Free The Golden Step by Christopher Somerville Page A

lazy contentment. He is not. In fact his poem for today is an absolute torrent of self-abasement. ‘I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head …’ He finds himself beset round by strong bulls of Bashan, ravening like lions with gaping mouths. ‘I am poured out like water,’ cries the wretched man, ‘and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.’
    There have been mornings when I have felt like that, too, but not this one. I turn away from the worm in the dust and luxuriate in the smugness of sloth.
    What a pleasure it is to have a shower that’s warm and all-over, to wash all my clothes properly instead of dunking them in a cold sink, to sleep in a clean, sweet-smelling room. Why have I never properly appreciated this sort of thing before? What a delicious, guilty pleasure it is to have nothing whatsoever to do. Oughtn’t I to be at my desk, at my computer, at my worrying and scurrying? I can’t remember the last time I allowed myself just to waste a day. And here I am, doing it. Better not even look at what that stern moralist the Psalmist has to say about the idle. He is bound to threatening me with being broken like a potter’s sherd, or cast out in the dirt. I kick back, stretch and luxuriate in wicked idleness. There’s plenty of lazing still to be done before I saunter into town this evening and check out who’s around. There are friends I’ve been looking forward to seeing, first and foremost George Aphordakos.

    I’d come to Kritsa five or six years before, at the instigation of Charis Kakoulakis. ‘Big village, Christopher – friendly people,’ Charis had said, ‘and one very special man, George Aphordakos, a policeman, a runner of the hills. George will show you all places of the mountains. He is aegagros , a wild goat of Crete.’
    Mountaineers are the epitome of the masculine hero in Crete, and they come in two dimensions. There is the traditional palikare or strongman champion with a great black beard, his chunky figure encased in tight black shirt, capacious breeches and long leather boots. You can see him in any village on fly posters advertising itinerant musicians. Such men love to present themselves in this image, slung about with bandoliers, one fist enveloping a lyra, the other doubled on their hip, a sariki or fringed headband twisted about their fiercely-knitted brows, gazing heroically towards a mountainous horizon. In contrast stands the lightly-made, athletic aegagros or mountain goat type, all sinews and hollows. He might not be able to fell a bear with a blow, but he can leap tirelessly from crag to pinnacle where your palikare would struggle and sweat to follow.
    George Aphordakos is a classic aegagros. I am probably more of a vouvaloi , a buffalo. Somehow we hit it off, to the point where George would take me out for long days hiking in the mountains from which I would return with scrub scratches on my shins, Pleistocene dwarf hippopotamus teeth in my pocket and green ends to my fingers. George climbs mountains like the wind, pock-pock-pock from ledge to ledge, a hardback tome of Byzantine iconography in his hand, a flower book and a bird book in his pack. Out with George you pinch every herb you pass and sniff your fingertips, you truffle for fossils and Venetian frescoes, you grub up painted shards of pottery last seen by Minoan eyes. George’s eagle glance picks out these things; his bony finger points you to them. When he has finished thoughtfully turning the rim of a 4,000-year-old vase in his hand, he gently reinserts it between the same two stones of the terrace wall from which he has retrieved it – such treasures,