The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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All that day saw me sprawled under the tree by the tent. I was only able to creep along with the slow progress of the tree’s shade like a sloppy woodlouse in the gnomon‘s shadow on sundial disk… “Don’t drink yourself drunk” is a truly sage adage, yet, as once upon a time I tried to drive it home to someone, my brake system entertains a rather peculiar standpoint on this particular subject…
And that same day it became crystal clear that the proximity of the arboreal long-liver was leaving no room for the serene repose and dreamy leisure of untroubled mind… The distant buzz of mahtagh feasts replacing each other under the Plane (although not every one was bringing a KAMAZ-truckload of tables for the activity), as well as cows wandering by to and from the water-spring supervised by their teenage shepherds all too eager for communication with prostrate strangers, and occasional passers-by either on foot or horseback gaping from the overly nigh trail at the alien lilac tint of the tent’s synthetic, on top of killing hangover, forcibly emphasized the need to find a better spot for my annual taking flight to the hills…
That’s why, only this morning, after filling my plastic bottle with the spring water for the trek ahead, I observed the tree closely for a report to you. Indeed, one millennium is not enough to grow as big as that. The lower branches of the giant reach the size of century-old trees. The bulky trunk, carrying that bunch of a grove, has a passage-like cleft in its base to admit the stream of water running from the spring (which, probably, has a say in Plane’s longevity), and even a horseman can ride into if ducking low in the saddle…
I also entered the tree and found myself in a damp murky cave illuminated by the dim daylight oozing in through the entrance and the opposite exit from the deep shade under the tree outside. It felt humid and uncomfortable in there. Several flat stones were strewn at random over the boggy ground of the floor to serve besmeared footholds. The sizable barbecue box of roughly welded sheet-iron stuck its rusty rebar-rod legs deep in the quaggy soil a little off the center of the cavity, uneven layers of wax drippings and innumerate melted taper ends well nigh filled the whole box. The dismal damp settings made you long for a soon acquittal, revving up back into the clear morning.
So, out I went to collect my things and, with a farewell glance at the glorious Plane, I pooh-poohed in a mute disgust at all those ugly knife marks left by self-immortalizers always ready to add their memes and esoteric symbols to any landmark which the assholes can only put their hands on.
The oldest of the mark-scars had crept, tagging along with the bark, up to some six meters above the ground. Cut a couple of centuries ago, the upper marks got blurred and distended by the inaudible flow of time into obscure, unreadable, contours over the uneven ripples in the gray bark that pulled the labor lost up, into inevitable oblivion…
~ ~ ~
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.