Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page B

them. Only in the last twenty years have they been touched by the high-leaping waves of universal trouble.
    The last day in the Meteora was nearing its end. The steep path down to Kalabaka and the lower regions uncoiled from a dead tree at the foot of the rock. But it was hard to leave the last of the monasteries. Holy Trinity, with its row of white columns and arches, the grey confusion of walls and rose-coloured tiles, the dome and the tall dark mast of a cypress tree above the deep ravine, looks, more than any of its fellows, like the structure of a dream. None of the monastic rocks can have been harder of access, and speculation as to how the first monk, the almost legendary Dometios, first scaled it, would be a restatement of the conundrum of St. Barlaam and the Transfiguration. The landing stage and its hook overhang a narrower chasm than any of the others and the cutting of the steps, during the episcopate of Polycarp of Trikke and Stagoi, must have been an even harder feat. Nobody knows when the monastic church was built, nor when the little chapel of St. John the Baptist was scooped from the rock, though the names of subsequent restorers and benefactors—Parthenios, Damascene and Jonah—are commemorated on the walls. The iconography is dark and indistinct.
    Holy Trinity was the poorest of all the monasteries of the Meteora. It is uninhabited now. The monks left before the war, and none has returned. Some of the doors of the empty cells hung open. Others were closed with twists of wire, and last year’s leaves blew about the wide wooden halls. In the little garden, an old shepherd with bright blue eyes, long matted hair, and a spade-shaped beard like that worn on vases by Ajax andAgamemnon, was sitting on a rock with a tall crook over his shoulder. He was shod in cowhide moccasins and dressed in a kind of sheepskin hauberk caught in by a belt. He looked as wild and solitary as Timon of Athens, but over the rare luxury of a cigarette he admitted that he got lonely in Holy Trinity, and added that he was about to abandon the flocks to become a postulant of St. Stephen. Delving into a past that seemed almost as remote and nebulous as that of the monastery’s foundation, he recounted his experiences during a short-lived emigration to Louisiana as a hand in the municipal slaughterhouses of Baton Rouge.
    From the plain’s brink at St. Stephen, we had turned back into the heart of the monastic regions. Only the descending pathway gave a hint of egress to the outside world. Dispersed among the rocks where monasticism still subsisted—Roussanou, St. Stephen, St. Barlaam and the Metamorphosis, isolated survivors of a scattered metropolis of twenty-six foundations—crumbled the shells of the extinct monasteries. Poised on their pinnacles, they are no longer accessible. No steps ascend and no monks are left to cast their nets into the surrounding gulf. They disintegrate in mid-air, empty stone caskets of rotting timber and slowly falling frescoes that only spiders and owls and kestrels inhabit or an occasional family of eagles. How distinct the rocks of the Meteora appear from all that surrounds them! They have a different birth, and bear an alien, planetary aspect, like a volley of thunderbolts embedded in the steep-sided hollow. The flanks of the nearest pillars were as smooth as mussel-shells, striped in places with yellow lichen or with moss as dark as submarine foliage and the straight ascending flight of the conglomerate sides was only broken here and there by a frill of evergreen. As they retreated, all these colours resolved themselves to a universal blue-grey gunmetal hue.
    Here, on the edge of the precipice of Holy Trinity, we were on a level with all the monasteries except the toweringTransfiguration. Lying on the grass among autumn crocuses and cyclamen and anemones, we watched the shadows darken. The great columns, as slanting and horizontal creases appeared, seemed to be on the move; to