The Magus - John Fowles [17]
the northwest, lay a spectacular agglomeration of snow-white houses around a couple of small harbours. But there were two eyesores, visible long before we landed. One was an obese Greek-Edwardian hotel near the larger of the two harbours, as at home on Phraxos as a hansom cab in a Doric temple. The other, equally at odds with the landscape, stood on the outskirts of the Village and dwarfed the cottages around it: a dauntingly long building several stories high and reminiscent, in spite of its ornate Corn- than facade, of a factory--a likeness more than just visually apt, as I was to discover. But the Lord Byron School, the Hotel Philadelphia and the village apart, the body of the island, all thirty square miles of it, was virgin. There were some silvery olive orchards and a few patches of terrace cultivation on the steep slopes of the north coast, but the rest was primeval pine forest. There were no antiquities. The ancient Greeks never much liked the taste of cistern water. This lack of open water meant also that there were no wild animals and few birds on the island. Its distinguishing characteristic, away from the village, was silence. Out on the hills one might pass a goatherd and his winter (in summer there was no grazing) flock of bronzebelled goats, or a bowed peasant woman carrying a huge faggot, or a resin-gatherer; but one very rarely did. It was the world before the machine, almost before man, and what small events happened, the passage of a shrike, the discovery of a new path, a glimpse of a distant caique far below, took on an unaccountable significance, as if they were isolated, framed, magnified by solitude. It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters. I was forced to go frequently for walks to escape the claustrophobic ambience of the Lord Byron School. To begin with, there was something pleasantly absurd about teaching in a boarding school (run on supposedly Eton-Harrow lines) only a look north from where Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. Certainly the masters, victims of a country with only two universities, were academically of a far higher standard than Mitford had suggested, and in themselves the boys were no better and no worse than boys the world over. But they were ruthlessly pragmatic about English. They cared nothing for literature, and everything for science. If I tried to do their eponym's poetry with them, they yawned; if I did the English names for the parts of a car, I had trouble getting them out of the class at lesson's end; and often they would bring me American scientific textbooks full of terms that were just as much Greek to me as the expectant faces waiting for a simple paraphrase. Both boys and masters loathed the island, and regarded it as a sort of self-imposed penal settlement where one came to work, work, work. I had imagined something far sleepier than an English school, and instead it was far tougher. The crowning irony of all was that this obsessive industry, this molelike blindness to their natural environment, was what was considered to be so typically English about the school. Perhaps to Greeks, made blas�y living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world, there was nothing discordant in being cooped up in such a system; but it drove me mad with irritation. One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much better than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic. He took me round the village _kapheneia_ and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley streets; one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal, and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society