THIS island formed a surprising contrast to the last: instead of the fertile valleys, the rich gardens, and flower-clad hills of Siphnos, we were now on a low-lying bare island of volcanic formation. The streaks of green, red, and yellow rocks which have come out of one of Vulcan’s crucibles give a curious weird aspect to everything; the soil is brown and thin, and not a tree is to be seen. We landed in a little harbour called ‘Green’ (prásino ^gr), from the rocks which surround it. We walked on a little way, and everything became red; and then we went a little further, and everything became white, for now we were at a quarry of a sort of white porous stone, easy to cut and much prized for building, for it hardens with time; it is the old ‘terra Kimolia,’ ^dnote out of which the ancients made fuller’s earth. Close to this spot quantities of ancient pots and tools have been found, and still the little industry of the place is in this quarry. Caïques down by the Green harbour are freighted with this stone, which is taken to Athens for building purposes.

Captain George did not treat us well on this occasion, for he had deposited us, bag and baggage, at a long hour’s walk from the town, where no animals were to be had, saying that in winter the harbour near the town was dangerous; which statement we found to be not exactly true; but Green harbour was far more convenient for his return to Seriphos: hence his desire to put in there. He was a true descendant of his illustrious ancestors. ‘Graeca mercari fide’ ^dnote is as applicable to-day as it was in Roman times; and, furthermore, the sin of lying is not one of the offences which meet with the disapprobation of the Eastern Church.

There are no mules in Kimolos, only wretched little donkeys not much bigger than Newfoundland dogs. On one of these Kera Limoniá was returning from her fields, and passed us. She was off in no time, and insisted on use being made of her animal. Presently we met a cavalcade coming for us from the town, so we restored to the old woman her ass. If the donkeys are small in Kimolos, the saddles are large, and apt to sway about unpleasantly. Riding is consequently precarious work, for on the pack saddles of the island, I had to ride sidewise, and to be tipped backwards is a sensation I only cared to try once. So in Kimolos I preferred to walk.

It had got quite dark by the time we reached the solitary town of the island. It is a walled town — that is to say, like many of these island towns, the backs of the houses form a wall all round, and it is entered by a gate at either end. The streets were, as usual, filthy, and the houses entered by steps, which project into the streets, below being the stable, the warehouse, and the pigsty. On the steps were platforms, where all the gossips of Kimolos sit whilst they ply their spindles and pull their neighbours to pieces. When we issued forth next morning every platform was covered with a staring crowd, and it was a trying ordeal to walk down the main street in imminent danger of stepping off the narrow ledge, called a footpath, into that abominable mire.

Our accommodation at Kimolos was not very grand: the house had only two rooms, the inner of which was given to us as a reception room, feeding room, and bedroom. That evening we had a crowd of visitors — the priest, the schoolmaster, the harbour master, the doctor, the demarch, and the eparch of Melos, who chanced to be here on a visit. Men and women of an inferior grade feasted with their eyes upon us from afar — that is to say, from the other end of a room about fifteen feet long. There was a window at the head of our bed into the adjoining room, where slept our servant, our host, Captain George, and goodness knows how many others. They talked in a high-pitched key all night, and if they wished to address a sleeper they called him by name till he awoke; rarely throughout the night was there a quarter of an hour’s peace.

And then the little oil lamp kept burning all night before the household sacrarium, or corner full of sacred pictures, is a great nuisance. By daytime these sacraria are pretty features in a house: some old hallowed wooden pictures, worn out by kissing; some gaudy new ones from Mount Athos in gilded frames; the wedding crowns of the host and hostess, enclosed in a circular fame; a few religious pictures from Russia; and the brazen censer in which on Saturday incense is burnt to sanctify the house: but at night the ever-burning lamp casting a flickering light on this sacred group is unpleasant, especially when the rays fall on the eikon of St. Michael or some other horrible picture of a saint who has undergone tortures innumerable. Every householder has his ‘name saint’ amongst this group, and the day for celebrating the birthday is the day of the saint.

