Miloslav Nevrlý – Page 2 – Carpathian Games

RODNA

THE ROSEBAY MOUNTAINS. Standing beneath them at the edge of the Maramureş Mountains, you might think yourself in Carpathian Ruthenia: streets strewn with river rocks, wood-gabled villages kilometers long, homes without chimneys, centuries-old wooden churches – onion-shaped – and paschal candles half a millennium old. Dusty hearths and shaggy-coated herds of goats. Shepherds in bast sandals, handmade leather shoes, and incredible hats, smelling biblically of sheep.

Far up the two thousand three hundred meters high ridges of the Rodna Alps, beauty awaits – realms of grass, verdant mountain crests and millions of gentle-red rhododendrons. Here, the weather shifts from storms to mist to sunshine, sometimes twice a day. I liked the Rodna Mountains. Walking southeast along the ridge, you encounter nothing but grass for days; the tree line is far beneath your feet. Occasionally, you may spot a small lake or herd of animals. Alpine accentors, their flight wild and whirring, alight on crags. Deserted mountain ridges. The only lodge far and wide is in Puzdrele, concealed among the sorrel of age-old sheep farms. In front of it, hogs with wires in their snouts root in the earth – without them they would surely root even more.

There are very few hikers on Rodna mountain ridges, though you may occasionally pass a band of shaved-headed Romanian pilgrims with loaves of bread tied to their backs. They carry satchels, and blankets hang around their necks. The person at the rear of the procession bears a kerosene lamp that swings from his rucksack. Sincere and modest people, they eat mostly tomatoes, bacon, and yellow kashkaval cheese.

Beneath towering Ineu Mountain lies icy Lala Lake. On our final night in Rodna, we took refuge from a storm in a deserted hunting cabin just below the lake’s frigid waters. We thought of last year’s rutting season as we ate our fill of rotten potatoes around a fire of Witch’s Broom, the only wood that burns so wet, and the flooded Lala River roared below the cabin.

MARAMUREŞ

THE TRACKLESS MOUNTAINS. Not one tourist marker sullies this mountain range, not one tourist cabin. Only military fences from another era lie toppled and disused below the grassy border. We hike along the old frontier for days. To the north, all of eastern Carpathian Ruthenia lies at our feet, the ancient comitat of Máramaros, the Tisza River valley, the highlands of [1] Nikola Šuhaj, snow covered Mount Hoverla, mighty Pip Ivan Peak. The Romanian side of the former Hungarian territory breathes fresh and green – endless forests, long valleys, pasture lands. Near the summit of Farcău Mountain, a lake lies where horned oxen drink each evening among blackbird flocks and windblown meadows. Beyond the old border tripoint of Stoh, even the uprooted border markers seem different: cast-iron posts lie, pink and decorative, amid the grass and wildflowers along the old Romanian-Polish frontier. And still we have not met a soul. Over the course of five days, we meet seven shepherds and two border guards who we appease with handwritten authorizations and homemade stamps – such documents work wonders in those deserted mountains! There is little water and few people atop the ridges that make up the western edge of Máramaros, and the border there is at times unmarked, at others secured by five layers of fencing, as the Rodna Mountains hem in the southern horizon. According to a sixty-year-old general map, we are scarcely clinging to a wild, forested ridge between the Ruscovei and Vaser valleys. Miserable forest crossroads fade into the undergrowth; this is a trackless land. We wander through rainstorms, Carpathian mists, and steep, rocky, rain-soaked pine thickets. We bed down near forest peat bogs, uprooted by wild beasts. We sleep near grouse droppings, wolf scat, sheep cadavers, horse bones strung across crooked pines: how bleak those rainy nights are! Huts emerge from the mountain fog, inhabited mostly by Rusyns, whose language is remarkably similar to Czech. They are kind, chasing the dogs away and giving us sheep’s milk and cheese – sweet and salty. But most beautiful of all is the music they play on their long fujaras to accompany us on our way. They blow their eastern song into great, glossy, homemade pipes until we are forever lost to sight among the junipers, scrub-pines, and trackless forests of the Maramureş Mountains.

[1] Nikola Šuhaj was an outlaw and local folk hero from Carpathian Ruthenia.

THE GAME STARRY NIGHTS

My tent, airy and windswept, is sweeter than the finest palace.

