The house on the cliff

*** At the end of the 19th Century, the house was built in record time at the instruction of my great- grandfather Márkos Voriás, in time for my grandmother’s first summer on the island as an 18 year- old bride. The location offered a 360 degree view; on one side the tall cliffs and tumbled rocks of the western coast and the open sea, on the other, the successive rolling inland hills all the way to the town, and in the background, the narrow strait and the mainland of Epirus. To the north we could see Mt. Pantokrátoras, and beyond, on the far coast, the Albanian mountains. In the nearer foreground, the view was of our village, Maskouládes, half-sprawled up the hillside. There was no direct route to the sea. The French architect who built the house worked in collaboration with a “landscape architect”. The task assigned to this specialist - his profession barely extant at the time - was a near impossibility: To provide easy access to the small beach that lay some hundred and fifty metres below the house. Something between a very steep slope and a cliff, the hillside was only truly vertical in a very few spots. The rocks are not smooth either, but full of nooks and footholds, paths and even ledges here and there. There are, too, places where the slope is reasonably walkable. The trouble is that the cliff is not a true cliff-face, but is made up of a tumble of vast boulders, looking like the ruins of a titanic fortification wall. There is, no doubt, a precise geological term for such landscapes. The landscape architect was no engineer, but an artist and garden designer. A geological survey would have quickly shown that the cliffside was unstable. The poor fellow, skilled in the composition of colourful flower beds, such as those he designed for the other side of the house, struggled mightily to make the impossible passable. Making use of the natural ledges and the gaps between boulders, digging, removing, even going so far as to blast unwieldy boulders with dynamite, filling in with gravel, building low retaining walls invisible from a distance, and with much patient labour, eventually created a broad and easily walkable path, which zig-zagged as mountain paths do from the lofty height of the house down to the beach. For two or three years all was well. My grandmother skipped gaily down the path with her entourage to bathe in the sea, and afterwards climbed up on the wooden saddle, decorated with blue and green beads, of Kyr Méntios, the purportedly white donkey shipped for the purpose from Cyprus, who was in fact a dirty beige. Ignoring the thuds and bumps of the ascent to the house, she would make laughing conversation with her companions, charmingly shaded by a parasol. The first landslide happened when Daddy was a little boy. Arriving from Athens at the beginning of the summer, they found that a portion of the upper path had given way, and the rockfall had blocked