Read Online Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Graves
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me. I wasn’t thinking of their mental and emotional rhythms; I meant that their hooves and their droppings spoil the turf.’
‘If you look closely you’ll see that they’re wearing wide leather shoes, and that there aren’t any casual droppings. Cattle are trained to drop into pits – there’s one over there by the wall – and the manure is returned to the land once a year, sprayed over the whole surface, so that the grass grows evenly.’
‘How charmingly scientific!’
Sally pretended not to hear.
We were approaching a group of houses each with its garden and fence; a stream ran around the bottom of the gardens and dark-haired children were bathing and fishing in it. The houses were built of stone with tiled roofs and brightly-painted shutters. Most of the walls were whitewashed, but some were colour-washed in yellow, smoke-grey or pink. A morose-looking man in leather shorts and sandals with criss-cross straps was setting out pea-sticks in a near-by garden. He looked up as we passed, greeting us with his fingers extended in the Latin blessing, and called something to his wife. She looked out of the window in obvious excitement, then disappeared and soon came hurrying to meet us with a basket of plums. She wore a short-sleeved white linen blouse with gold buttons, and a heavily embroidered skirt, and looked rather Moorish.
‘In Mari’s name, all’s well?’ This seemed to be the formal greeting.
‘All’s well,’ Sally returned with a polite smile.
The woman looked inquiringly at me.
‘A poet from the past, who has consented to visit us.’
‘Offer him one of my plums and ask him to swallow the stone.’ She spoke gravely but her mouth twitched.
‘How’s that?’
‘To take the stone back to his own epoch so that it may in time become the ancestress of my plum-tree.’
It was a relief to know that the commons at least made their little jokes; but Sally, See-a-Bird and the Interpreter did not laugh. From the abstracted look on See-a-Bird’s face I guessed that he was working out the logical possibility of the experiment.
‘And your child?’ asked Sally.
‘Mari be praised! I did as you told me, Witch, and to-day he walks without a limp. He ran a race with the cat just now and beat her easily. She ran up a tree.’
‘This is a village of the commons,’ See-a-Bird explained, as we went on. ‘It’s called Horned Lamb. Each village is famous for something; this has a carp-pool and an unusual way of thatching barns with heather and rush. Over there on the green is the totem-pole, the centre of their worship.’
‘What are the marriage customs here?’ I asked. (‘That’s the first thing to find out,’ as Knut Jensen the Danish anthropologist had once told me. ‘There are some places, you know, where a man dies of shame if he accidentally catches sight of his sister-in-law’s leaf-skirt hanging out on the line; and others where he’s expected to lead her off into the bush three times a day. One can make dreadful mistakes if one doesn’t discover which place is which.’)
‘Horned Lamb is strictly monogamous,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The girls and boys here have no sexual experience before marriage, unless they decide to migrate to another monogamous village where that’s permitted – or to a polygamous one. They’re free to go off if they like.’
‘If they do go, are they estranged from their families?’
‘Not at all. They visit them as often as they like and there’s no ill-will between villages with different moralities. Only, every permanent resident of a village is expected to conform to local custom.’
‘What’s that large house beyond the bridge?’ It was built in red brick with quadrangles, like a Cambridge college, and surrounded by a double-line of plane-trees.
‘That’s where the recorders live. The commons prefer to live in cottages with gardens and to have neighbours across the garden fence. The recorders prefer flats in a large building with
‘If you look closely you’ll see that they’re wearing wide leather shoes, and that there aren’t any casual droppings. Cattle are trained to drop into pits – there’s one over there by the wall – and the manure is returned to the land once a year, sprayed over the whole surface, so that the grass grows evenly.’
‘How charmingly scientific!’
Sally pretended not to hear.
We were approaching a group of houses each with its garden and fence; a stream ran around the bottom of the gardens and dark-haired children were bathing and fishing in it. The houses were built of stone with tiled roofs and brightly-painted shutters. Most of the walls were whitewashed, but some were colour-washed in yellow, smoke-grey or pink. A morose-looking man in leather shorts and sandals with criss-cross straps was setting out pea-sticks in a near-by garden. He looked up as we passed, greeting us with his fingers extended in the Latin blessing, and called something to his wife. She looked out of the window in obvious excitement, then disappeared and soon came hurrying to meet us with a basket of plums. She wore a short-sleeved white linen blouse with gold buttons, and a heavily embroidered skirt, and looked rather Moorish.
‘In Mari’s name, all’s well?’ This seemed to be the formal greeting.
‘All’s well,’ Sally returned with a polite smile.
The woman looked inquiringly at me.
‘A poet from the past, who has consented to visit us.’
‘Offer him one of my plums and ask him to swallow the stone.’ She spoke gravely but her mouth twitched.
‘How’s that?’
‘To take the stone back to his own epoch so that it may in time become the ancestress of my plum-tree.’
It was a relief to know that the commons at least made their little jokes; but Sally, See-a-Bird and the Interpreter did not laugh. From the abstracted look on See-a-Bird’s face I guessed that he was working out the logical possibility of the experiment.
‘And your child?’ asked Sally.
‘Mari be praised! I did as you told me, Witch, and to-day he walks without a limp. He ran a race with the cat just now and beat her easily. She ran up a tree.’
‘This is a village of the commons,’ See-a-Bird explained, as we went on. ‘It’s called Horned Lamb. Each village is famous for something; this has a carp-pool and an unusual way of thatching barns with heather and rush. Over there on the green is the totem-pole, the centre of their worship.’
‘What are the marriage customs here?’ I asked. (‘That’s the first thing to find out,’ as Knut Jensen the Danish anthropologist had once told me. ‘There are some places, you know, where a man dies of shame if he accidentally catches sight of his sister-in-law’s leaf-skirt hanging out on the line; and others where he’s expected to lead her off into the bush three times a day. One can make dreadful mistakes if one doesn’t discover which place is which.’)
‘Horned Lamb is strictly monogamous,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The girls and boys here have no sexual experience before marriage, unless they decide to migrate to another monogamous village where that’s permitted – or to a polygamous one. They’re free to go off if they like.’
‘If they do go, are they estranged from their families?’
‘Not at all. They visit them as often as they like and there’s no ill-will between villages with different moralities. Only, every permanent resident of a village is expected to conform to local custom.’
‘What’s that large house beyond the bridge?’ It was built in red brick with quadrangles, like a Cambridge college, and surrounded by a double-line of plane-trees.
‘That’s where the recorders live. The commons prefer to live in cottages with gardens and to have neighbours across the garden fence. The recorders prefer flats in a large building with
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