Um-Jesid, mother of the sixth Caliph of Islam

Nights are the cornerstones of every journey and the games of kings. Days can be hot or rainy, merry or monotonous, endless, or a mere blink of an eye. But the pilgrim faces them wide awake. When night comes, however, he goes helplessly forward, vulnerable and at the mercy of the darkness. When the windy tail of day sweeps away its footprints and evening falls restless as a pregnant doe, it is time to seek safety, shelter, and rest. I see the land with different eyes, forests take on a new shape at dusk. On balmy evenings, they beckon to me, and their dry peripheries spread out before me like a beautiful maiden. But on nights of hail amid strange mountains, an evening mist at two thousand meters bodes uncertainty, even doom. On such nights, I wish to be far away among people, basking in the sun of morning. But I have no choice. It is time to sleep, time to search for a place to spend the night. Fear not, my timid little brother, I have gone to sleep every night and always woken the following morning. The less I take with me on my journey, the more I am at the mercy of the night and the unknown, and the more beautiful and unusual nights I spend.

With a tent, I am a millionaire: indifferent, oblivious, self-assured. I can go wherever I wish. Spreading out my palace of green, my fear of night vanishes. Heed only the words of the Prophet Muhammad, “First tie your camel firmly to a tree, then consign him to God’s protection.” Thus, I build my tent securely and do not rely impertinently on the mercy of the night. For it is long, and better is to sleep than to patch canvas in darkness, hunt the winds for possessions borne on gusty wings, or bale water out of sleeping bags. Only then do I lie down to sleep.

Tents are like girls, each one has a different smell, but all are equally fragrant. And though they all let the sunlight in, each morning has its own hue. It is strange – some people have never slept in such airy palaces. What unfortunates!

Possessing only a tarp, I am still a wealthy man. A two-by-two-meter canvas is a bundle light and small, and I need not fear the night. I lay beneath it feeling as glad as the rich man and as happy as the outlaw. I have a home, but I also have the wind and the stars. Raindrops, though meddlesome in a tent with a floor, dry up and disappear, absorbed by the earth. When the rain stops, the stars reappear. I lean out from under my roof like a caddis fly from its watery conduit. An occasional drop falls on my face from the branches above, but who cares, my body is dry, and my eyes gaze upwards at the night sky. Strange – some people have never fallen asleep with their gaze fixed on the stars. What unfortunates!

Finally, there are the journeys when I carry no shelter at all. I prepare for the night without tent or tarp. It is bad to walk into long and rainy darkness. My gaze scours the sky, the clouds, and the thickets. It is alright, the afternoon clouds have dispersed with the coming evening, dissolving into faded blues and vanishing altogether. It is growing rapidly cooler. The night will be clear and cold, but I do not mind the chill, I adapt to it quickly. I console myself with the memory of Taras Bulba, knowing that evening frost on wild fields gladdens Cossack bones. Lowering my pack, the day is behind me. Suddenly, there is plenty of time. I sprawl in the grass. The earth has completed her daily Sun Dance; having twirled before her star, her face fades with the approaching night. Strange – some people cannot carry all they need upon their backs. What unfortunates!

I break off pine boughs to place under my sleeping bag. Blessed is the land where I can go about this work and fear no pricking of the conscience. For breaking off branches in Carpathian forests is like pulling a few hairs from a girl’s mane in love-play: it only makes her wilder. Yet preparing such a bed of boughs in Czech forests is like tearing out the last of an old man’s bristles.

