense sea which merged into space.

An abrupt change of direction, and there before us stretched the high plateaux covered with green crops, within the distance a range of snowcapped mountains stained rose by the setting sun. We had reached our destination, which was Steno, about six miles on this side of Tripolis.

A man approached, kissed Papamanoli and then me, and led us to a pretty jaunting-car, drawn by a frisky pony covered with tassels and tiny bells. He was Petros Karamanos. He had a keen, frank face, tanned by the mountain air, and was powerfully built, though without any suggestion of heaviness. He looked like a country gentleman; his calm and assured manner, the authority of his gaze, his simple dress, all bespoke the rich man, owning the soil he trod. He spoke no language but Greek.

The sun was just disappearing behind the mountains in the west, and the air, which had already been very light and fresh, became cold, for we were more than three thousand feet above sea-level. Everywhere were fields of green wheat, apple and cherry orchards. I wondered where grew the magic plant from which hashish, bringer of dreams, was made.

I thought of an old fairy-tale of a little boy sent by a good fairy to look for a magic flower which grew on the inaccessible summit of a distant mountain. Off he had set like me, guided and upheld by faith alone. I wondered if I had really arrived in the place where my magic flower grew, and if I was now to reap the reward of my faith in Destiny.

After an hour’s drive, we reached the foot of a hill covered with heather and flowering broom. A farm with tiled roofs was set against it, facing the rising sun and overlooking the plains covered with orchards and wheat fields. The buildings were of granite, and seemed very ancient. They were as massively constructed as a fortress, with vaulted entrances, and the great flags which paved the courtyard had been worn away by the contact of countless generations of feet.

It was the hour when yokes of oxen returned slowly from their work in the fields, and flocks of black sheep came pouring in at the great outer gate, running in disorder towards the sheepfolds, the ewes with distended udders answering the plaintive bleatings of the hungry lambs. A warm smell of hay and the breath of kine came out to meet the chill of the falling night.

Bare-footed servant girls looked at me curiously. They wore their hair in the local fashion in a sort of coronet on top of their little heads, a fashion marvellously becoming to their clear-cut profiles. Perhaps in the recesses of these wild mountains the antique race has kept its purity, for I noticed that many of the women had the straight noses of the goddesses of old. A hairy groom, dressed as I imagined a companion of Ulysses in the Cyclops’ cave might have been dressed, came to take our pony, greeting his master with the humble respect of the serf for his overlord.

Madame Petros appeared on the veranda, which had a beautiful wrought-iron railing. She greeted me with a speech of welcome, punctuated by little ripples of laughter at my obvious bewilderment, which was due to my ignorance of Greek. I was just beginning to feel ridiculous, when an imposing equipage entered the courtyard. Imagine a sort of victoria, such as is still used for marriages in some remote parts of France, but very old and dilapidated, with rattling iron wheels. Two enormous dapple-grey dray horses had dragged this nightmare of a vehicle over the bridle-paths from Tripolis; it was a marvel to me that it still held together. From this ancient but stout carriage descended a swarthy little woman. She was only about twenty, but already had the air of an old maid. This was Petros’ niece, who lived in town, moved in polite society
and, most important of all, spoke French; she had been summoned to act as interpreter.

She began by apologizing for being late and not coming to the station with her carriage to fetch me. She was anything but beautiful, her monkey-like face distorted by nervous twitchings, but the poor girl was so pleasant and amiable that I was thankful indeed for her presence, which brought me, so to speak, out of the darkness into the light of comprehension.

The inside of the house surprised me. It was richly and tastefully decorated, and the ancient walls housed some very fine modern furniture.

