A First Visit to Greece

Not far north of the city of Cadmus a low bluff juts out into the flat plains of gravel and mud, alternately dry-cracked with summer drought or spongy with irrigation. The waters of Lake Copais no longer sluggishly daub its slopes, but are drained and channelled and fed—for fifty drachmas an hour—through the tiny pumping station at its base to the fields of maize and cotton. Peasant wives and daughters, barefooted, tend the subsidiary flow, raking rivulets down the planted aisles, drawing little earth dams open or shut with their odd Greek spades, skirts tucked up from clay-sloshed calves, and heads swathed in scarves against the merciless sun.