On the Shores of the Mediterranean (21 page)

It had been a very stiff climb and the only other people I had seen were an expensively-dressed couple whom I would have identified as English except that they carried alpenstocks and answered my ‘Good morning. Rotten weather!’ with
‘Guten tag. Ja, schrecklich wetter.’
The hut was filled to bursting point with something like sixty people, all either French or German. I was the only English person present. There was a huge fire, but it was difficult to get at (I would have liked to dry my wet shirt which I had changed for a dry one), being hemmed in by people sitting with their backs to it, reading old copies of the
Reader’s Digest
. The noise and the heat were unbelievable. Presiding over this throng was the custodian and guide, Costas Zolotas, and his wife, who was cooking the midday meal, a good-looking, friendly couple. I drank a brandy and felt better. Whether all these people had already climbed the mountain, were about to climb it, or had no intention of climbing it, was not clear.

I left for the summit at 10.40. The fog was still thick. Sparrow-like birds flew about aimlessly, close to the ground, as if afraid of getting lost. The trees were thinning rapidly now and soon there were none at all. After about half an hour the track became very steep, making long zigzags up what was now bare mountainside, over screes. By now I was beginning to be very tired and I realized
how silly I had been to establish my private record between Prionia and the hut. During this time I met three people, all on their way down, two of them a young Swiss man and his wife, both carrying neatly rolled umbrellas, with a very lively little girl of about eight dancing down ahead of them in the mist telling them to hurry up. It was now that I made a serious mistake. In order to cut out the interminable zigzagging I tried to climb the mountain vertically, and in doing so found myself slipping and stumbling and sometimes falling flat on my face on piles of loose scree brought down by people who had taken the same sort of short cut descending the mountain that I was trying to take while going up. What was worse, when I tried to find the main track again I was unable to do so and had to continue climbing on the loose stuff. I felt terrible. Every few hundred yards or so my legs gave way and I had to sit down with my heart pounding away, wondering if I was going to die, not caring much, shamed by the small birds that, completely unafraid, were energetically hopping about me, no doubt hoping that I represented some form of sustenance, or would jettison something edible. If I was going to die, presumably of heart failure, there were worse places to give up the ghost than on the upper slopes of Olympus at what must have been around 8500 feet.

At around 12.15, while taking one of these obligatory rests and wondering whether or not I was going to make it to the top, I was overtaken by a young German who looked almost as done-in as I felt, and whose only luggage was a plastic bag with a loaf of bread in it. As he had no water and I had no food, we decided to pool our resources and go to the summit together. It was really no place to be alone anyway, visibility being down to twenty yards. It turned out that he was a physicist at Göttingen University. The last graduate of Göttingen University I had met on a mountainside had been a professor of entomology with only one lung who was
chasing butterflies, but that was a long time ago, in the Apennines in 1943. Climbing with a companion gave me fresh heart, and in a few minutes we reached the ridge, which the inadequate map kindly provided free by the Alpine Club of Litochoron showed to be the ridge leading to the foot of the Skala summit at 9400 feet. The ridge, over which a bitter wind was blowing, overhung a void full of what looked like dirty cotton wool in what was called the Louki Cirque.

In another quarter of an hour we reached the foot of the Skala summit, which was invisible in the clouds, and began to make what, in the circumstances, unroped, I considered to be an extremely hazardous traverse under the buttresses of the main arête. This was an enormous wedge-shaped monolith, now invisible, from which rose the three main peaks of Skala, Mytikas and Stefani. Hazardous because the whole of this east face of the mountain consisted of either loose slabs or crumbling limestone full of limestone chippings, now covered with a glaze of ice on which it was only too easy to slip and fall into the depths of the Louki Cirque. It seemed extraordinary that no warning of any kind was given to climbers, most of whom had no mountaineering experience and were not properly equipped, that they might have to traverse a thoroughly unstable, ice-covered rock face.

Now the red-painted rocks led upwards into a sort of couloir and at one o’clock we emerged on to the narrow summit of Mytikas, otherwise the Needle, the Pantheon of the Gods, the highest point of Olympus, from which to the east, from where we had come, it fell away into the Cirque, immediately below us, as did Skala and Stefani, the Throne of Zeus. And there we crouched with flurries of snow whirling about us in the screaming wind, unable even to see the Throne of Zeus or anything else, nibbling bread, sipping cold water and becoming colder every minute but reluctant to leave, having done better than Sultan
Mehmed IV who is said to have made an unsuccessful attempt to climb it in 1669.

