Emilio Comici by David Smart

Author:David Smart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771604574
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2020-07-03T17:06:35+00:00

Chapter Six:

The Plain of Muses

“Each pinnacle is a little God and the summit, Jupiter,” Emilio remarked when he first saw the vertical 200-metre faces of Olympus’s peaks, Agios Antonios (the highest mountain in Greece, at 2815 metres), Mytikas and Skolio. His client, Anna Escher, must have been amused to see Greece bring out a rarely seen scholarly side of Emilio. When it rained he blamed the god Fluvius. “Thank Phoebe, the goddess of light,” he said on the summit of Olympus, “there is enough time to get down.”159

Their guide and bodyguard was long-haired, wild-eyed Christos Kakkalos from the nearby village of Litochoro. Kakkalos carried a rifle, which doubled as an ice axe. When wild dogs closed in on the approach to their campsite on the Plain of Muses, Kakkalos chased them away with a fist and a feral growl. On the hike in, when a mule bucked off its load and ran away, Kakkalos had piled its load on his already heavy pack.

The ancient Greeks had built a small shrine on the summit of Agios Antonios. In the modern period, the sport had been slow to catch up with western Europe. In 1921, Kakkalos had guided Swiss explorers Marcel Kurz and Fritz Kuhn on the first ascent of Stefani. The steeper walls of the mountain had not even been considered.

Emilio and Escher, however, made quick work of the first ascents of the northeast ridge and northwest face of Stefani and the northwest ridge of Mytikas while Kakkalos and Escher’s friend, Dr. Gizman, watched Emilio and Escher with a telescope. After the climb, Emilio showed Kakkalos how running belays worked, with a tent pole as an anchor point.

Most of Emilio’s account of his Greek trip, however, concerns not the technical climbing on Olympus but the approach to Smólikas (2637 metres), in the Pindus range, with Escher and Gizman. Smólikas, the second-highest mountain in Greece, was in the Ioannina area, close to the Albanian border, and no one knew how to get there from Athens. A travel agent told Emilio to take a one-day bus ride to Grevena, but there was no bus, and the taxi ride took them two days. In Grevena, they hired taxis for the long drive on bad roads to Kastoria.

In Kastoria, the best hotel in town was so infested with bedbugs that they slept in their sleeping bags with the drawstrings cinched around their faces. In the morning, they paid a local with a car to drive them, partly cross-country, 70 kilometres to Samarina, a hamlet that Emilio said “in the winter would be difficult to reach, as it then lay buried under high drifts of snow, far from the inhabited cities, the haunt of wolves, in a land that knows no skiing.”160

The innkeeper of Samarina knew a little about Italy from the Italian soldiers who had crossed the mountains from Albania in the Great War to pasture their horses. Along with the local gendarme, he entreated the climbers to hire armed escorts if they travelled further, in case of brigands.

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