Next day we found our hostess and other ladies of Kimolos eager to come in long before we were dressed: they are excessively primitive in their manners, with little modesty, and an apparent desire to be hospitable; they are very communicative, too, about their customs and beliefs, and never see anything ridiculous in the most extraordinary superstitions.

Their belief in vampires (vrykólakes ^gr) here in Kimolos is very firm, and though in Greece the heads of the Church are now set against allowing the people to hold such beliefs, which at one time were in a measure sanctioned by the Church, yet it takes a long time to eradicate superstitions which have lived for centuries. If a dying man curse himself, or any enemy of his shall curse him when at the point of death, that man will become a vampire. The earth cannot dissolve his body; he will wander about at night strangling men and beasts, and sucking their blood. There is no peace for him in Hades, no peace for his relatives, for he returns to his home and ‘feeds on his own,’ as the expression goes; he brings with him plagues, typhus, cholera; the grass dies near his grave, the flowers wither, and are eaten by worms, ruin comes on the herds, and dogs wander ominously about the streets howling in the night.

Kimolos and Melos, more than any other islands of the archipelago, have been visited by pestilential scourges; consequently in these islands the belief in vampires is more rampant than elsewhere in the Cyclades, except, perhaps, in the wild north of Andros. And during the piteous ravages of pestilence, religion, they say, alone can assist to quell the spirit, and by liturgies alone can the Papas ^dnote set things right. Now, in the nineteenth century, we do not see what Tournefort did in 1700, for, except in Northern Andros, they do not exhume the body, burn it, and cast the ashes to the winds; this has been strenuously forbidden by the archpriests; but what they still do in Kimolos is this: if there is a suspected case of vampire they go to a priest — for there are plenty of ignorant priests who pander to the superstitions of the people — he accompanies them to the grave of the supposed ghost, and on bended knee they supplicate the All-Merciful to have compassion on this wretched being. ‘May he be after death for ever unloosed like stones and iron,’ says the Church formula, which in darker ages was written by Chrisophoros Angelas to meet this emergency, and on the grave the priest pours some boiling water and some vinegar. After this ceremony it is generally observed that the ghost stops his wanderings; many affirm that whilst the service is going on they hear the rattle of the bones as they settle in the grave.

This idea of vampires is, of course, very old; nearly all creeds and superstitions have taught that wicked men cannot rest after death. Homer tells us (‘Od.’: ii. 49) that the shades in Hades had an idea that by filling themselves with blood they could return to life, and consequently eagerly supped up the blood of slaughtered sheep. So now a poor ghost sucks the blood of a relative, and gains for himself strength. Vampire dread is, however, rapidly on the decrease — I doubt if a single one of the rising generation will believe it.

These are not the only kind of ghosts they have in Kimolos; it is a volcanic island full of caves and uncanny spots: these invariably excite, beyond control, a belief in the supernatural; consequently in Kimolos and Melos all sorts of old superstitions survive.

If they build a house they will kill a goat and a bird, with the blood of which they make a cross on the foundation stone; and for this ceremony the Church has an office and a prayer. If a murder has been committed in a house, or a man buried at midnight, shadows will come out and terrify the inhabitants. At houses such as these they get the priest to read an office and a prayer to drive out the demon; on this occasion again the Church is ready. If this is not successful the house is deserted, and just outside the walls of Kimolos are several houses which, I was told, were deserted for this very reason.

On the hill over the town, near some windmills, are quantities of caves where Nereids dwell; ‘and the Nereids of Kimolos,’ said our hostess, ‘perform the duties of maternity just as we do, only their great desire is to have male children;’ she illustrated her statement by the following story. ‘One day a Nereid of the cave was expecting her confinement, and sent for the regular Mrs. Gamp, of Kimolos, to attend upon her, saying, at the same time, “If it is a boy you shall be happy, but if it is a girl we will tear you in four parts and hang you in this cave.” Clever Mrs. Gamp was determined not to be quartered thus, so when a girl arrived she made believe it was a boy, swaddled it up tightly, and went home. Eight days afterwards they unpacked the child and were miserably disappointed. So a Nereid went down and knocked at Mrs. Gamp’s door. Again she was too cunning for them, for she knew the rule that if you answer the first knock of a Nereid you become mad. So the spell of the Nereids was lost, and could not hurt her; in fact,’ concluded our hostess, ‘she is alive to-day, and can tell her own tale.’