Squatting up there, enveloped in freezing cloud, with a Force 7 wind blowing, 9570 feet above the Aegean, it was a bit difficult to understand how Homer had been able to write, without having tried it out for himself (rather like a house agent who can write a convincing description of a house without actually seeing it) that ‘never is it swept by the winds nor touched by snow; a purer air surrounds it, a white clarity envelops it and the Gods there taste of a happiness which lasts as long as their eternal lives’. But perhaps they were there still, the Gods, invisible to our profane gaze, rendered indifferent to bad weather by the
ichor
that flowed in their veins, the substitute for blood that rendered them imperishable and incorruptible, sitting there in their hierarchies, the twelve great gods – Zeus, Poseidon, Hephaestus, Hermes, Ares, Apollo, Hera, Athene, Artemis, Hestia, Aphrodite and Demeter; Helios, Selene, Leto, Dione, Dionysus, Themis and Eos, and their courtiers – the Horae, the Moirae (The Fates), Nemesis, the Graces, the Muses, Iris, Hebe and Ganymede. All of them presided over by Zeus, ruling with an iron hand concealed in a silken glove, robust, grave, in the fullness of maturity, bearded, with thick waving hair, dressed in a long mantle which left his chest and right arm free, on official occasions holding in his left hand a sceptre, in his right a thunderbolt, and with an eagle at his feet. Here they passed the long days in feasting and happy conversation, sitting at their golden tables drinking nectar from golden cups constantly topped up by Hebe and passed from hand to hand, being entertained by Apollo playing on his lyre, sung to by the Muses, eating the sweet-smelling ambrosia that if a mortal ate of it would make him, too, immortal, and that if it arrived too late would at least preserve his corpse from decay. Here they sat appreciatively inhaling the smell of burnt offerings that drifted up to
them from the fires lit in their honour by mortal men and women in the other world thousands of feet below, at the day’s end returning each one to the detached accommodation built for them by Hephaestus, the lame craftsman god, there to rest or, in the case of Zeus perhaps, and others so inclined, to perform what for him was one of his multitudinous acts of creation. How one envied them all.

‘I suppose that you will write about meeting a funny little German physicist from Göttingen on top of Olympus when you get back to England,’ the young man said, who had himself lived in Cambridge for a year, after we had taken ritual photographs of one another which when mine was developed looked as if it had been processed in mud.

‘If I get off this mountain alive I will write that I met you and that without you I wouldn’t be standing here,’ I said, and I really meant it. And together we went down to make the traverse once more above the Louki Cirque to the Skala ridge, up which, unknown to me, Wanda was doggedly plodding to rescue me.

By 5.30 p.m. that evening we were back at Prionia drinking delicious hot sweet tea looking up the Mavrolongos Gorge towards the three summits which were now swimming in a cloudless sky, bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.

In what was something between winter and very early spring we travelled in a taxi through eastern Thrace, where there was no sign of spring at all, and down to Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The vehicle was a black Bel-Air, still as immaculate as it must have been when it came off the production line around 1965. Seeing it for the first time as we emerged from our hotel in Istanbul was rather like encountering a living dinosaur, or a mammoth just emerged from a block of Siberian ice, and, in fact, it turned out to have been a mistake to have chartered such a museum piece and its driver.

At the lighthouse at Cape Helles the driver stopped, there being no more road, this being the extreme south-western point of
Turkey-in-Europe with beyond it a free fall to the Aegean Sea, and began doing what he had done on every other occasion when we got out of his taxi: he produced a cloth and began removing the dust that started to settle on it each time we got going. In this case it was the thick red dust of the Gallipoli peninsula, dust that only now very old soldiers and sailors still remember from 1915.

As he performed this ritual he did what he always had done, sucked his teeth in a disapproving, audible way, at the same time giving us reproachful looks, as if to imply that we were responsible for the countryside, in this case the peninsula, being in such a state, and therefore for the state of his taxi which, in a sense, I suppose we were, being the only two of the three of us who actually wanted to visit Gallipoli, the Dardanelles and the Troad (the part of north-west Asia Minor surrounding the city of Troy), which was why we had hired him in the first place.

He was an Armenian and gloomy. I had always had a soft spot for Armenians, a race who have spent more time being massacred than any other people in the Mediterranean regions in the last eighty years or so, more than 600,000 in 1915–16 alone. At first we tried to cheer him up by telling him that things might have been worse. For instance it might have been raining, in which case his taxi inside and out would have been covered in mud, not just half an inch or so of dust that would come off with the flick or two of the wrist, but it was no good. So we let him be gloomy. We weren’t feeling all that cheerful ourselves. Battlefields, especially comparatively modern ones, such as the one we were on, are hardly ever jolly.

In 1915 the Allies, in order to create a diversion and break the deadlock on the western front, mounted an expedition against the Turks, who had joined the Germans the previous October, hoping that an eastern campaign would turn the German flank. It was an original concept but doomed to failure by
half-heartedness and inadequate planning, and opened badly when, on 18 March, the Turks inflicted what proved to be a decisive defeat on the combined Allied fleets, which were attempting to force the Dardanelles, sinking three battleships, admittedly not very modern ones, seriously damaging three others and killing 700 men with the loss of only 40 of their own side, an action which the Allies broke off and never resumed, having failed to clear the minefields. The High Command therefore decided to force the Straits by landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. British, Australian, New Zealand and French divisions were landed in April and August but the casualties were appalling and the expedition was abandoned at the end of the year.

