the most final
concluding work

I didn’t go back retracing the route which two days earlier brought me to the famous tree. Instead, my intention was to follow the ridge of the toombs (so in Karabakh they call the rounded mountains stretching in wavy chains, under the blanket of grass and woods, to tell them from giant lehrs pricking the sky with their raw rocky tors of peaks) by which stratagem I would bypass climbing all the way down to the valley of Karmir-Bazaar and trudging back up the highway to the pass in the vicinity of the Sarushen village.

That’s why I took a well nigh indiscernible trail tilting up the steep to the right. I did not know whether my plan was feasible at all but if there’s a trail it would eventually bring you someplace, right? And I walked on along it, inhaling sweet fragrance from the infinite varieties of mountain verdure, admiring the fixed waves of merrily green toombs flooded with the sunshine, looking forward to the delight from the breathtaking vistas which would unfurl from atop the ridge…

And it turned out just so—a view surpassing the most dainty epithets by Bunin-and-Turgenev as well as the subtlest brush strokes in Ayvazovsky-and-Sarian’s pictures—and, against that terrific background, the trail flowed into a narrow road coming up from nowhere to the next toomb from whose wood, there were descending, dwindled to specks by the distance, a couple of horses, two men, and a dog.

We met in ten minutes. The horses dragged three-to-four-meter-long trunks of young trees cinched with their thicker ends onto the backs of beasts of burden; the loose tops, peeled of the bark already, kept scratching and sweeping the scorched stony road. Two boys and a dog escorted the firewood for keeping their homes warm next winter…

Entering the wood, I met another party of loggers; they were three horses, and three men, and no dog. We exchanged greetings and I asked if there was a way to reach Sarushen if moving from top to top in the chain of toombs.

The woodchopper in a red shirt sun-bleached by the decade it weathered—a well match to the drum-tight skin in his face presenting his skull structure in detail—replied he been heard of such a trail but never tried himself, and that after another three hundred meters I would meet a one-eyed old man cutting wood up there, who should certainly know. I walked as far as I was told to, then another three or five hundred meters, but never heard an ax; the old man was, probably, enjoying a snack break combined with a good smoke and sound nap…

Before reaching the top of the toomb, the road split into multiple paths. I picked the one of a more promising width but soon it just gave out as if it never was there at all. A pathless mountain wood stood around where you can’t walk without grabbing at the tree trunks—trunkhanging, a thoroughly tiresome recreational activity, it must be confessed. I omitted climbing the summit in an attempt to outflank it while looking for a passage to the following toomb in the ridge.

Suddenly, there cropped up the feeling of some odd change. The sounds of summer wood died away, the daylight dimmed into a weird twilight dissolving the sunlit patches between the bushes and on the tree trunks. What’s up, man? A flash-mob of clouds in the sky?

It took a couple of puzzled looks around to get it—instead of lofty giants interspersing diverse undergrowth I was surrounded by frequent trunks of peers whose crowns interlocked at four to five meters above the ground into a dense mass of foliage impenetrable for the sun, and it was their joint shade that gave the air that grim uncanny touch.

Something made me look back and eye-contact the beastly intent stare… A jackal? Dog? … ah, none… look at this brush of a tail… a fox no doubt… or maybe a vixen… and surely a young one, never met hunters yet…

“Hi, Fox. I’m not Prince. I am not young. Go your way.”

I moved on, dodging the long web-threads, bypassing and sometimes scrambling through the prickly brier; the fox followed. Who invented the bullshit as if animals cannot withstand your fixed look and have to turn their eyes away? Faking quack!.

And so went we on. Occasionally, I addressed him with one or another conversational clue but he never picked gossip. At one point, I took off my haversack and opened it to angle and throw him a piece of bread.

At first, he didn’t seem to know how to approach it but then wolfed the treat down, and quite efficiently too, keeping me all the time under his most vigilant surveillance. Considering the donor for a potential prey? Easy, schemer, we don’t need no hurry… And only when between the trees ahead there stretched a sunlit clearing, he began to cast evasive looks behind himself and soon blend into the woodwork. Fare thee well, Young Fox from the young forest…

I went out into the clearing to realize that I had almost completed a rough circle about the summit never finding the passage over to the next toomb. A couple of decayed roofs peeped from under the distant cliffs. Enough was enough, fed up with the search for an imaginary trail running along the ridge, I switched over to looking for a way to reach the ghost village of Skhtorashen.

The steep footpath soon showed up and brought me to an abandoned orchard of hulking Mulberry trees from where I proceeded to the village spring of delicious water superior to that back by the long-liver Plane.

Then I walked the thirty-meter-long street of two or three houses lost under the crashing overgrowth of blackberry bushes. The cobblestoned street cut abruptly replaced by a barely discernible trail tilting down the slope which faced the Karmir-Bazaar valley.

On the way down the slope, like an incurable bolshie, I made two more attempts at finding at least a minor shortcut, yet both deviations were blocked by deep gorges and sheer cliffs, so the highway met me exactly where I left it two days before, near “The Old Plane Diner”.

