Roumeli Read Free

mammoth halted in meditation on the tundra’s edge.
    We gazed upwards in silence for a long time. Even the Koutzovlachs, blunted to this phenomenon by their migrations to and from their summer villages in the Pindus and their Thessalian winter-pastures, seemed lost in wonder. They only sank their glance at the cry of some fellow-villager making the month-long journey by road with the village flocks. For the streets were a moving tide of sheep, and the air was full of golden dust and baas and shouted greetings in the strange Latin dialect of these black-clad shepherds. Through the assembly of homespun cloaks and whiskers and crooks and the fleecy turmoil, a tall monk advanced. He was a head and shoulders taller than anyone else, and his high cylindrical hat increased his height to the stature of a giant. “There you are,” the driver said. “There’s Father Christopher, the Abbot of St. Barlaam.”
    Could we stay at his monastery for the night? Of course we could, or two or three. His assent was underlined by a friendly blow on the shoulder and smile on that long saturnine face that radiated the wiry strands of his beard in a bristling fan. Half an hour later we were advancing westwards on either side of his mare. A satchel of provisions hung from one side of the saddle bow, a wicker-caged demijohn of wine from the other. In the middle, loose and easy in the saddle, puffing at his short pipe, talking, or quietly humming to himself, rode the hospitable abbot. The greetings of passing peasants, as we ambled westwards, prompted a response of humorous and squire-ish banter or an occasional mock-threatening flourish or a jovial prod with his great stick. The shadows in the astonishing rocks werebroadening, and all, in the second village of Kastraki, was mellow and golden. Then the last houses fell behind, and as we rounded the vast central tympanum of conglomerate, a deep gorge opened before us, that dwindled and climbed along a chasm between the mountains. The white walls of the monastery of the Transfiguration appeared on a ledge far overhead and soon, the outline of St. Barlaam. My heart sank at the height and the distance. It seemed impossible that we should ever reach that eagle’s nest....At that moment, the sun dipped below the serrated edge of the Pindus. The mountains ahead turned grey-blue and cold and threatening and sad, and every trace of cheer seemed to die from the world. Those Greco- and Mantegna-like rocks might have been the background for the desert macerations of St. Jerome, the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, or the Wilderness of the Temptation.
    As night fell, the road insensibly climbed. At the foot of the rock of St. Barlaam, a great square chasm, choked with undergrowth and rock, disappeared into the mountainside. “The cave of the dragon,” the abbot said, pointing through the dusk, with a quiet and slightly grating laugh, “safely stowed away under the monastery.” The road turned into a narrow flagged ascent between overpowering volumes of rock, winding among boulders and twisted plane trees and opening at last into a slanting world from which all glimpse of the plain was locked out. We were deeply engaged in this improbable geology. But a turn of the path led from our labyrinth into the most brilliant moonlight, and the mountains were suddenly robbed of their menace and their weight. All was silver and light and magical and miraculously silent. The plane trees were as still as the gleaming precipices themselves, as though each leaf had been rolled out of precious metal and beaten thin and then wired to the silver branches. Fathoms above, the reception platform of St. Barlaam and the jutting tiles of its eaved penthouse projected into the moonlight in a galleon’s poop, from which, likean anchor at the end of its cable, the great hook hung. The smooth sides of the cliff were not only perpendicular, but at many points they curved outwards and overhung their