We walked uphill from the lighthouse to the Cape Helles Memorial, a tall obelisk nearly one hundred feet high. Beyond it the peninsula stretched away, also uphill, in the general direction of Constantinople, as it still then was (it only became Istanbul in 1930), the ultimate goal of all those men whose names are recorded on its walls, and of so many others, none of whom ever reached it, through stony fields, dry-looking country without a perennial stream of even the smallest description running through it, with olive groves, scrub oaks, little groups of cypresses and mulberry trees, with the fruit already ripening, providing what in summer would be the only shade.

The great majority of the men whose names are recorded on the Memorial, and those who are buried in the six Cape Helles cemeteries and the majority of the French who are buried or otherwise remembered in their cemetery above Morto Bay, died in attempts to take Krithia village on the forward slopes of Achi Baba, a big, bare 700-foot-high top above the Narrows which the Allies believed to be one of the key points of the peninsula. There are 20,763 names carved on the walls of the Helles Memorial, 14,617 more on the four other memorials, at Chunuk Bair, Hill
60, Lone Pine and Twelve Tree Copse, none of whom have known graves; and in addition, there are the names of 9503 men who are buried in one or other of the thirty-one Commonwealth cemeteries close to the beaches of Anzac and Suvla Bay and on the wild and lonely hills. Of the 34,000 British and Commonwealth dead, 27,000 were buried in unidentified graves.

Of the 9000 French and colonial dead, 6000 were either never identified or never found. The Turks who died (more than 60,000 and something less than 90,000) are commemorated by the enormous monument above the entrance to the Straits on the site of the ancient city of Elaeus. There are no Turkish cemeteries. The Turks did not bury their dead or record their names, so in a sense they are all unknown soldiers.

Of the 489,000 Allied troops engaged, 252,000 became casualties; of the approximately 500,000 Turks, 251,309 were casualties.

Reading these seemingly endless columns of names on the Allied Memorials, so neatly inscribed on panel after panel, I had the feeling that I had first experienced long ago as a cadet in the Chapel of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst on Sunday morning church parades in another war, when bored by those militant devotions, I had read off the names of the Officer Cadets, inscribed on the Carrara marble columns, who had died in that First World War – that I was working my way down a column of entries in a set of enormous ledgers dealing exclusively with death, ledgers in which there were no credit entries, only debits.

Immediately to the left of the lighthouse were the ruins of a coastal battery in which a pair of guns installed here by German technicians before the First World War to command the western approaches to the Dardanelles had been thrown down from their mountings. And beyond and below this battery there was a small bay, about the size of a Cornish cove, with a gently sloping amphitheatre of ground ascending from a crescent-shaped
beach to a village of whitewashed houses with a minaret rising above it.

At the far end of this beach there was a white castle on a height above it, Sedd-el-Bahr, the Barrier of the Sea, from which the village with the minaret took its name. The beach was V Beach and just above it there was a grove of wild olive trees and Judas trees, already in flower in this hollow, which also sheltered spring roses and santolina bushes from the cruel northern winds, as it did a British war cemetery in which lie buried what remained of 696 men who tried to take this little beach and died in the face of concentrated Turkish machine-gun fire in April 1915, in what was one of the most spectacular massacres of the Gallipoli campaign.

Out beyond all this were the Dardanelles, dark blue and flecked with white, brilliant in the late afternoon sunshine, with a big Soviet tanker punching up into the western entrance against a Force 7 north-easter, probably on its way to Constanta or Batum.

On such a day, with such a wind from the north-east increasing the pressure on the surface of the Aegean, and with the winter snows melting in the 900,000-square-mile basin of the Black Sea, the west-going stream would be pouring out through the Dardanelles at about three knots, perhaps more up at the Narrows, twelve miles inside them.

While this was happening on the surface, anything up to fifty fathoms below the heavier, saltier waters of the Aegean would be flowing eastwards through it into the Sea of Marmara and up the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, maintaining its salinity in spite of the enormous amount of fresh water that flows into it from the rivers of central Europe, Russia and Asia Minor. With a strong south-westerly wind the process is reversed. With a wind just sufficiently strong to check the surface outflow without actually reversing it, the current comes to a standstill.

Some 4000 yards away across the mouth of the Straits to the south from Sedd-el-Bahr, there was another castle, Kum Kale, the Sand Castle. Both castles were built by the Grand Vizir Muhammad Kiuprili in about 1659, a man ‘whose integrity and strength of character’, in the words of C. A. Fyffe, a distinguished nineteenth-century historian, ‘did much to counteract the pernicious influence of degenerate sultans and to prop up for a season the declining empire’.