After several turns in the smooth serpentine, the highway took a beeline to the pass out from the outspread valley of Karmir-Bazaar.

Up the tilted roadside I trudged along through the repulsive yet somehow fetching stench of the sun-thawed asphalt. Panting, sweating, plodding ahead, I had to move the haversack straps to different positions over my shoulders more and more often, ridiculously often, but all the same at any place after a few steps they dug into the flesh anew and hurt to the very bone. The salt of sweat ate into the eyes that ceased their joyous frisking around to catch a beautiful view or 2, the dull weary gaze crawled along the coarse asphalt under the worn army boots stomping my shadow, which began to gradually grow longer. And yet, at times my eyes took the liberty of casting wishful glances uphill seeking some shady tree nearby the highway, though I knew perfectly well there was not a single such one all the way up to the pass top.

Once or twice, I left the asphalt to slacken thirst with blackberries from the bushes below the road shoulder, looks like this year we’re facing the blackberry crop failure or else it was the stretch of barren bushes ‘cause I hate to be a bearer of bad tidings… And again my heavy boots were tramping uphill along the steady tilt…

~ ~ ~

To obtain and develop your skills at clairvoyance, don’t look for a better coach than mountains… So, when the endless straight ascend of the highway reached the pass top to transform from that point on into horizontal bends and twists dictated by the relief of the toombs outside the valley left behind, I could predict with an awesome degree of accuracy that half an hour later the already indiscernible (if watched from this here position) speck of a pedestrian, this here me, would be taking the indiscernible turn to disappear over the farthermost slope of that distant toomb and, after ten-to-fifteen-minute walk, before reaching the Sarushen village, I would fork off the highway to follow the dirt road tilting to the bottom of the Varanda River valley. And there it would be really nice, with lots of shade under the trees, and the spring of cool water running from the rocky river bank…

All happened exactly as foretold, and when the dirt road brought down to the shallow ford across the gravel-filled riverbed before the sharp rise to the village of Sarkissashen, I split and went along the river bank through the live tunnel passing over a Hazel thicket to come out into the wide expanse of an unusually level field stretched matching the foot of the steep toomb on the opposite bank.

Try to imagine a football field put almost straight-up, and overgrown with broad-leaf wood up to the very top of that wheeling stadium. Because the steep is so rampant, the tree crowns do not screen each other but climb higher and higher in succeeding rows, each crown sending forth the shimmer of its own—a little bit different—shade of green. Can you imagine this daydream? If so, then you can easily see me too down on this riverbank, stretched on my back under a huge Walnut tree, on the thick mat of moldered foliage from the years past—brittle, soft, dried out.

Here am I to enjoy the orgy of the upward stream of green running over the toomb across the river, and relish the deep blue of the sky above, and admire the canopy of broad Walnut leaves sun-bathing in the soft breeze over my head.

Ho-ho! It’s damn good to be alive, sprawling like this, thinking thoughts of this or that, or of nothing at all. The only jarring note is the absence of anyone who I could share all this surrounding beauty with… whoops! Forget, cut this one out… I’ve got used since long that the moments of the like delight only happen when there’s no one around… Yet, it’s never overmuch to make sure you keep your megalomania in check, tight and proper, and no seemingly harmless thoughts are taken for granted, like, the more space is forked out to a single person, the higher is their position…

Once upon a time, I was flipping thru a discarded relic of a glossy magazine in German. The feature article inside was all about a certain Hoheit Herzog, the owner of a giant chemical concern. In short, he’s one of those Highnesses keeping aloof from the political rat races for they’ve left that petty sport to presidents, prime ministers, contesting parties und so weiter, yet the slightest turns of rudder within their enterprises are of the most decisive import for the political course of Germany.

The article was full of eye-candies around the Herzog's close-up against the backdrop of his personal backyard park—a crashing vast scope of trimmed grass interspersed with old well-groomed trees and the couple of the blond-lock cupids of his grand kids playing toy bows between the trees next to his left earlobe.

His forefathers, wandering Jew paddlers, hauled consumer goods from as far as China itself to trade with feudal dukes, and barons, and any other titled medieval bandits. Gentile barbarians paid the sidelocked Shylocks with all sorts of base abuse. And now he’s the upper dog, the monarch of a wealthy industrial kingdom. Yet, is he happy? Looked doubtful to me considering Herr Herzog's facial expression smack-bang in the middle of that paid-for-by-humilated-ancestry-and-fully-deserved-by-his-own-merits park of his…

OK, but leaving in peace all them those royals, what about me? Am I happy here, lying on my side beneath the arboreal awning, enjoying whiffs of the soft breeze cooled by the river stream, with all this hell of a lot of space for me and me alone?

Some huge domain, indeed, this field under the thigh-deep rank grass, spiked-mace-like bluish spherical thorns peeping here and there, and that grand Camelot-toomb over the stream, as tall as the residential towers bulking up alongside the highway between Kiev and the Borispol Airport. What else would you ask for to feel appropriately happy, eh?

A pretty interesting question if you come to think of it. Alas, no looking-glass in my haversack to knock out a self-diagnosis from the smart expression of my silly mug…

~ ~ ~