Começos... (43)

I left Athens at mid-day in the Automatrice, a reasonably fast Diesel train which for four hours trundled along beside the sun-glittering Gulf of Salamis, through pale green valleys hemmed in by low, treeless hills of grey limestone, past dust-grey villages set among the dark spear-like cypresses. The light was white and intense, the magical light of Hellas which shadows impartially the fluting of a Doric column or the hard lines of a peasant’s face. We passed Megara, near which the hero Theseus kicked the giant Sciron into the sea (where he turned into a tortoise), and then after miles of gnarled olive-trees, slowed and stopped at New Corinth.
I had over an hour to wait at the squalid railway station, which seemed as if designed to destroy all romantic preconceptions of Greece. On the dirty, paper-littered platform sat sad-eyed women in drab, shapeless clothes, and a few listless men, cloth-capped and collarless. Among them was a sullen youth with a strained, handsome face, who looked older than his years. He had lost a leg in the Civil War and hobbled painfully on crutches. A few meagre-looking fowl pecked between the tracks, and a small ragged boy moved along the platform with a trayful of “souflakia” – fragments of meat on wooden skewers; but he had few costumers.
So this was Greece.

LEONARD COTTRELL, The Bull of Minos [1953]