Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.2]

Chapter Twenty-six

As the large blue and white island ferry began to careen into the port of Gavrio, on the western coast of Andros, Theo instructed Nicasio and Daniela to disembark with the passengers on foot down the crowded gangplank. There on shore he would pick them up in his Suzuki jeep as he drove it out of the vehicle storage decks amid a hundred other cars. This maneuver would be done in unison with the frenetic passengers dodging between the exiting cars. Somehow, after several desperate moments, the implausible plan worked, and they found themselves out on the dock where Theo drove by and picked them up, soon to be commandeering his jeep out of the little port town jockeying for positions in the temporary traffic. It was as if a grand race took place to get out of the port and disperse onto roads in various directions covering the island.

Soon Theo's vehicle was skirting a picturesque coastline of turquoise water, black rocks, and cream-colored, sandy coves. As they cruised along this eastern shore they followed an asphalt road which paralleled a long, umbrella dotted stretch of a beach. Theo referred to this as the 'GoldenBeach,' popular for swimming, and he taught them in Greek that it was pronounced, 'Chryso Amo.' The azure shoreline looked inviting to both Californians who were not accustomed to such clear, light blue beach waters.

The little white SUV climbed steadily upward along the edge of the steep mountain range, while its passengers peered precariously down toward the Aegean. Theo brought to their attention the amazing number of fieldstone walls, crisscrossing over the entire landscape. The little barriers, head tall to a man, were everywhere and once used as fencing, Theo explained, for flocks of sheep. The walls ran helter-skelter over the dryer, more barren landscape as far as the eye could see. He also pointed out far below them, and looking like a toy, their former ship now making its way out of the Gavrio port and onward toward its next island stop at Tinos to the southeast.

The existence of spring water was just as Theo had explained it. Many of the curves up the mountainside featured outcroppings of thick trees and bright green underbrush. Sometimes a carved marble fountain could be seen in these locations with water continuously spewing out of it and then snaking its way down a ravine or disappearing into a jungle-like tangle of vines, fig trees and dense bamboo. The view out across the sea from the higher elevation was breathtaking, with the shadows of clouds moving briskly across the water. A road sign they soon passed read Palaiopoli, which Nicasio easily translated from his GRE Greek-root-studies to mean 'ancient town." Theo explained the entire mountainside was littered with the stone ruins of that settlement, arranged randomly on terraces all the way down precariously to the sea. It was one of the earliest settlements on the island, he told them, and had seen two thousand years of permanent habitation before falling into abandonment only some two hundred years before.

"The winds are the main problem here," he said, "making this a pretty dangerous road. And the steepness of those cliffs? Well, those two unpleasant conditions were exactly why the early inhabitants stayed here."

"Why was that?" Daniela asked.

"They were living, you remember, in the age of pirates. The settlement could be more easily defended from this high vantage point. Ships had trouble landing below. The people could throw down stones or shoot arrows at anyone trying to scale the cliffs."

"Interesting," Nicasio added. "So it was all just a continuous game of survival here. And they used the natural features as a system of defense."

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," Theo continued in his remarkably clear Californian accent. "But those physical conditions make the coastline here pretty unlivable today. The whole area is zoned as an archaeological site of historical interest anyway. It's illegal to build anywhere there are remains of ancient settlements on these islands."