Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. I was at the foot of Mt. Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the restored Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, forty summers and a thousand years ago. I was looking for the cave on Mt. Ida in which, it was said (by the D’Aulaires and others), Zeus was born to the goddess Rhea. Coincidentally, in that very same cave the philosopher Epimenides of Knossos, the lying Cretan who said, “All Cretans are liars,” is said to have fallen asleep for fifty-seven years, after which he reportedly awoke with the gift of prophecy. I wondered if I could manage the same feat; or maybe, after a quick nap, just the ability to prophesy a few minutes ahead, say as far as what I’d be having for lunch.

            I got off the bus at a dusty intersection—right for Knossos and Heraklion, left for Agios Nikolaos, then still a sleepy fishing village, not the flash, tawdry resort it's since become—and started walking. After a few minutes I saw a refugee from another age coming down the mountain toward me: tall, with piercing eyes and a bristling mustache, wearing a kind of turban and sash and flared red trousers, like a janissary in a nineteenth-century painting. When he saw me he stopped and stared and returned my muttered greeting with a question I didn’t understand, probably “Where do you think you’re going?” All I could say in Greek with any degree of fluency was “I dislike meatballs” (“the’maressou ne keftedes”), but it seemed inadequate to the occasion, as well as being quite untrue, so I offered no reply. He shrugged and walked on. I walked on, too, in the opposite direction, for an hour or so alongside a narrowing stream, steadily upward, past olive groves and orange trees and orchards and the stone huts of long-gone goatherds. As I slowly climbed the foot of the mountain and arrived on its steeper inclines, the stream vanished into the rocks, and with it vanished all other sounds; in the heat of the sun there was only a windborne silence, pinned to the vast azure above by the whirring of cicadas. The path I was following soon dwindled to little more than a rockfall. The trees became sparse, and the peak of the great pagan mountain soared into a booming blue sky in which eagles or vultures or demiurges slowly wheeled. I stopped and looked around and realized I was sweating more from fear than from the heat. I was about a quarter of the way up and had no inclination to go on. (Mt. Ida is 2400 meters, or about 8000 feet, high, so this was pretty sluggish progress anyway.) There was nothing visible to be afraid of, and at that treeless altitude there were no longer any cicadas. There was no sound at all but the rushing of the wind. There was me, and there was the mountain: in a word, wilderness. Nothing. So, logically, nothing to be afraid of. But it was this very absence that so frightened me, as if the wilderness had opened wide its maw and exhaled malevolently, like an immense serpent. (Of all the writers whose work I know, Algernon Blackwood describes this sensation best: see “The Willows.”) I felt abandoned yet scrutinized, as if Zeus himself were on his way to strike me down, with vengeance in his heart. Or as if Pan might jump out from behind a rock, grinning his humorless satyr’s grin; for I suddenly felt panic, in panic’s Grecian birthplace.[1] My knees buckled. I turned and walked away, slowly at first, then faster; then, once I’d recovered the use of my knees, I gave up all thoughts of continuing with my quest and ran as fast as I could, stu mbling down the mountain, and half-walked, half-ran down the long white dusty road to the intersection and hailed the first bus back to Knossos. A German backpacker offered me his canteen, from which I took a long, grateful drink.

    “You are OK?” he inquired.

    “Thank you, yes.”

    “I like to meet peoples,” he said.

     That evening as I sat at a café in the main square in Heraklion, getting pie-eyed on retsina, the tall bloke I’d seen coming down the mountain strode by in front of me, carrying three or four plastic Spar Market shopping bags bulging with loaves of bread, boxes of cereal, bottles of wine, garlic sausages, cabbages, and other staples. He was heading for the bus stop, and I deduced that he’d just come into town to do a bit of grocery shopping and was now on his back to his home or cave on the side or summit of Mount Ida. Shrines to Zeus and the presence of Pan never occurred to him; he was probably more worried about the TV reception up there and getting a decent slice of prosciutto. He no doubt made the journey weekly, or even daily; he was a commuter who happened to live in a wilderness from which I’d fled, never to return, driven off by my middle-class panic. One man’s wilderness is another’s home sweet home.

[1] As the dictionary says: Gr. Panikos, of Pan. I’ve since learned, by the way, that I was probably about twenty meters from Zeus’s cave when I turned back. If it was the same cave, that is. No one really knows, except the gods and goddesses, and no one’s heard from them for years.