Gythio

It's noon of a very pleasant day here in Gythio, and i'm on a tiny island right in front of town. Well, technically, it's not an island anymore, because someone's built a road that connects it to the mainland. On the farther side stands a lighthouse and i'm sitting on the coast, a few meters from it. From here i can see the middle finger of the Mani, all the way to its tip. It is, again, a mostly mountainous peninsula, but at stretches, towards the south, the land becomes lower, and at times it sinks under the horizon, so that the parts that emerge from it look like islands. The clear skies and the long views here make obvious the curvature of the Earth: people living in this area must have wondered about this in the oldest of times, perhaps not only philosophers or 'great' thinkers, but simple fishermen and farmers.

The rocks i'm sitting on have sharp edges, corroded by the rain. They are calcareous, porous, cratered as if fruit eaten by birds and striated and puckered, like elephant skin. If this kind of rock is common around here, there should be at least some caverns in the area. Must find out about that.