Aegean Interlude

It has been a startling day. As we pull into the port of Linaria, on Skyros, we find a bus waiting for us, summoned by some genie. Our captain tells us to board it, and we do, headed we know not where. It twists and swaggers its way, king of the cowpath, up a narrow winding road to a headland at Tris Boukes where the driver, who thinks he speaks English, points with pride at a monument passing strange: a statue of a naked Greek athlete of Homeric dimensions, topped by the incongruously twentieth century head of an English aesthete. Here, under the baking summer skies of Greece, overlooking a blue-green bay, “in some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England,” lies the English poet Rupert Brooke, killed by a fever contracted in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. One suspects it was the Greek equivalent of the WPA that devised his gravestone.

Over dinner tonight, a splendid dinner of fresh-caught lobster (crayfish, really), Greek salad, fruit, cheese, and wine aboard the yacht Sirocoi, we discuss our plans for the days to come. There are ten of us in the group, sailing the Aegean for 11 days in two yachts: the Sirocoi is chartered, a comfortable, broad-beamed motor sailor with a crew of four; the Bushido, a swift, sleek racing sloop, has been lent to us.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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It has been a startling day. As we pull into the port of Linaria, on Skyros, we find a bus waiting for us, summoned by some genie. Our captain tells us to board it, and we do, headed we know not where. It twists and swaggers its way, king of the cowpath, up a narrow winding road to a headland at Tris Boukes where the driver, who thinks he speaks English, points with pride at a monument passing strange: a statue of a naked Greek athlete of Homeric dimensions, topped by the incongruously twentieth century head of an English aesthete. Here, under the baking summer skies of Greece, overlooking a blue-green bay, “in some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England,” lies the English poet Rupert Brooke, killed by a fever contracted in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. One suspects it was the Greek equivalent of the WPA that devised his gravestone.

Over dinner tonight, a splendid dinner of fresh-caught lobster (crayfish, really), Greek salad, fruit, cheese, and wine aboard the yacht Sirocoi, we discuss our plans for the days to come. There are ten of us in the group, sailing the Aegean for 11 days in two yachts: the Sirocoi is chartered, a comfortable, broad-beamed motor sailor with a crew of four; the Bushido, a swift, sleek racing sloop, has been lent to us.