Elsewhere Leigh Fermor talks of ‘black-coiffed crones’. Here they are ‘fate-spinning’, giving a terrifying and timeless aspect to them, reinforced by their sitting beneath ‘the snarl of the slogan’. ‘Crone’ is probably a dying word, being none too respectful of elderly women.
‘There was something baleful about these two black-coiffed figures under the snarl of the slogan: they looked implacable and fate-spinning crones.’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 100
