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Through Fervent Seas

Peering through the dark, ravished from a night on a bench with the soft vibrations of the ship’s engines, I saw Crete. My eyes shuttered. They wanted rest, to evaporate from the world surrounding and return to the forgotten lands where dreams relate to one another on a gossamer thread. But my mind; it singed my lashes and brows with the ferocity of ancient fable. Crete. I heard so much. I had a conscious tale of the Cretan in my mind. Who was he? Where did he come from?

A Formulation of Crete and Its New Sustaining Land

Camron Karsten
2006-10-07 13:31:24

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Through Fervent Seas

Peering through the dark, ravished from a night on a bench with the soft vibrations of the ship’s engines, I saw Crete. My eyes shuttered. They wanted rest, to evaporate from the world surrounding and return to the forgotten lands where dreams relate to one another on a gossamer thread. But my mind; it singed my lashes and brows with the ferocity of ancient fable. Crete. I heard so much. I had a conscious tale of the Cretan in my mind. Who was he? Where did he come from?

Half passed five o’clock in the morning, the land was dark except for sparsely dotted housings emitting a constellation of pulsing lights. I saw the tracers of headlights, darting through the thin brush like fireflies. I smelled the sea air of maritime travel, now mixed with the sweet earthen scent of eucalyptus and the offshore breezes lure the water-bound. Classic Crete. My mind fast-forwarded on a reel of all knowledge I ever ingested. Now it was time to digest.

From the earliest mythological references of a birthing Western World to the sound revolutions of caiques and ships masquerading the Mediterranean in search of the origin of the
Greek, the Romans, Venetians, the Turks—an Ottoman, Byzantine or Roman Empire—and further distending deep into the Biblical times of St. Paul and his knowledge of Greek being the language of civilization; what was the Cretan? What kind of people lived here?

My mind kept the eyes wide. Through the thinning dark of late night into early dawn, I pictured the Cretan: he was large, taut like a mast against fierce gales, with gritty muscles winding through the skeletal structure. Skin was a penetrating brown, casting off the rays of the sun with a glisten of sweat, shouting to the Heavens, “Burn me with all your might! And ever more wish to see me run to shade!” Black eyes were stealthily held within deep-set cranial pockets sheltered by the bush of thick wiry brows. ...