I picture scurf-surfing cormorants and carrion birds buffeted by winds in anticipation of sailors’ corpses washing up on the wind-blasted coast. And I like the straight line of continuity connecting today’s mariners to those of Menelaus, contending with the same elements.
‘There in the blue haze, circled by tempest-haunting birds, lay the terrible Cape whose storms almost dashed the ships of Menelaus and Ajax, and those of many later seamen, to fragments.’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 156
