Our friend Petra thrust a book into my hand a few days ago and said “Take this Martin, I didn’t like it very much but I thought you might”
She is quite right.
The book is by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travel writer of the mid twentieth century whom I have often read references to, but never actually read before.
I will be reading him from now on.

I am going to quote you a long passage from a piece he wrote in 1969 for, of all publications, Holiday Magazine.
When he was in his early twenties he decided to walk to Constantinople, he travelled sometimes sleeping in ditches or with shepherds in their bothys, at other times between silk sheets with the local gentry who recognised him as one of their own.
On this particular night he got lost by the shores of the Black Sea, fell, lost his torch and wounded, and seriously cold he stumbled into a cave occupied by Greek and Turkish fishermen and shepherds.
The fed him, dressed his wounds and when he produced a few bottles of Raki in thankfulness the party began.
There follows a description of Costa’s dance, I have never come across a dance better described;

“The next dance, on which Costa now embarked solo, was although akin to its forerunner, odder still. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same cigarette in the centre of his lips as he gazed at the ground with his eyes nearly closed and rotated on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back. Soon his arms lifted above his head and slowly soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face, like a vulture rocking in a slow breeze with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the steps evolved.
The downward gaze, the precise placing of the feet, the sudden twirl of the body, the sinking on alternate knees, the sweep of an outstretched leg in three quarters of a circle with the arms out flung in two radii for balance- these steps and passes and above all the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the trodden fish scales and goat’s droppings, a lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracting the conclusion of Pythagoras about the square of the hypotenuse.
But more striking still was the doomed aura that invested this dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer. Absorption lifted him so far from the others in the cave that he might have been alone in a distant room, raptly applying ritual and undeviating devices to abstruse and nearly insoluble conundrums or exorcising a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The voices and hands had grown silent, isolating the wiry jangle of the strings.
On a rock, lifted there to clear the floor, the round, low, heavy table was perched. Revolving past it , Costa leaned forward: suddenly the table levitated itself into the air, sailed past us, and pivoted at right angles to Costas head in a series of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there only by his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a magic carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of smoke and soon travelling so fast that the four glasses on it, the chapfallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and the spoons, the earthenware saucepan that had held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerel with their heads and tails hanging over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved for a few swift revolutions; then it redefined itself, when the pace dwindled into a slowly revolving still life.
As the dancer sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table top; when he soared into the dark only the underside glowed.
He quickened his pace and reduced the circumferences of the circles by spinning faster and faster in the same place, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto: cries which rose to an uproar. His head was flung back; muscles and veins corrugated his streaming features and his balancing arms were out flung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself melted into a vast disc twice its own diameter and spinning at such a speed at the cave’s centre that it should by rights have scattered the still life that it bore into the nether shadows.
Slowly the speed slackened. The table was looping through the smoke five feet from the floor. Soon it was sliding from its orbit and rotating back to its launching rock, unhurriedly alighting there at last with all its impedimenta undisturbed. Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it settled in its place, he retrieved the cigarette he had left burning on the edge of a plate. Dancing slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, he tapped away the long ash and replaced the cigarette in his mouth. Gyrating, sinking and rising again, he unwound the dance to its sober initial steps; then, straight as a wand and poised on tiptoe at his motionless starting point, he broke off and sauntered with lowered lids to the re-established table. Picking up his raki glass he took a meditative sip and, pokerfaced in the clamour, slowly subsided.”