The elderly woman invited us into her work shed, a lean-to on the side of her small stone-built home. Sitting down at the loom, she began to demonstrate what she was doing in broken English.
‘Wool.’ She held up the scarlet shuttle, then pushed it through the threads.
‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the emerging fabric. The loom clattered away, her words shouted above the noise.
Dressed head to foot in faded black, despite the heat of Crete in August, she wore a high-necked blouse with a long heavy skirt from which emerged legs in thick black stockings, terminating in battered shoes.
Her salt-and-pepper hair was just visible at the front of a severely tied-back scarf. Her hands, covered in brown age spots, were knotted by arthritis. She might have been 60 or 70, or even older; it was impossible to tell.
The red wool on the shuttle flashed backwards and forwards, and reminded me of the story we had heard the previous day at Knossos about Ariadne’s thread. How she had given