This story is told substantially the same in other islands with pleasing varieties; in Anaphi, for instance, they say that the Nereid offered Mrs. Gamp a bag of gold if the child was a boy. Mrs. Gamp invented the same deceitful plan, but the Nereid was equal to her. She sent her the bag indeed, but it was full of onions instead of gold. From the solemn way our hostess told her story, from the constant corrections of those around if they thought she was not telling it rightly, we could but feel sure that she and her female friends firmly believed in this interesting episode in a midwife’s career.

The morning after our arrival the ladies of Kimolos were very busy, for it was St. Katharina’s Day ^dnote. They made us go to an early mass first in the Church of St Katharina, which was all decorated with evergreens, daphnes, myrtles, and flowers, cyclamens, basil, &c.; from thence we went to the Metropolitan Church, a new one just outside the town, which had been built only recently by the joint co-operation of the males and females of the place, who gave their services gratuitously: the women brought all the materials together, prepared the mortar, and did all they could, leaving the men to put them together. The Kimoliotes are a very pious race of people. How fervently they kissed the silver eikon of the ‘guiding Madonna’ (i Panagía odigítria ^gr)! and what a lot of money the priest was getting, who stood at the door, as he gave a bit of sacred bread and a cross of sacred oil to each who passed, and got in return the money, the ‘return gift’ (antídoron ^gr), as it is called! This system of gift for gift is very marked in Greece; if you give a Greek woman a trifling present, off she will set to her drawer, and fetch you something she thinks an equivalent to your gift: there is something painfully barefaced about it to our ideas.

We witnessed a very sad case in this church. A poor young sailor had just returned the day before, raving mad, from a voyage, and his fellow-sailors gave the following account of the cause. As they rounded Cape Malea a terrible storm came on, and the light called Telonia was seen at the masthead, and the poor young fellow had fallen a sacrifice to the demons of the air.

Greek sailors, like Italian ones, who call them ‘the fire of St. Elmo,’ have a firm belief in the evil omen of these atmospheric lights; and they try to exorcise them with magic words or by shooting or beating brass instruments; they personify them still as birds of evil omen, which settle on the masts, just as Ulysses did on his travels. By land, however, they look upon them as demons, which dwell in the air, and prevent the migration of souls from earth to heaven.

The poor young fellow immediately on reaching home had been taken to the Church of the Guiding Madonna, for it was evident to all that he had lost his reason, whether these strange lights had been the cause of it or not. Whenever a person becomes delirious or wanders in his mind the doctor is sent away, and the priest is called in; if able to go they take the sufferer to the church, if not the priest visits him at home, and the church bell is rung to drive the devil away. In the event of the patient dying in torment or convulsion the priest preaches to the sorrowing bystanders about the awful struggle between life and death, heaven and hell; in the event, however, of his recovery the priest says, ‘This is a miracle,’ and expects a handsome donation.

It was a distressing sight to see the young man, with wan face and wandering eye, surrounded by his sorrowing friends. They had been with him in the church praying all night, and they intended to keep him there all day, hourly hoping for the Virgin’s favour to be granted to him. I felt much interested in the poor fellow, but there was no better account of his condition before we left the island.

It was our good fortune to come across a ceremony of a different nature in a house we went into soon after. Some girls were busy making what they told us were St. Katharina’s cakes: the recipe is simple, and as follows. Take three handfuls of flour and three of salt, get an old woman who has been married once to mix these. Then make them into cakes and, tasteless and salt as they are, eat them lying down and call upon St. Katharina to intercede in your behalf and send you a husband. When this is done the girls try to go to sleep and dream, if possible, of a desire to drink and of some gallant young man handing them a glass of water. If they dream this, the young man is the husband destined for them by St. Katharina. It is not to be wondered at that their dreams sometimes turn in the direction of a desire to drink and of young men when they have eaten so much salt and thought so much about husbands.

