Orts #684

  
And if you ever want to know if someone has put the evil eye on you, . . . hold three cloves in a candle's flame. If they all shatter, the curse was indeed upon you but now is gone. If they just blacken, it is still upon you. To find out who gave you the evil eye, drop grains of charcoal into a glass of water and say the names of those you suspect. The charcoal will sink when you guess correctly. 
     -- the wisewoman from Zervou, in The Greek for Love, by James Chatto
 

The beginning of Chapter 5 of the same book:

    The pleasures of mixing cement are not always apparent to the uninitiated, but pleasures there are. Beyond the obvious satisfaction of physical exercise lies the childish delight in playing with mud and water, bucket and spade, and in stirring things together. Mixing a good batch of mortar is part building a sandcastle and part making a cake, the whole activity dignified by manly practicality.
   One begins by seizing a shovel and moving a quantity of sand from the main heap to the newly swept and pristine mixing pad. The obsessive workman will seek to create a conical mound with the perfect profile of Mount Fuji, judging this part of the operation complete when the summit is about knee-high. Now he exchanges the shovel for a mattock, scrunching its blade down into the soft peak and pulling gently, moving to left and right, pulling some more, pushing a little, until the mountain has a deep crater. His eye falls upon the heavy brown paper sack of cement emblazoned with the manufacturer's name — usually Titan but sometimes Erakles, either way, a worthy foe. A swift, sudden, arcing blow and the mattock blade pierces the top of the sack, sending up a small cloud of fine grey dust. Through this wound, the cement can be shovelled into the crater of sand, the perfect amount judged by eye and instinct. Mix dry ingredients together thoroughly until a new, slightly larger Fujiyama looms on the mixing pad.
   The next crater is larger and broader than the first. Indeed, the mountain is all but pulled down, spread into a ring of smooth hills around a peaceful vlley. If making mortar for stone, the lime is now added — half a bag should be about right — pure white and with the soft texture of toothpaste, an alien lump in the centre of the valley. Pour on half a bucket of water, pick up the mattock and start blending the lime into the sand-cement mixture, pulling the encircling hills into the mud, adding more water as needed. One must work quickly now, in case the water finds a way through the shrinking hills. In a minute or two, the danger is past, the dry and liquid ingredients are thoroughly mixed and the mortar exists, a quivering mudlike form, solid enough to hold its shape, wet enough to make a cheerful splat when dropped from a shovel into the carrying bucket. A single batch will serve one old Greek builder for twenty minutes if he's working hard and if you've remembered to take him enough lumps of stone. The recipe can be repeated twenty-seven thousand times for larger projects, or until the back breaks.