Paxos, with it`s gnarled groves of olives and crazy stone walls, is a goblin island. It leans to the east, as though some giant Titan of antiquity strode across it and tilted it. The ground water is brackish due, it is said, to greedy exploration for oil. One suspects, though, a more tolerant attitude before the project failed..

The `real` town square was the triangle glimpsed through the church arch. Plumb in the centre of the usual jumbled taverna eatery was the little yellow kiosk with it`s nick-nacks and solitary phone. the Greeks are forthright voicifiers, and each evening the diners - with expressions as innocent as their ears were alert - cheerfully eavesdropped on all the latest news. Nearbye was a marble fishs-slab where eager buyers would trudge up with their cone-shaped newspapers for the latest catch. There was another square on the quay front but this was just for day-trippers to be tormented by the wasps under the bright  yellow and blue awnings. There, little wooden caiques stood ready to chug them over to the golden sands of Anti -Paxos, leaving the rest of the long-stays in relative peace. A short coastal walk fetched them to the lagoon of Magonissi where a merciful taverna-owner, realising the fatalising effect of bazouki music on the Western soul, whisked them over in his inflatable to restore their spirits with medleys of the Fab Four. It was from this place that the tourist left his companion basking on the sand and crossing the trickle of sea that titles Monganissi an islet, climbed the sharp, high rocks and-in the company of a single  lizard - laid his eyes on such a southward of islands and blue sea as...as...but enough! too much talk might burst the blissful bubble of the blue and white memory.

Lakka, in the north is less of a capiatal than Gaios by only about seven houses. Loggos, in the middle, is even smaller...which reminds me...

It was very, very hot. Not a breeze stirred the flat water of the little, round harbour. On the low stone quay only a solitary taverna ventured an open door. Behind, shuttered Loggos cowered from relentless pressure of the noonday heat. To the left, the tall stack and rusty remmnants of the derelict olive-oil factory baked behind it`s cobbled beach while the tourists, chased by the foot-scorching impossibility of those same cobbles, Dozed -marooned until the evening bus - in the one patch of shade near the taverna. Despite the proximity of the water there was a heavy desert - like stillness over the place.

 
It was the gradually increasing sound of an approaching craft through the hush of the heat that caused the tourists to heave their heavy lids in sluggish curiosity towards the headland, and a boggle of bewilderment strove to master their sun-drugged brains at the vision that was cleaving the glassy water towards them. Eerily out of place in such a setting and looking far too cumbrous for such a small craft sat - two abreast - six elderly gentlemen in fawn linen jackets. Each wore a straw hat and sat, crouched miserably, over a cane walking stick.  Behind them at the tiller, erect and inscrutable, sat a tall lady elderly, but some years younger than the men. She too wore a straw hat, but with a tall crown, and was dressed in a loose muslin frock.With a stony intentness, she steered them to the quay.

As they drew near she rose and made her way through the men to the prow and the tourist - roused to a belated chivalry-held out a helping hand...Her words as she refused his offer were so bizarre that for a long moment his brain accused his ears of lying. She said, in faultless upper-class English, ` I`m sorry, but we have been swimming and I have no knickers on, and if I bend, forward, then these dirty old buggers behind me will look up my frock at my bare arse`.

He fell back stupified as , unaided, she awkwardly pulled each of the men on to the quay, and  peremptorily marshalling them to the taverna table, gestured each man to remove his hat and sat him down bareheaded. As though pre-ordered a waiter appeared and placed skimpy plates of food before them which they picked at listlessly under the merciless glare of the sun. In no time at all the lady glanced impatiently at her watch, clapped sharply, stood and re -hatted each man,  and ushered her charges impatiently back to their craft. Wordlessly, each man took his place hunched over his stick as the motor purred into life and the lady, as erect and stony faced as ever, took the tiller and conducted them out of the harbour and around the headland. She herself had not eaten a thing.

As the sound faded into the haze the two tourists stared at each other in drained disbelief until, dumfounded by the utter bizarreness of what they had seen, they fell into a fitful sleep.

Back at Gaios no one could enlighten them. There were no parties of elderly yachtsmen along the coast, certainly no such group on the island. It was not to be explained. Who were they? Some  ghostly victims an old Victorian shipwreck perhaps, being forever rescued and then cast cruelly back upon the deep? Or maybe some Dantean group of old unrepentant lechers taken in their decrepitude and condemned to wander forever over the bleak oceans having their feeble  lusts perpetually tempted by that tall, knickerless Amazon? Was that stop at Loggos a respite, or to fuel their senile cupidity once more into futile impotence? Or where they?...or perhaps?...or maybe?...then again? But no matter, It`s good that some mysteries should shake us out of the shallow certainty of our materialistic minds. There was an eerie feeling about Paxos that night.

 Mention of night recalls that time is passing and this is getting long. No time now for Karystos, or Donkey Island, or Gythion, or Elafonissos, or Skiathos (ah! Tsoungrias!) . But never mind, what a tale there will be next year down in the Peloponnese.

And so; As the sun, gathering the rosey garments of the clouds in crimson dignity about him, descends in regal splendour the radiant stairway of the west...etc;...etc;...you know how these things traditionally end...