Chambers of the Sun Part 13

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Endymion

Alihan Guesthouse, Selçuk - September 18th, Evening

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever..." So begins Keats' Endymion, one of the marmoreal monuments of English Romantic poetry. The story is as renowned as anything else that ever came from where Helicon breaks down in cliff into the sea: the hero is born a shepherd in Latmos, fair beyond anything that the five-fingered mountain has ever beheld, the son of Zeus and the nympth Calyce. In a dream, he falls in love with the Moon herself - or possibly the god of sleep, Hypnos - and his lover secures him immortal youth, on one condition: that he while away eternity in the crystalline depths of slumber. Keats attempts a theme already sung by writers as diverse as Lyly and the bookish Apollonius Rhodius, and does so with a species of diffuse lyricism which seems to breathe the air of soft summer nights. Like many of the Romantics' greater works, it is impassioned and subtly worked to the point of monotony, and for all its aerial romance it excludes so much of life that it is not an easy poem to read in its entirety. Matthew Arnold was very rude about it, and "poor" Keats (for the epithet has become inseparable from the man) suffered much for it even within his own lifetime, and yet I feel that it is redeemed by a youth and beauty as eternal as that of its subject. My favourite story about it - I forget where I read it - is that, shortly after the poem's publication, a distinguished poet asked Shelley how it was that Keats had written the Endymion when he knew no Greek. Shelley, "who had not a drop of jealousy in his heart," replied, "maybe Keats is a Greek."

There is one particular passage where Endymion addresses his sister Peona that seems in perfect accord with the spirit of this journey:

"...Fold
A rose leaf round thy finger’s taperness,
And soothe thy lips: hist, when the airy stress
Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,
And with a sympathetic touch unbinds
Eolian magic from their lucid wombs:
Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;
Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;
Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave
Round every spot where trod Apollo’s foot;
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
Where long ago a giant battle was;
And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
In every place where infant Orpheus slept."

The faint magic of poetry in its own landscape, lingering delicately as the softest aroma from a rose, is one of the most stirring influences I have ever felt, and I could not resist the chance to see if Latmos really fitted the tale. Today there is a Hellenistic city, Heraklia, crumbling around the foot of Latmos at the shore of Lake Bafa, which has a reputation as one of the most outstandingly beautiful places in Turkey.

There is no bus service to the modern village of Kapıkırı, so I had myself dropped at Bafa Gölü, which would be a one-horse town if they could afford a horse. Twenty minutes later, a car came from the pension, and took me ten miles along the side of the lake. The geology of the area is astonishing; Latmos is situated pretty much directly over the faultline of three tectonic plates, and the timeless seismic turmoil has wrought a mountain that looks as though it has been piled together by no mortal hand. The land is littered all about with boulders the size of houses, which collect in drifts like snow. As we meandered around, we passed cowherds driving fly-blighted cattle with wooden switches, old ladies gift-wrapped in the brightest floral cloths who sit by the roadside and stitch lace as they have done for the last seven hundred years, and smitten Byzantine churches looking like volcanic incontinence.

The guide says that Heraklia is a place where the ruins blend seamlessly into the rocks; not only is this so, but it is also the case that modern life goes on in, on, and around the Greek remnants so that often the only way that you can tell the difference between the walls of today and of two thousand years ago is the quality of workmanship. The community are - and I hesitate to use the word - poor, poor in a way that I have never seen before, in a kind of poverty that seems totally without unhappiness or ambition. Like Keats' poem, Kapıkırı is a recrudescence of a pastoral spirit that has long been pronounced dead; they keep donkeys in their yards and build their houses out of the old city walls because that is the way that life is. I remember overhearing a Liverpudlian family talking in Kuşadası:

"Dad, why has that man got holes in his trousers?"

"Because Turkey's a poor country. 70, 80 percent of the country are below the poverty line - they can only afford to eat three times a week. Not like us."

