Page 48 - GREC14N_KGS_02

Literature | Famous words

Was there ever a Colossus of Rhodes? Mythical
or not, it must be reckoned one of the wonders of
Cocteau on the world strung on the thread of our itinerary. And
why not believe in it—as one believes in Phileas
his own Rhodes Fogg’s adventures?... Rome, a diamond; Athens, a
pearl; to-morrow Egypt and a scarab; Rhodes, the
The famous French writer wanders first baroque stone we thread upon our neck-lace.
through the streets of mystery on Brushing back her locks and resting on one knee,
the island of the Knights and vividly the Venus of Rhodes keeps vigil at the meeting-
depicts his experience. O Γάλλος point of many races, cities, glories: Mycenae,
συγγραφέας περιπλανάται στους Greece, the Roman Empire, Byzantium, the
Crusades, Knights of St John, Patmos where the
δρόμους του νησιού των Ιπποτών και apostle ate the book and wrote his Apocalypse, the
περιγράφει την εμπειρία του. Turks, Suleiman the Magnificent, Hippocrates,
Homer, Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius....
Entering the market-place, I might have been stepping
into a scene from the Arabian Nights. The tongues of
Babel clacked round a Persian fountain. A little Jew
boy, just out of school, hailed us in French. All the life
of the East seething in the open street welcomed us
into its midst. From Rhodes on, every street treated us
to a pantomime; the three-walled shops gaped like so
many stage-sets on which the curtain never fell.
The town was full of barbers and cobblers. In the
repertory of an eastern street the Barber’s Opera has
pride of place, for each of the countless religious sects
affects a special mode of coiffure. Reclining in ecstatic
ease, the customer confides his head to hands equally
adept in shaving, hair-cuts and inflicting torture.
Boots hung everywhere in clusters. Every-where men
were tanning, sewing, polishing and selling boots.
Barbers’ shops and boot-shops alike displayed the
portrait of the Duce, a portrait all in dots and blobs so
skilfully laid out that once they hit the retina the eye
transfers the picture to the dazzling walls which once a
week the women do over with a fresh coat of lime.
On either side of the harbour, where once the feet
of the Colossus restedour ship had passed between
them two pillars rises. One pillar is crowned by
Romulus and Remus suckled by the Roman wolf;
from the summit of the other a bronze stag gazes
towards the isle of huntsmen and of roses. A wall
runs round the city, rising and falling in abrupt
festoons, topped by patrol-paths and tall towers.
You enter through fortress gates; once within, you
lose your bearings in a maze of stairways, platforms,
vaults and fosses, battlements and bridges, and very
soon find yourself back again at your starting-point.
An Italian soldier silhouetted on the skyline shouted
to Passepartout to put his camera away. As a matter
Among other things, Cocteau has of fact Passepartout was about to photograph, not Rodos Confidential Digital Archives
passionately painted gods and the fortress, but an old Mahometan woman who
heroes of Greek mythology. Εκτός was lighting a cigarette, leaning on the parapet of
των άλλων, έχει ζωγραφίσει με
πάθος θεούς και ήρωες από την a Byzantine well. A sacrilegious gesture—as if the
ελληνική μυθολογία. Vicar’s wife should smoke beside the font! It was

48 GREC14N 2018