Petros went off immediately to fetch a sample of his hashish. I wondered how I was to give an intelligent opinion on it, and not betray the fact that it was the first I had ever seen. I didn’t even know how the quality was indicated. I was afraid of making a fool of myself and revealing my ignorance, for after that I could be sure that all the poor stuff which had been unsaleable would be joyfully palmed off on me. I fell back on a method which is often useful. So far as possible, I would be silent. Petros came in with a fragment of brownish matter in his hand. He immediately gave me the clue to how to test the value of his merchandise, by proceeding to sniff it, and hold it up for me to sniff. Then he took a piece and rolled it between his fingers into a slender cone, to which he put a match. It burned with a tiny and rather smoky flame, and when he hastily extinguished it, a heavily perfumed white smoke rose from it. In my turn I took a piece and went through exactly the same manoeuvres, only, having noticed how quickly he put out the flame, I on the contrary let it burn. Then in silence, with a cold and rather disdainful air, I held it out to him. He interpreted my silence according to his fears, and instantly exclaimed:

‘Oh, but don’t be afraid, I have better stuff than this. Only I thought this might perhaps interest you; it is much cheaper.’

I replied with dignity:

‘I have not come such a long way to buy cheap stuff. Please show me your best at once.’

He vanished, and returned in a moment with a piece of the same matter, but less brittle and of a greenish hue. He went through the same gestures, but this time the flame was long and very smoky, and he
complacently let it burn. That, thought I, is probably the sign of really good quality. Now I knew how to buy hashish. I declared myself satisfied, and we settled on the quantity I was to buy, four hundred
okes
(six hundred kilograms), at the price of twenty francs the
oke
.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘we’ll go and fetch the goods from the warehouse where they are stored.’

A servant girl brought us little wax torches, and two hefty workmen armed with huge cudgels accompanied us. Petros opened a vaulted door, behind which a stone staircase led down into the cellars. A musty smell of damp rose from this underground passage, and almost at once we came to a crypt hewn out of the living rock. In this vault, which was circular in form, sacks were piled up; this was the hashish crop of the current year. The two workmen picked out the number of sacks which corresponded to the weight I had ordered, put them in the middle of the floor, then fell upon them with their sticks, in order to break up the contents and reduce them to dust.

We must have formed a strange group. First there was Papamanoli, the priest, in his flowing black robes, and beside him Petros, holding in his hand a piece of white paper, into which he put a sample from each sack. Each of us held aloft a little wax taper in order to give light to the men who were beating so furiously on the bulging sacks. Our shadows danced fantastically along the vaulted roof, and the bats, panic-stricken and blinded by the light, bumped their horrid soft bodies against us, making the flames of our candles flicker. I shall never forget this scene, though the others seemed quite unconscious of its picturesque quality. Petros poured the different samples from his paper into a little bag, which he gave me as indicating the average quality of my hashish. The sacks were then carried into a barn, so that the icy cold of the night should prevent the powdered hashish from coagulating afresh.

I went off to my room, escorted by the ugly little niece and one of the handsome young servant girls carrying water, towels and everything needful for the comfort of a guest. I wished my ugly little interpreter at the devil so that I should be left alone with the comely handmaiden, for I felt the need for ethnographical documentation, and the opportunity seemed excellent, but alas…

The hand-woven linen sheets were icy cold, and I could not get them warmed. All the happenings of the day kept going round and round in
my head, and the hashish I had breathed in in the crypt had set my imagination afire. I tossed and turned, and finally got up. My room was next to vast attics, certainly the servants’ quarters could not be far off. I could always have a look. So off I went groping my way through the darkness, knocking my head against great strings of onions hanging from the beams, and bumping into dusty objects, until suddenly beneath my feet I saw a ray of light, and voices came up from the floor below. I lay down and placed my eye against this crack in the old flooring, and I saw a rustic room with whitewashed walls, about which two men were moving. They were Papamanoli and Petros. Papamanoli was undressing and preparing for bed, while Petros was standing, a candle in one hand, reading a blue paper which looked like a telegram. After he had read it, he handed it to the priest, who instantly held it to the candle flame, let it burn down to his fingers, and stamped out the ashes underfoot. A gesture made towards my room showed me that the two men were speaking about me, and made me think that this was perhaps the telegram which the priest had received the evening before while we were dining at the house of his cousin, Madame Smirneo.