I never saw the girls again to ask them the result of their experiment, but I do not doubt that sooner or later they will find helpmates, for they were pretty girls, with an Ionian type of countenance, round faces, and those curious almond-shaped eyes. This is distinctly the Kimoliote type, another very pretty specimen of which appeared to us that evening in the old Kimoliote costume, which unfortunately has now been entirely abandoned, except on rare festive occasions.

On the head is a thing they call the kourlí ^gr, being one of those Eastern veils we use as antimacassars, thrown over a ring of false curls. From the shoulders to the heels was a robe of silver brocade, covered with gold and coloured flowers, long loose sleeves, and stomacher. The woman was well adapted to show this dress off, being very tall and handsome, with such dark almond-shaped eyes and such a mouthful of pearly-white teeth, or, as they express it here, ‘such a cave full of white horses,’ that she seemed quite regal to look upon.

They talked of getting up a dance that evening, in which all the women were to appear in robes like this; but it was delicately hinted to me that I should be expected to stand the supper and pay the musicians; so I told them as politely as I could that, with the prospect of a hard day before us on the morrow, the best thing we could do was to go to bed.

In spite of threatening rain, and the usual difficulties attending a prospective wetting in this country, we managed to get off pretty early next morning on our way to a hill called ‘Old Camp’ (palaiókastro ^gr) where are the ruins of the old fort capital of Kimolos.

When once the present town is left behind there is very little trace of habitation or life on the island. A bright-eyed shepherd boy accompanied us part of the way, with bare legs and a goat’s skin bag on his neck: he was musical, according to the Greek conceptions of music, and sang us several low, monotonous songs. Then we came across some women gathering saffron on the hillside, with which to flavour their bread and their fish; and about the time for our midday meal we reached a shed, or mandra, close to the old camp, where a shepherd lived in much the same state as the herd of Ulysses lived in on Ithaca. Dogs came out barking to meet us, as if we had been Telemachus; and we stooped to enter a low cabin, consisting of one room, made out of large stones roughly piled together, and letting in the wind at numerous cracks. Across the roof ran beams, into which all the articles of husbandry were thrust; a place for a fire was in one corner with no outlet for the smoke; in another corner was some straw for the herdsman’s bed; outside this wall was the semicircular enclosure for the cattle, on the wall of which was placed dried branches of prickly brushwood to prevent them from escaping.

The view from here was more curious than pretty; it seemed as if in the centre of the island there had been the crater of a vast volcano; and it is still called ‘the cone.’ Down by the coast we were pointed out a spot where hot healing springs emanated from the rocks, and where once was a bathing establishment; but now this has almost fallen into the sea, and those that want the waters must go and return to the town by boat all in one day.

‘Kimolos is the spot,’ says Tournefort, ‘where corsairs spent in horrible debaucheries the booty they took from the Turks.’ Now these caverns where the corsairs bivouacked are still looked upon with dread by the inhabitants, for from their volcanic nature the rocks frequently split with horrid noises, and fall to pieces, thereby terrifying the superstitious labourer as he sows or reaps his crops.

The old camp has a grand position on the highest point of Kimolos, and has traces of having been used, both in ancient and mediaeval days, as the acropolis of the island. There is the mediaeval wall, some three feet thick, running in conjunction with the ancient wall with colossal stones; on the summit are cisterns and places of sepulture ^dnote, now used as shelters for cattle. And, indeed, we were glad enough to take shelter ourselves in what presumably was once a reservoir, for the rain came on in torrents; and being a thousand feet above the sea, well on in December, it was rather cold. But on our return journey the sun shone out once more, and made us dry and warm before we reached home.