Not like us, it is true, but these families have food on the table three times a day. I do not feel embarrassed as a tourist, because it is a way of life of such obvious self-sufficiency that the villagers look the odd German or English hiker in the eye with the same mild curiosity as that which they meet. My pension is the best I have stayed in yet; guests sleep in bungalows in their wilderness garden, half-hidden behind screens of laurel and hyacinth. The place is terrific.

Having arrived shortly before the magic hour of sunset, I set out to explore the ruins that lay nearer at hand. A temple of Athena, built from great robust blocks of granite without any form of mortar, stands astride a promontory and looks as though it will be there for another two millennia. The view from the shell up to the peak of Latmos is worth the trip of its own merit. Further down the hill is a temple of Endymion himself, overgrown with lime-trees, amongst which I half-fancy that I can catch a glimpse of the demi-god's tresses, perfumed with sleep. To the east of the town, scattered over the skirts of Latmos, splinters of the city wall crown precipitous little valleys and glow with a gentle light only half imparted by the sun's dying rays.

While searching for the amphitheatre, I almost ran into a man who looked like something out of a Richard Hannay book. He had a Yildiz shotgun slung over his shoulder, two mysterious lumps in a game-bag and such weather-beaten skin that I instantly labelled him Peter Pienaar. I brokenly asked him what he had been shooting. "Keklik," he replied, pulling off a startlingly lifelike imitation of a partridge's call and waggling his fingers beneath his chin. I struggled to keep up with his veldtsman's lope as he showed me to the theatre, a sad little limestone affair that would make a perfect setting for a pastoral masque.

The next day, after breakfasting on fresh-baked bread, the excellent local goat's milk cheese and dried fruits - the only drawback being that there is not a bean of real coffee to be had in the entire nation - I decided to go looking for Keats' "gloomy shades sequester'd deep" out on the mountain-side. Disregarding the fact that Keats had never been anywhere near Latmos, the mountain is distinguished by several monasteries to which the Christian community fled from the Arab conquerors in the seventh century. They cannonised Endymion for his "abstinence," and made the place quite their own; Joseph the Hymnographer was tonsured here.

The valleys are really bloody difficult going; the boulders often accumulate in heaps that rise some forty feet above the real ground level, and once you are stuck in a valley it is very easy to lose your orientation. Still, impetuous youth knows no restraint, and I half-yomped, half-clambered in no particular direction. A relatively easy couple of hours saw me on what passes for Latmos' shoulder, and I ran by some mad chance into an absolute treasure-trove. The first find was an unobtrusive cave into which I dived for brief respite from the sun, and which turned out to contain a wall of frescoes that could not be younger than the ninth century. Judging by the graffiti, I was by far from the first to come across it, but I would willingly bet that mine were the first steps in that dust this year. Then, two hundred yards as the crow flies but some twenty minutes as the man stumbles, there is an entire village built on three crags, with a small church, houses, a lookout-tower and flights of steps cut into the rock. The Christian communities here were never found, though they passed a good couple of centuries, and they must have lived relatively comfortably off the spring and pickings of game. Once again, I can only have recourse to the photographs in describing the effect of the place.

However, as I discovered, the Arabs never fingered the fugitives for good reason: the place is almost inaccessible. I quickly lost my way, and there followed perhaps two of the most horrible hours of my life as I sought a route back down. There were not a few points where I honestly feared for my life, not least when, emerging gratefully from a twenty-foot vertical chute, I heard the faintest of clicks behind me, and turned around to see a man not ten yards away pointing his gun at my head. There was a pause of the most terrible beat my heart has ever skipped, and then he lowered his aim as I raised my hands. He grinned wryly, turned on his heel and disappeared down the precipice. Some catch I would have made.

It was hairy - hellishly hairy - but at tortuous length, after a number of false dawns, scratched, bruised and beset by the world's most tenacious burrs, I slid down the last rock and alighted on the earth. Worst thing is, I can't say that I wouldn't do it again for the sake of that cave. A thing of beauty is a joy forever...

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