The Pillars of Hercules

Spillman was in the cheap seats in the big smoky lounge at the center of C Deck, surrounded by his heap of bags—shopping bags mostly, in which he carried all his possessions. One of them was an instrument he called a “melodeon”—a fat flute with a keyboard which made a kazoolike sound. Goodhearted man that he was, he spent part of the day serenading the others in the cheap seats. Jewish songs, Gypsy songs, and old favorites such as “Blue Moon” and “O Solo Mio.”

There was a bald toothless Israeli with a dog on his lap in the cheap seats, and a German family with a small baby, and some backpackers, and some Greek Cypriots, and part of a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a Dutch couple which had just been on a kibbutz. There were some Arabs, too. The Israeli with the dog said that he had been a soldier his whole life. “I have fought in three wars!” The German family had set up a field kitchen in some spare seats and were forever dishing up food for their baby and themselves. The Slovakian pilgrims traveled with a small bearded friar who said mass in one of the lounges every day. The prettiest pilgrim was a girl in her twenties who carried a wooden cross as tall as she was. Tacked to it was a holy card, the size of a baseball card, with a saint’s picture on it. She heaved the cross in a slightly defiant way, the winsome Slovak, smiling, carrying this enormous cross among the querulous passengers.

There were other passengers, too, in the cabins. Some of them had strange stories to tell, but I met them later. The Sea Harmony was an unusual ship for the way people were thrown together. The bad weather did not help either—it was cold and windy, the sea unsettled. It was not a cruise, but rather a way for these people to get from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, or to stop along the way.

I had paid a little extra to have my own cabin. That was my only luxury. The food was awful. The weather was grim. The Greek crew was truculent and unhelpful, and the Greek passengers even worse—two of them sat in the lounge shouting into cellular phones, making interminable calls. They smoked. They demanded that the Burmese play tapes of Greek music very loudly. Because the decks were cold and windswept, there was no refuge anywhere. But I had my cabin.

The wind was blowing the rain sideways on our approach to Limassol, and the weather continued cold and rainy, such a novelty, after the parched landscapes of Syria and Israel, all these muddy sidewalks and puddled streets and weeping trees. I had been eager to see the Republic of Cyprus, after having traversed Turkish Cyprus. It had been impossible for me to go directly from one to the other, and so this thousand-mile detour had been necessary. But had it been worth it? Yes, I thought so, because I had seen how Turkish Cyprus had been lifeless and deprived; and now I saw that it hardly mattered, for Limassol, with its tourists and its Royal Air Force base at nearby Akrotiri and its embittered Greeks, was unattractive and seedy. Turkish Cyprus was like a Third World island of soldiers and self-help; Greek Cyprus was a rather ugly and bungaloid coastline, the most distant outpost of the European Community, another welfare case.

The larger islands in the Mediterranean are miniature continents, the French historian Fernand Braudel said. He cited Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus as good examples of this. I could see how this might be so. A single island might have many microclimates, and regions and dialects if not separate languages; and a mountain range that was like a continental divide, and a wild or sparsely settled interior. They were so complex they seemed vast, and each section of coast was different. But the partition of Cyprus made it smaller. It had broken into two mean fragments, a pair of true islands, each with its own culture and language. The large complex island of Cyprus had become two simpler and much less interesting places, in the twenty years since the Turks had asserted themselves in the north and the Greeks in the south.

I walked from the port to the town, buying my breakfast on the way, fruit here, juice there, and at last bought a copy of the day-before-yesterday’s Daily Telegraph and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafe across from Limassol’s front, while the wind whipped the waves onto the promenade.