That afternoon, just after our return, my wife admitted to a headache, more out of a yearning for solitude and repose than out of real pain. Without a moment’s hesitation our hostess went to fetch her mother, an old, withered hag of seventy or more years, who volunteered to cure the ailment by her magic art and the accompanying incantation. Out of her pocket she drew a large pocket handkerchief, in a corner of which she tied a slip-knot. This knot she laid on her knees and put her elbow on it, and then with great deliberation proceeded to measure to the opposite corner from her elbow to the middle finger, nipping it between the fingers till she laid the first finger of her left hand straight across the measured mark. The handkerchief went three times, and about four inches over; this bit of four inches she held in her left hand, and waved with her right the knot vigorously across and over the sides of the patient’s head, saying, as she did so, the following incantation:—

Thanks to the kind interpretation of our hostess, I was able to get the words which the old woman mumbled in an inaudible voice, and flatly refused to repeat more distinctly. Then she measured the handkerchief again in the same way, and by some sleight of hand it only seemed to reach three times. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, ‘you are suffering from the sun, for the handkerchief has got shorter; if you have nothing the matter with you it remains the same length, if you are suffering from the sun it gets shorter.’

After dabbing cold water on the patient’s head, and muttering the same incantation over again, the old hag promised immediate relief at sunset; and at sunset she measured again and pronounced the cure to be effectual, as the handkerchief did not shorten. The patient could have told how the pain never really existed, but it was only kind to tell the old thing what a clever doctress she was. By what sleight of hand she managed to measure the handkerchief shorter and longer at her will remained a mystery to us, though we watched her narrowly.

There are a great many of these charms in the Greek islands. In Amorgos I saw the stomach-ache charm. Elsewhere they have incantations that they sing to the new moon when people look pale, and another they recite to the moon and to flowers is reckoned highly beneficial for those fleshy swellings which grow on the hands, and which have no importance beyond inconvenience. It runs as follows:—

Now warts are called ‘ants’ in these parts, from the numbers in which they come: hence the allusion. Many others are utterly mysterious, and only known to certain old hags, just as in ancient Athens secret cures were kept up in families — medicated rings, prepared plants, &c. Plato, in his ‘Laws,’ treats of charms and incantations, and tells us that the accompanying songs were essential to success. ‘Without the incantation the herb would be of no avail’ (Charm, p. 155). In Byzantine days these musical incantations were in great repute, as we read in the pages of Psellos and others; and amongst these islanders many quaint remedies are still in vogue. As a cure for jaundice put a piece of gold into a glass of water or white wine. This they expose to the air during the night, but are careful to take it in before sunrise. They drink it on an empty stomach, and in two or three days are well. The idea is that gold will attract to itself and fix in the water that substance which vivifies everything, and which exists in the midnight air.

We bade farewell to Captain George next morning without any serious pang: he was busily preparing for his return to Seriphos with a favourable breeze, and was evidently quite content with the results of his outing, for he was humming gaily to himself one of the island sailors’ favourite couplets :—

And when we met him again, in Syra, some months later, we were the very best of friends. We did not part from our host and hostess of Kimolos in quite so friendly a fashion; they evidently looked upon us as legitimate prey, and charged us accordingly. But these good people are not well up in the ways of the world; give them what you think just firmly but kindly, and when they see there is no hope of getting any more they unblushingly give in, and become overpoweringly friendly again.

It was our plan to visit a spot called Helleniká before crossing over to Melos, where are the remains of an extensive old Hellenic town on the west coast, just opposite Melos. The demarch of Kimolos showed us a collection of treasures that he had dug up there; the property is his, and, for fear of having to give up his treasure-trove, he goes there with his workmen and digs by night; and we heard fabulous accounts of the wealth he had acquired by his ‘finds.’

The ancient site of the town of Kimolos has been hunted over before by antiquarians, for Mr. Brest was consul here for France, and in 1799 was a sort of king in the island in those days when French sailing ships used to take their pilots for the archipelago from Melos or Kimolos. A special French consul lived on Kimolos, because the ships used to stop in the good harbourage which lies between the two islands; and Mr. Brest used to intercede with the Kapitan Pasha, who came to levy taxes, on behalf of the inhabitants; consequently he was omnipotent here. Mr. Brest it was who in after-years discovered the Venus of Melos, and his son (now an old man) is still everybody’s vice-consul at Melos, and a man of weight. From Kimolos old Mr. Brest used to feed many of the European museums, and opened many profitable tombs long before the demarchs existed.