Qaz and fog

Josh Dankoff is here to visit. We took a marshutka straight up into the Caucasus mountains to the village of Qazbegi, from where one can look up on a clear day and see the bright dome of famous Mount Qazbeg, said to be the site of Prometheus torture. Obscured in cloud, we never saw the mountain. But we climbed through Gerdeti village, where all the houses have one meter thick slate walls without mortar, and later intersected a track leading to the Trinity monastery up above.

After awhile, the clouds closed around us, and feeling the cold, we left the gentle switchbacks for a calmer day and started climbing directly up the slope. The mist closed in around us, and our breath came out in gasps from the altitude. Small yellow flowers peaked out cautiously from damp knee length grass, and the long arms of pine trees caught our sleeves, beckoning us into their dark undergrowth. A dull glow throbbed through the constantly shifting mists, casting disorienting but hardly perceptible shadows across the slope. Our faces were damp from dew or sweat, we didn’t know which.

Pausing for breath on a 60 degree slope, unable to see more than thirty feet up, down, or to either side, I felt completely lost to the world. Our voices died on our lips with little resonance, the same hollow sound one speaks with in dreams. Faintly at first, then clearly audible we heard footfalls and a slow tugging of grass, though no beast or man came into sight. The sound lasted for five uncanny minutes as we listened intently, hovering on the steep hill surrounded in white. It was hard to believe any animals could be on this slope with us, but not wanting to think too clearly about what it might be, we pushed forward, knowing simply that our destination lay uphill.

We finally achieved the top, discovered our cow friends from the eerie noises of the slope below, but alas, did not discover our destination monastery. We were on top of the hill and as far as we could see everything went downhill. So we sat and contemplated the mist, hoping for a break in the clouds that never came.

Having no other plan, we chose a direction and wandered downhill in another direction than the one we had come up. Soon a gravel track emerged from the mist to the right, disappearing just as quickly to the left. Following it just a short ways down it turned uphill and soon we were in the lee of a jutting rock outcrop, the monastery walls rising solemnly into the cloud, black slate stones with thin scratches of orange lichen in a thick wall circumnavigating the compound. We pushed our way through surprised mountain cows, finding an entrance through a belltower on the far side of the wall. The clouds danced around and above us, flirting unreservedly with the stoic church cupola, veteran of many clouds, many snows, many moons.... Green grass was moist with dew, we tiptoed towards the church in the center of the lawn.

Inside a monk befriended us, I sang chants in the church, and Josh did not feel bashful lighting candles in front of icons, their glow casting long shadows into the dark corners of rough rock. A monastery in the clouds is not such a strange place to be afterall.