Before nightfall, I gather wood for a “foc mare”, a great Romanian fire. Blessed are the lands where there is still wood enough for the nocturnal pilgrim! Fire, the most sparkling of nighttime games, would deserve its own chapter. Fires are joyful and pure, you can gaze into them for hours. I remember them as I do lovers. The quiet, three-log fire I slept by in Poloniny National Park. The secret watch-fires of forest dells and craggy glens. The fragrant fires of precious woods from the southern Slovak Karst. The blazing pine-log fires which illuminated and heated our rocky shelters beneath the limestone walls of Veľká Fatra and the sandstone overhangs of Děčín. Driftwood fires on the sandy shores of the Tisza River, the smell of fish, mud, freedom, and bacon cooking on a willow stick, the hot dust of herds and plains. The clear fires of wood from beaver dams at the border of Poland and Lithuania where pure water splashes down onto the steep, desolate banks of deep Suwalki lakes, and sheldrakes’ cries ring out above the surface of the water. Shepherds’ fires of juniper, rosebay and scrub-pine amid the Transylvanian Carpathians and the Macedonian Pirin Mountains. Fire and sheep – such safe and soothing smells. We lived among them for thousands of years, a few short years amid the stony walls of cities cannot wipe that out. I sleep with shepherds near silent flocks. Sheep bleat from their dreams. They shake their heads with a soft ringing of bells and a dog laps the stranger’s dusty hand. Silence. Such great good cannot be expressed in words and I can never be grateful enough to fire, the oldest good, which fends off wild animals, and banishes fear from the soul and cold from the body. I believe I would never be done with the game of sparkling fire, so beautiful and so beneficial. And therefore I will spare no more words upon it, my blanket-loving brother! But when you grow tired of your blankets and your bed, pull night’s wide and starry brim down around your head! For who knows if the term wide open sky did not originally come from the wide hats under which 19^th century poets slept as they wondered the land, or if instead it reminds us of the broad midnight heavens so familiar to ancient pilgrims. Thus, when you grow tired of the world, pull night’s wide and starry brim down around your head! Bed down under a moonlit bluff, bed down in a south-facing fallow. There the ground is dry and hard and your bed of plants smells pungent beneath your head as crickets sing. Above such mattresses, the stars shine brightest and the full moon glows like the window of a dark ship on the Black Sea. I lie in the grass recalling the names of constellations. Once I knew them all and had learned them with delight, but now I see it was not necessary. It is good in youth to know much about stars – though not only about stars – but even better is, in old age, to knowingly forget unimportant external things. To keep only what is meaningful – only what nourishes us inwardly. Just as the names of animals and plants are not what is most significant about them, neither are the shapes of age-old constellations that which is most important about stars. It is enough to lie beneath them, to graze your thoughts on verdant pastures and water your deeds at clear streams as the words of an evening song of thanks flit like silver swallows upon your lips.

So as not to discourage you from nocturnal journeys, my chilly little brother, I will comfort you. There are other ways to sleep beneath the starry heavens that are just as beautiful! Under the open sky I wake often to check the midnight breezes and scour the sky for clouds. The calls of night birds wake me too. I sleep lightly under the open sky, like an animal prepared for anything, ready to flee in search of shelter from rain, storms, danger. Remember that the best place to sleep is in the hay – amidst dried grasses. Perhaps that is because our early ancestors hearkened from the sultry eastern steppes. We are the brothers of horses. Moonlight streams into the old hay shed. The fragrant warmth of a fresh night wafts through the air. You lie in the depths of your sanctuary. If there is someone to place a warm arm around your neck before you sleep, all the better. So much the better, my sensuous little brother. Hay sheds: the most wonderful confluence of nature and civilization, grass and ingenuity. Unsurpassable. I lie there exhausted and satiated. All that was meant to happen has happened, the day is finished. A last gentle burp and the heavenly taste of the departing day, with all its blessings, drifts through the body. The balanced taste of garlic and chocolate. Two seemingly disparate smells blend silkily together. Garlocolate.

I lay and I listen – is someone dancing outside in the dark? No, it is only the grass running before the wind. Strange that I do not believe in grass fairies, for all that is necessary for their birth and dance lies here at hand, beneath the stars of the heavens. Perhaps I do not believe in them simply because I cannot see them, just like without a radio receiver, I cannot believe in radio waves that travel around the earth, inaudibly roaring even through the silence of my moonlit hay shed. After that I rest without thoughts, heavy with fatigue, as warm and hefty as pewter. I can no longer move my arms, sleep is a light death. From out of the forest, night, the dark sister of time, enters the hay shed. She lays down beside me and presses close, I can no longer hold my eyes open. In vain do I remind her of the Prophet’s words – that prayer is better than sleep. She laughs, her warm body fills the depths of my sanctuary. Her kingdom draws ever nearer, the realm of sleep, the realm of sleeep, the realm of sleeee…

GIUMALᾸU

THE SMALL MOUNTAINS. They stand upon the left Bank of the Golden Bistrița River in an area once called Bukovina and are composed of two parts: Giumalău and Rarău. The most stunning and well-known place here is a remote stony fortress, a craggy pinnacle of white limestone called Pietrele Doamnei or “Lady’s Stones”. It reaches skyward, high above the surrounding forests and grazing lands, feet planted among the rarest of mountain grasses. Once at its base I gathered yellow oat grass, beautiful and silky.

The Rarău Mountains were where I first saw people making homemade lime. A group of old men stoked a blazing kiln – a devil’s forge – cracking off chunks of limestone and baking them in the fierce heat. Sweat poured off them as they merrily worked the bellows, and all around the limekiln, nothing but grass and forests – inspiration for the rest of the world’s factories.

A few kilometers on, a group of monks mowed grass amid trees and meadows. Young and old, dressed in black, with tall hats and coal-black beards. Sweat poured off them too as they brandished their scythes, their dark cassocks fluttering behind them. A short way on, there stood a small solitary monastery, and the sound of orthodox chants floated through the still air.

In a merry little hut beneath Lady’s Stones, wine flows to the spluttering of a kerosene lamp and a voice there sings long into the night. Drinking is not frowned upon in Romania: it seems moderation is the law of the land, often reinforced by grave-looking constables in faded blue uniforms, though they are not the real reason for restraint. After all, beată – the Romanian word for an inebriated woman – is nearly identical to the Latin word, beata, meaning a blissful woman. Thus, blissful women sing among the Giumalău Mountains as Lady’s Stones gleam softly in the moonlight.

CᾸLIMAN

THE SULFUR MOUNTAINS. Enormous, tree-covered, volcanic, deserted. There is not so much as a single tourist cabin. Vultures wing aloft in the pale firmament above. Wildly jagged cliffs stand at crater’s edge – igneous apostles. Below, ferocious dogs guard mottled herds. They surround the pilgrims, their teeth snapping close. In vain, you brandish your stick – it only makes them. A shepherd boy of about five years old runs towards you. He kicks the dogs who turn and slink back to their herds, tails between their legs. At crude sulfur mines, you collect the yellow brimstone that lies strewn upon the ground. Its smoke will come handy when you tell your tales of hellish Călimanic adventures. Over a century ago, the borders of Hungarian Transylvania, Austrian Bukovina, and Romanian Moldavia met here in Căliman. Even today, there is evidence of Maria Theresa’s influence alongside the remains of World War I era military trenches. But peace has long reigned in this region, and the Căliman Mountains now belong to a single country. Grassy ridges and rugged cliffs stretch on gently till they are lost to sight at the horizon. Vast expanses, wild horses, and gentle breezes.

We arrived from the north, passing around the crater and across Negoi peak. You must have your own food and bedding wherever you go there. Though once we dined with some shepherds on mamaliga – thick, rustic cornmeal porridge and sheep curds – washing it down with amber schnapps. Enormous fleas leaped from their woolly coats, but it would have been impolite to show our surprise, and anyway, the little creatures vanished swiftly enough. But the taste of yellow porridge and amber schnapps will stay with us forever. What more could you ask, little brother?

We endured many storms in Căliman, which clouded trout-filled streams. But at long last, we descended from the ridge, climbing down into the long Ilvy valley and the villages of upper Mureş. We had grown wild and hungry in those mountains and were in need of a good shirt-washing and fingernail trimming. The feast in Wallachian Hot Springs was nearly at hand.

THE GAME OF THE EMERALD VOID OF TIME

For thou art man and not God, thou art flesh and not of angels. How couldst thou remain forever in this state of grace being neither an angel in heaven nor the first man in Paradise? I am He who comforteth the downcast with gladness.

From the third book of Rhenish traveler THOMAS à KEMPIS (1379 – 1471)

That day is sure to come, as unexpectedly as a lone swan appearing upon the northern horizon. Rare, snowy white, it flaps its wings slowly – far has it yet fly. An other-worldly day, unburdened by time. The longer you sweat and toil beneath the weight of time, the greater the certainty that the day will soon arrive. Days when I feel the ponderousness of time and my own diminishing vigor are days when I strain and struggle. Time and a stallion’s strength are the hounds that drive me. I feel I must see everything, climb each craggy slope, ford each rushing river, explore each winding valley, and record it all in my memory. I trudge arduously through the mountains. The joy I feel is not silent and knowing, but fierce and animal. On such days, I yearn to try all that life has to offer. To rob my own father. To give all my money away to Gypsies. To make love to four girls at once. To have all my teeth knocked out. To kill whales in the South Seas, to freeze my feet off on Lake Athabasca. To dance myself to death, to burn at the stake for the salvation of all. A thousand seductive things. And if I knew I could resurrect the dead, I would even kill someone – run them through, just once in my life. But instead, I stumble through the mountains as my life forces become slowly spent. Let these secrets remain between us though, my tender-eared brother, they are not truths for everyone’s ears!

On the evening of such feral days, I stink of sweat, I cannot eat for sheer exhaustion, even sleep is long in coming. Once in the Carpathians years ago, I had come to the end of my strength. I could not take another step, so complete was my fatigue. Earlier that day, I had spent hours climbing sheer hillsides without so much as a bite to eat, my heavy pack strapped to my back. Suddenly, I felt my legs turn to lead, lactic acid infused my muscles, and I collapsed. I used to laugh at tales of heroes who, for their wounds or exhaustion, crawled theatrically toward an unattainable aim, only to collapse forever a meter before it. That evening I was no different from them. My pack lay over me, and I could not move. I lay there for a very long time. But those are not the days when a swan appears upon the northern horizon.

Swan days are different. I remember one of them in the Eastern Carpathians. I was alone with three sun-filled, jubilant, weary, feral days behind me. I had not met a soul the entire time. It was the end of September and the shepherds had already led their flocks down into the valleys. After dark on the third day, I descended below the pastures to find shelter beneath a tree. Morning broke foggy and rainy. My back was sore, the weather was dismal and cold. The smoke from the fire stung my eyes, my body was weary from the strain of the previous days and my clothes were damp and sticky. I felt so miserable, I could have cried. But I had to keep going, the rest of my holiday had been planned out precisely. I was suddenly overcome by utter fatigue, more emotional than physical. Another day of lugging myself toward empty and futile goals! On long journeys, ambivalence is dangerous and indecision can be fatal. I stood there blankly. My very being rebelled against leaving, I shook with cold and feebleness. Then I looked up and noticed a black hut standing in the fog. I must have missed it in the dark the evening before. Or had a ghost built it over night? Like Muhammad in his visions, I did not know who was tempting me – was it a good or evil spirit? I drew closer, the hay shed was open. I felt relieved, it was decided. Haste, that wily comrade, vanished and I saw a swan circling above the mountains.

I changed back into dry clothes, and with my sleeping bag, crawled into the darkest corner. Rain drummed on the roof, ancient rain. How sweet to listen to it while lying in dry hay. The first moment of bliss, and how many more awaited me that day! I felt completely and utterly safe, like a child, racked with fever, but cared for by his mother. My classmates were at school, and I lay unconcerned in the uncustomary light of my bedroom, ravaged by illness, yet in safety’s arms, having vivid dreams that are not dreamt at other times. No ill could befall me.

Here, too, walls of wood, hay, darkness, warmth and wafting aromas took motherly care of me. The river of time flowed sweetly by, and its waters took on a new dimension. I lay there for minutes, then hours without moving, the rain drummed, and I sank into the fragrant emerald void. Oh, if death could be so sweet – a crossing into another state of consciousness. Strength vanished, I felt only the boundless yearning to rest. My body yielded to its bed. I lifted my foot, such heavenly exhaustion, a moment later I could no longer even lift a finger. The muscles in my face loosened, their ever-present grimace vanished along with the mask that accompanies people wherever they go. I fell freely into my subconscious. Wonderful imagery arose there, but I had no power or will to capture it. My notebook and pencil were within grasp, but I did not have the strength to reach for them. I was incapable of writing down the thoughts that floated around me that others might experience my joy and assurance, however distantly. Such sublime happiness did not permit me to move, or draw my clumsy hand vacuously across paper. Perhaps later, once the body regains its loathsome, shallow cheerfulness, and the soul reclaims its bothersome busy-bee alacrity which drives a person incessantly and instinctively from nowhere to nowhere. The hours passed silently by, and my soul drank its fill at the wellspring. Such swan days must serve us long, for who knows when they will return again. Without their solitude, the soul would shrivel and dry, becoming like Zarathustra’s empty sacks of flour which might still cloud the air with their dust, but would be of little other use. In those moments, I clearly sensed how most of what people do comes down to mere games and substitution. Everything is a game: work, hobbies, property, art, power. And people – small and self-important. Chubby little toddlers. Of all material necessities, being fed, warm and dry are all we need to survive. And that is all easily attainable.

Sometimes I slept; waking and dreaming merged together. This was no sloth or idleness. It was life to which belong both days of labor and days of rest. I floated in peace and immobility while still clearly realizing all that was going on in the cosmos around me. I lay in the silence of a Carpathian hay shed while one man somewhere shot at another. And throngs of people listened attentively to someone’s speech. And a ship sank into the sea. And billions of spermatozoa surrounded their planet, their earth-like egg. And silent reindeer trekked across the tundra. And a grandmother in Malaysia told her little grandchildren fairytales.

Above the mountains, the day was passing. The hay shed was silent, and I, too, remained quiet and immobile. But life swirled in both of us; we were part of cosmic events. Love and extinction. Tears of joy and realization rolled down my cheeks. I had lain there the whole day without eating or drinking anything, in the dark and the rain. Yet – tears of joy. An old friend of mine told me he had experienced his most profound moments of happiness in a concentration camp during the war. Absolute happiness. And I believe him. The deeper the valley, the higher the mountain, the greater the despair, the more dazzling the exultation. Gratefulness for small things. For all things. If great pain vanishes from the world, so too will great joy. If sin vanishes, so too will forgiveness.

It must have been afternoon, the rain had stopped. The hay shed shone. A fox crossed a corner of the meadow, hunting for voles. It leaped, straight-pawed, into the air, landed, and with a shake of its head went round the other side of the shed. I was beginning my return to the world. The sun was pulling me back. It gleamed through the roof between shingles. My lethargy was dissipating. Thousands of grass seeds and grains of dust danced in the glowing rays, life swirled and turned to gold. As is written in the Vedas, “The sun is the soul of the world.” Fragrant mists rose from the meadows, and the sun awoke amorous fantasies. Pray that the darkest fantasies never come to pass – they would destroy body and soul. I had almost awoken. The swan day had come to an end. I gazed at the evening heavens. Yellow, green, and red clouds scudded swiftly westward. Island-like. Crete, New Guinea, Iceland. Painted monsters. They glided across the, where a high wind blew. How fresh and crisp it must be. To fly with it! Rush with it! How fast would I have to run to feel warm in it? Because the faster I race downhill on a bike or skis, the chillier I feel. And how about a meteor blazing through the air? At what speed do cold and heat meet in perfect balance so the aeronaut can sit astride it in comfort?

The game of the emerald void had come to an end. Night had arrived, the swan had disappeared beyond the horizon, and the day was at its end. A blessed day and a blessed game. Vital and purifying. The wellsprings were replenished, the soul cleansed, the body resurrected. It had revived from its daylong stupor like an Indian saint waking in an underground grave. A moonbeam passed through the roof, piercing the darkness. Silver-gleaming. I suddenly felt my old stallion-strength returning. The yearning to press onwards. I knew that both were wonderful and human: animal strength and clear consciousness. I also knew that the morning after such days would find me once again prepared to bear cold and heat, hunger and thirst, ready to ford treacherous waters, give all my possession to Gypsies, make love to four girls at once, burn at the stake for all of humanity. But let the secret of the emerald void, which breaks time’s reign of terror and snaps the futile whip of haste, remain between us, my tender-eared little brother. That truth is not for all!

CEAHLᾸU

THE WHITE-FLECKED MOUNTAINS. These are a wild belt of conglomerate mountains. They stand above the mild waters of the Golden Bistrița River from whose waters you scoop fresh zeal for sheer climbs up mountainsides and green-white mountain gorges. Their peaks, blanketed in green, mossy plains and dark scrub-pine thickets, are beautiful to behold. But most stunning of all are their white cliffs. Not hillsides or slopes, but precipices hundreds of meters high. Around their brinks, edelweiss and mouse-ears reach into the abyss like the hanging gardens of old. But August is not the best month for botanizing in Ceahlău, for the Moldavian sun has singed most of the color out of its plants. As you walk along the brink of a precipice, a raven takes flight beneath your feet. It beats the air with its wings and is suddenly above the abyss, taking with it the whir of its plumage. Many such dark-winged birds soar above the white cliffs.

Toaca Peak, a towering, nearly two-thousand-meter-tall summit, resembles the gleaming crown of “the olden king of Moldavian Carpathia,” as Romanian bards have called the Ceahlău Mountains. We have trekked across them from north to south, and from south to north. They are not as deserted as other Romanian ranges. On folk holidays, people climb all the way up to their myth shrouded plains. We had very little to eat once, the tiny shop at the foot of the mountains was closed. From sacks that stood open before the shop, we scooped rough cornmeal and begged a farmer for some drippings: meat baked in lard, garnished with dead fly larvae. We cooked mamaliga on an open fire, greased it with the fatty, fly-infested residue and disinfected our stomachs in the Eastern fashion: with firewater. Life in the Ceahlău Mountains was good and healthy.

If you are not strong of lung or sure of foot, do not go Ceahlău. The mountains are exceedingly steep from all sides, perhaps the steepest in all of Romania: above the waterfall of Duruitoarea, hikers wept for sheer exhaustion.

OBCINA MARE

THE MONASTERY MOUNTAINS. This range lies in the easternmost Carpathians where three “obcinas”, or mountain ridges, rest side by side. Obcina Mare – the Great Ridge, home to the largest number of monasteries – lies furthest eastward. At the foot of mountains only twelve hundred meters tall, painted monastery churches have stood for half a millennium. Deep in the ancient Muntenian principality of Moldavia, long dead heroes, rulers, voivodes, and princes rest beneath the gravestones of forest-fringed orthodox monasteries. Everything about them is simple and modest. Clear brooks flow near verdant forests. Enter any church and thousands of faces stare down at you from the walls – saints and sinners painted in colors that neither fade nor tarnish. A dusky and secretive world. Faces appear on the outside walls of churches too, shining with bluish hues beneath an azure Moldavian sky. Saints gaze with dark, glittering stares, their beards woven reverently like braided loaves. Sinners and saint-slayers all have small pointy noses. Evil Turkish soldiers had their eyes gouged out by pilgrims long ago. Others, too, have carved into the old paintings. Ever since 1775, when the Sublime Porte ceded northern Moldavia to Maria Theresa who renamed it Bukovina, Austrian pilgrims have travelled to those forest monasteries and carved their names barbarically into the painted walls. Thousands of ornate signatures can still be seen today. Years there are also different, counted from the creation of the world. Thus 1981 is said to be the year five thousand seven hundred and forty-one.

If you ever venture into those lands, little brother, visit the monasteries by mountain route. The journey from Putna to Sucevița monastery will take several hours, and you will have to cross a fir-covered mountain ridge where heart-leaf oxeyes shine from green riverbanks. The path on the rim becomes nearly indiscernible, grouse fly from thickets, the smallest chick taking last to the air. Great silver beeches of Bukovina. From Sucevița to Moldovița, you must cross the main ridge. Forests rise up to the mountain rim on the eastward side, the west-facing slopes are a mix of trees and grass. Do not forget that most beautiful is the descent to the monasteries.

HᾸŞMAŞ

THE DAPPLED MOUNTAINS. White limestone cliffs, dark pinewood forests, fresh sheep pastures, the Hagymás of old Hungary. Lonely Rock, the most famous landmark, towers above a wooden tourist lodge, the only one far and wide. At the foot of the mountains near the little town of Balan, people mine for copper, but the area is otherwise deserted and grows ever more so the further north you travel. Most wild and beautiful it seemed below Black Hăşmaş Peak where great white bluffs, precipices and rock pinnacles soar above sweeping pastures. Dogs and shepherd children race from ramshackle huts to beg for whatever we give them. The sweets they so desire are a long way off.

Crossing the Hăşmaş Mountains, we continued northward for about a day from Pingaraţi Pass, which is spanned by the road to Bicaz, without knowing if we’d entered the Giurgeu Mountains or not. There seemed to be fewer sheep and more cows, and streams of water trickled down wooded slopes more frequently than in the southern Hăşmaş. There were also fewer pine forests on mountain rims and broad clearings were commonplace. Gradually dissipating forest paths led us southward and roundabout from a tributary of the Bicaz River to the enormous cliffs of Little Suhard Mountain. Above crystal clear brooks: bluffs of meadowsweets, giant fir trees, nocturnal fires and teas of seven rare Hăşmaş herbs. Evenings were silent despite the proximity of Bicaz gorge.

Bicaz Gorge is unparalleled among Romanian gorges. Plunging hundreds of meters between sheer limestone walls, its floor is barely wide enough for the pure water that bubbles at its bottom. Even the road that runs through it had to be cut into the rock in places. The busy route disturbs the gorge’s beauty, but peace reigns in adjoining canyons where white waterfalls rush above great watery pools. Below Bicaz and on its eastward end, the narrow Șugăul Gorge opens up on the left, its wooden footbridge dangling dozens of meters above the water. The cliff walls and flora of Bicaz Gorge have no equal: it was there I collected some of the rarest European bluegrass for my herbarium.

THE GAME OF AMBROSIAL MEMORY

There are three things most beautiful in all the world, and the first of these is scent.

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD, 7^th century AD

This is a game of kings, little brother – once born without it, you can never learn it, if it is yours from birth, it is yours forever. Sensing an aroma you have not smelled for a quarter-century transports you straight back to the journeys of yesteryear, to the girls of your youth, to wooden shacks long turned to dust, to river banks of old. It is as if you had left them but an hour before. Memory of scent is the clearest, deepest, and most animal of all. Perhaps only useless, passionate people possess it. Compared to scent, our travel diaries, memories, pictures, and collections are blurred and sightless. Concealed beneath our crown, vault of primeval smells, lie tucked away all the perfumes of places we have ever visited, fragrant details we have long forgotten, waiting for the wind to catch them up after decades of dust and sleep. Therefore, sniff to everything, my squeamish little brother. Wrinkle not your nose, complain not of foul odor. All things are fragrant if you wish, even the most odious. Put your nose to anything and take a breath. Your nostrils smart at the scent; it rises up into your head, never again to be forgotten.

That which you grow accustomed to in your youth is ambrosial in old age. Kings should sprinkle all newborns, children, milk, gruel, clothes, and toys with their odor, whatever it may be. They would gain a devoted nation. All the hive would smell as one, all would love their ruler’s scent. Therefore, sniff to everything, little brother. Soon nothing will disgust you, and that is important. World and people will spread out before you as an array of different aromas. It is good that each person has his own smell and unbearable to drown out one’s scent with artificial odors. All Americans smell alike, their toxic aftershaves deprive them of their individuality. An Eskimo kiss is a beautiful thing – man and woman breathe in each other’s smells. How diverse and wonderful the Eskimo scent must be, so deep and full, when they say that all white men – even unwashed hunters and woodsmen – smell of flowers.

Put your nose to everything. How wonderful that each girl has her own bouquet of smells. You will never forget the aroma of her secret places, the milky scent of thousands of fragrant little creatures. There is no greater death than to be repulsed by your lover’s scent. Smell is of utmost importance in marriage too. A thirty-year-old lecture by my zoology professor, Mr. Komárek, still sticks in my mind. The old man warned against marrying a girl whose scent did not please or excite us. Sight is not important. Beauty passes and we cease to notice unseemly things. Hearing, too, is not a decisive factor. We can grow accustomed even to a squawky voice. Touch is deceptive. Love makes what is rough tender. But smell cannot be deceived. What is unpleasant the first night becomes repugnant until death, we never grow used to it.

But enough, I am skating on thin and distant ice. Let us return to our pilgrim games! The game of smells is perfect for when you travel. You can use it to recall bygone lands. Have you forgotten what the Sázava River looked like when you were nine years old? Do you search your memory, vainly trying to conjure up visions of the past? Try letting three earthworms die in a matchbox, then open it two days later. That will do the trick! The unmistakable, heavy aroma (call it that, my squeamish little brother!) will evoke that July day of forty years ago. Suddenly, you remember everything. You wore red trousers, a white bird soared above the river. Willows swayed in the current, a barbel leapt above the water’s surface, a raftsman called in the distance. You were sorry for the earthworms that died, forgotten in the little box. If only their lives had ended in a better death – like at the end of a fishing line. One sniff and you remember it all: how wide the river, how slippery the stones. Someone ambling along the further bank. Lunch time, and the linden blossoms fading. The smell of tar and fish in your nostrils. The yearning to stand barefoot on a boat and sail off into the distance. What a remarkable eulogy to long dead earthworms. They did not die in vain!

Therefore, smell everything, little brother, your life will be the better for it!