The air is cool and very still, the occasional cock crows, the hens and wild turkeys chatter on softly in the olive groves around my house and the cicadas have yet to start that day long thrill of sound which is so much the Mediterranean to us north Europeans who rarely hear so much as an unconvinced cricket.


...It is wonderful to walk on these nearly forgotten paths, letting them determine your direction: although unless you watch turnings very carefully, faint memories of the Cretan labyrinth creep in as they fork and curve back on themselves and swiftly become indistinguishable one from another.

...Pomegranate, cherry and fig trees hung over the walls from long forgotten orchards whose houses and memories are just a pile of rubble or a single carefully built stone gateway: ‘nothing beyond remains’. ... The relentless winter rain here gives the island a wonderfully lush vista of 500 year old Venetian olive groves, woods of bracken and dog rose as green as Devon, and headlands with their melancholy sentinels of pines and cypresses, but on the west coast it turns to a cropped, thorny garrigue, smelling of oregano, myrtle and, often, goat. ... The air is damp however hot the day, the breeze blows and the sea is piebald in shades of blue: the crystal turquoise of small coves almost iridescent in its brightness, the deep pewter-purple swell in fissures in the cliff so deep, that it is here where some Paxiots claim to have kept a submarine during the war to harass the German and Italian shipping fleet.


...My first, not entirely rational, thought was that it was a llama, the second, in common with my companions, was to climb over a high wall as the beast thudded towards us, gathering speed.