Kum Kale stands on a low promontory where Homer’s River Scamander, otherwise the Menderes, enters the Hellespont, having wound its way down into it from its source on the slopes of Mount Ida and through the Plain of Troy. This river is not to be confused with another Menderes, the Büyuk, Great Menderes, the ancient Maeander, from which derives the term ‘meander’, which enters the Aegean south of Izmir by way of a plain in which stand the ruins of ancient Miletus.

The Plain and its Hellespontine and Aegean shores are a depository of the fabulous dead of the ancient world. In this part of the world, where the relics of antiquity protrude above the surface of the earth at innumerable points but not always in very recognizable form, nothing is very certain. Near where we were standing on Cape Helles, trying to handle a map that was behaving like an out-of-control spinnaker, there was supposed to be a tumulus containing the remains of Protesilaus, the first man of Agamemnon’s army to set foot on the soil of Asia and the first Greek casualty of the Trojan War. Both the Admiralty
Mediterranean Pilot
and Murray’s
Guide to Constantinople and the Troad
, admittedly published a long time ago (the
Mediterranean Pilot
, the more modern of the two, after the First World War), said it was there but we were not able to find it. Perhaps it was at Elaeus, the now vanished city which stood on the heights above Morto Bay, beyond Sedd-el-Bahr.

It was on this tomb of Protesilaus that Alexander the Great offered a sacrifice to the Gods before setting off to Asia in 334 BC in the hope that they might favour his expedition and allow him to lead it to a triumphant conclusion. As an additional insurance against possible disaster he erected there a temple to Zeus, in his guise as the Lord of Happy Landings, to Heracles and to Athena, who besides being the virgin goddess of wisdom and practical skills was also an authority on prudent warfare. Then, as if all this was not enough, having embarked on the waters of the Hellespont, in mid-stream he sacrificed a bull to Poseidon, and poured a libation of wine into the water from a golden cup in order to propitiate the Nereids, the daughters of Nereus, whose wife’s name was Doris.

Out of sight from where we stood, high above the Aegean shore between Kum Kale and the ancient promontory of Sigeum, now Cape Yenisehir, which is the north-easternmost point of Asia Minor, are the mounds believed to cover the ashes of Achilles and his friend Patroclus. Achilles, one of the foremost of the Greeks at the Siege of Troy, had taken to his tent and skulked there while Patroclus, borrowing his armour, led the Myrmidons into battle. Patroclus was killed by Hector, son of King Priam of Troy, and Achilles swore to avenge his death. It was the loss of his devoted companion that brought him back into the battle, during which he killed Hector and dragged his body round Patroclus’ tomb for twelve consecutive days. Achilles in his turn was then killed by another of Priam’s sons, Paris, with an arrow which penetrated his only weak spot – the Achilles tendon.

The mound of Achilles is riddled with the burrowings of innumerable archaeologists and other inquisitive persons; that of Patroclus, the smaller of the two earthworks, is in better shape in spite of having been used as the foundation for a Turkish gun emplacement in the First World War. In fact it may not be the
tomb of Patroclus at all. It could be the tomb of Antilochus, the great runner who brought to Achilles the news of the death of Patroclus. If this is so then the ashes of Achilles and Patroclus are, as Homer said they were, in the same tomb.

The mound containing the tomb of Ajax, the gigantic, rather slow-witted leader of the Salamis contingent, who recovered Achilles’ dead body, then killed himself in a fit of pique when Achilles’ armour, retrieved from the Trojans after Patroclus’ death, was given to Odysseus and not to him, is conspicuous on the high, bare ground overlooking the Hellespont east of the mouth of the Scamander and between it and the more than ruined city of Rhoetum: more than ruined because the only evidence of its existence, like so many other cities in this part of the world, are some fragments of pottery, some bricks and some splinters of sculptured white marble and the like.

Unfortunately, savants have now proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the present tumulus, which has a broken vault within it, dates from the first century AD, and was therefore constructed about 1300 years after Ajax’s death. What a bore they are, taking away all the pleasures of the imagination, which is almost invariably better than the reality. It was here, too, off Elaeus, in AD 323, that the fleet of Constantine the Great, Emperor of the West, engaged with the fleet of Licinus, Emperor of the East, which had been anchored off the Tomb of Ajax, defeating it and leaving Constantine master of the world.

And there were innumerable others, illustrious and not so illustrious, who died in the great naval actions of the Hellespont, whose remains are either between thirty and fifty fathoms deep down on the bottom of the Straits, or out in the Aegean, or else, more likely, carried away eastwards by the submarine current, either into the Sea of Marmara, or, even further still, through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea.