Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  Ross murmured: ‘Are we in the right place? Can this be it?’

  Above the entrance gate a frescoed Virgin and Child lifted their hands in faded blessing. The stones underfoot were indented by generations of booted and sandalled feet. Three massive iron-bound doors and a curving ramp steered us into what seemed to be an abandoned village.

  The courtyard was filled with chapels and dormitories. We didn’t know where to go. Wonky stairways climbed to shut doors, and other, half-timbered buildings sagged under slate roofs like English barns. We gave up searching for anyone, and wandered in mystified peace. I started taking cine film. We passed alcoves which we took to be abbots’ tombs, each carved slab resting beneath the gaze of a painted Christ. The silence was touched only by the piping of unseen birds and a faint chanting from somewhere. The place had the feel of a sleepy hamlet, but clouds were streaming off the heights above.

  At last a young monk found us and led us to a balcony where the guest master – a genial patriarch who spoke no English – welcomed us with traditional ouzo, coffee and Turkish delight. Other monks were now gathering for vespers below. They looked too few for the spaces round them. In their soft black caps and black cassocks they walked like shadows. Their hair was drawn back and twisted into buns, but gushing grey beards turned everyone over forty-five into a Methuselah. When we descended to join them, the eyes that stared back at us looked guarded and overcast. I wondered what they were seeing, or if these men knew any language but their own.

  The sun was setting. The domed church, painted in faded rose, gave no hint of what was inside. In the porch a stately elder asked us: ‘Roman Catholic?’

  Vincent said: ‘Protestant.’

  Gently the monk ushered us to seats in the narthex: high, creaking pews where we propped ourselves awkwardly and could glimpse the service only through an archway into the sanctuary. We had, I realised, been relegated to a zone for heretics; but as the rite proceeded, any anger faded. We were spectators of a ceremony utterly mysterious. For hours two bodiless voices in the sanctuary carried a thread of prayer in lonely antiphony. Often the only sound was a thin patter, as if the readers were chattering to God, and we understood no word except an endlessly recurring Kyrie Eleison, ‘O Lord have mercy’.

  Even in this gloom, by the waning light, I saw that every wall and ceiling was covered with frescoes. Unfamiliar saints held up their books and swords in threat or blessing. They filled the dark with their gaze. Inside the sanctuary the giant candlesticks and chandeliers and gilded thrones and icons were fading to glimmers. Among them an old wood-burning stove sent a rusty flue pipe into the cupola. Meanwhile the cowled monks shuffled in and out at random, pausing to light candles, stooping to kiss the icons one by one, or to press their lips to a frescoed foot or hand. Sometimes they murmured together, or fell asleep in their pews.

  I could only guess what the others were feeling. Vincent was craned forward in his seat with a concentrated scrutiny, as if to wrench out some meaning; Julian lounged a little, detached but interested; Ross looked scared. The only pilgrims were a pair of Greek pensioners and a violent-looking youth who embraced the icons with shivering fingers.

  As the chanting continued, I lapsed into baffled wonderment. A monk in a crimson chasuble strode into our narthex, censing the icons, censing us, in gusts of blue perfume. I stood up to receive this, copying the monks around me. My bewilderment was painless, almost peaceful. This plainsong descended from ancient Byzantium, I knew, and its language had barely changed from that of the New Testament. I heard no Protestant yearning in it, only a timeless monody, as if all the questings of our distant seminary were useless, even arrogant, before some unknowable grace. Here the sacred and the secular had become conflated, and I imagined the monks moving casually in the anteroom of God.

  Julian murmured to me: ‘Reverence is immaterial here . . .’

  In the dying light the painted martyrs and angels were dimming from our sight. But the amber haloes still glowed around their darkening faces, until at last nothing but this disembodied sanctity survived, like so many golden coins scattered over the walls.

  I think this was the last time we were happy together. Some spell had enveloped us all. Julian and Vincent even imagined that the monks’ vespers reflected the certitude and liturgical austerity of the early Church. Its celebrants might have been revenants from another time. That evening we ate in the refectory – a frescoed chamber built half a millennium ago for several hundred monks. Watched by the gaunt saints limned on the walls, we supped in silence to the drone of a novice’s reading, seated with other pilgrims at chunky marble tables. Our fare was a thin vegetable soup – it was the fasting time of Lent – with bread and olives.

  Our dormitory was whitewashed bare. An icon of the Virgin hung in one corner, with her oil lamp lit beneath it. The guest master crossed himself in silence, then left us alone. I had brought a camp stove with me, and we lit this for warmth, huddled on the edge of our beds. There, locked in my failing memory, we remain unageing, and are conversing together softly, although there is nobody to overhear. Vincent’s hands are outstretched to the gas flame. His hollowed cheeks and dark eyes still look grimly medieval, but he is smiling. Julian has cowled himself in a blanket like a music-hall monk; and Ross, with his odd, reticent sweetness, is passing us cream chocolates from his backpack. We are unmoored from everything familiar, drawn closer by our isolation here, and I sense the mountain silence all around us like an embalmment: for Athos is a closed theocracy, a country without women, where nobody was ever born, but only dies. Even time here is strange. The monks follow the Julian calendar, abandoned elsewhere four centuries ago, and they tell the hours in the old Byzantine mode, starting the day from sunset. In the cells around us they must be praying alone, reading their canon of Church Fathers unknown to us, or perhaps murmuring the Jesus prayer, whose solitary exercise brings them to salvation. We can hear the waves beating on the rocks far below.

  As for myself, I looked like a boyish replica of Vincent in those days: lean and strong, but too sensitive for my own peace – and very ignorant. In truth, we all were.

  The Revelation of St John the Divine was a mystery never studied in the seminary; but along the muralled arcades of the monastic church its Apocalypse unfurled in meticulous detail. Here were the trumpeting angels and the four destroying horsemen, the nameless Beast of the Sea and the lion-headed horses puffing brimstone; and the monk who showed us round next morning, reviving some half-forgotten English, pointed them out with stentorian authority as if the rolling-up of time were imminent.

  We gazed in perplexity. All through the church and refectory the severe and brilliant frescoes seemed to return us to a primitive, purer time, closer to scripture. Gospel episodes – Christ’s baptism, the Nativity, the raising of Lazarus – became newly unfamiliar to me. In their bare economy, they took on the force of sublime facts. And a sense of triumph suffused them. The Crucifixion barely featured, and when it did, the agony of Western portraiture was absent. Instead, angels were flying in to collect Christ’s blood in a chalice. Even the scenes of martyrdom were not fleshly tragedies but divine celebrations, in which the executioners too were going about the business of salvation. Their expressions were no different from those of their victims, which remained mild and pain-free even as their heads were flying off – with haloes still intact – at the swing of a sword.

  As the ranks of alien saints multiplied – St Basil the Great, St Gregory Palamas, St Maximus the Confessor – Vincent became impatient and irritated: the murals were crude, he said, without depth or perspective. But Julian scrutinised them with fascination. Their artists, he guessed, were not inept, but simply had no interest in perspective. Their frescoes did not draw a spectator in, but projected themselves as living presences. They were sacred propaganda.

  Our guiding monk spoke of them matter-of-factly. Here, for him, was all the meaningful past and the promised future. He stopped before a huge fresco of the Last Judgement. His face was nested
so deep in beard that only a pair of soft hazel eyes shone through, and seemed to contradict the booming majesty of his voice. From the throne of God a river of fire carried the damned into the mouth of Hell, where Satan writhed (a pilgrim had scratched out his eyes). The monk answered Ross’s qualms with implacable certainty: no, this was not extinction but eternal torment. ‘This is what God has said. There are sheep, there are goats . . .’

  Damnation always troubled Ross: he, who seemed least destined for it. Enclosed by the stained glass of the portico, the Judgement was inflamed still further by blocks of reflected purple and green light. As the monk pointed out the figures drowning eternally in fire, Ross said: ‘These are only symbols . . .’

  It is strange, in retrospect, what power we accorded these aged monks, with their ascetic robes and God-like beards. For our guide, nothing scriptural could be symbolic. He repeated remorselessly: ‘This is what will happen.’

  Ross turned away. ‘I think in Orthodoxy,’ he said, ‘you don’t believe that people inherit Adam’s sin. But in the West we follow St Augustine. He said that we’re damned from before birth and our passions are turned to one another instead of to God.’ He looked oddly wretched. ‘We’re always in sin.’

  The monk frowned back at him, not quite understanding, but repeated: ‘We are always in sin.’ The next moment he was declaring: ‘The Apocalypse is not far now. The world is turning to Lucifer. His agents are warring against Mount Athos. They mean to destroy us.’ The hazel eyes still shone mildly out, as if severed from his words. ‘But our trust is in the Virgin. You’ve seen her icon in the church. She has promised to feed and protect us always . . .’

  He began to ramble, sometimes talking about world destruction, sometimes about his cats, and his momentary and delusive power leaked away. Only Ross went on seeming troubled. In the painted refectory, reaching the alcove where the high table stood, I found him staring up at the mural of the Last Supper that overarched it. He smiled weakly at me, then asked: ‘Who do you think was “the disciple that Jesus loved”?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Ross.’ Many think that the unnamed disciple who rested against Christ’s breast at the Last Supper was the youthful St John. But why he was singled out as Christ’s beloved, nobody knew.

  Tensely Ross asked: ‘Can it have been different, do you think? I mean, what He felt . . .’

  I answered unthinking: ‘The Gospel doesn’t say.’

  We lingered a moment longer. Ross said out of the blue: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Above us in the dark the fair young head inclined across the chest of Jesus, while Ross went on gazing up. But still I did not understand.

  We climbed that day over the wildest spurs of the peninsula, aiming to reach the western shore by noon. The sky had clouded. The monastery dropped from sight below, and we were ascending on one of the ancient paths which undulate for miles in rough-laid stones. A corridor of shrubs and trees enclosed us. On one side rose the sheer curtain of the mountain; on the other, far below, lay a misty sea.

  As our way grew overgrown, we found ourselves brushing through purple-red anemones. The track deteriorated from carefully compacted pebbles to stones set down haphazardly, and at last to naked rock. We went in Indian file, Vincent leading. He was used to trekking holidays, and his stride threatened to leave us all behind. Ross followed him in silence, then Julian, complaining. Once we heard the sound of bells. A train of mules weaved past, laden with wood, untended. And once a shy young monk passed us on his way to another monastery, and wished us Godspeed, touching his hand to his heart.

  By noon the way had levelled out through forest. The sky had darkened. Gnarled holm oaks and chestnut trees had dropped their twigs and husks underfoot. In this heavy stillness the chirruping of the birds had stopped. We rested on rocks for a while, eating hunks of monastic bread. Somewhere the sea made an odd hush. It was now that Ross, sitting beside Vincent, reached into his backpack and pulled something out. He handed it to Vincent with a look of such naive ardour that I turned away. His gift was an icon of the Virgin of Tenderness, bought in the ferry port where we had embarked. Julian had already made scathing remarks about these commercial icons, produced by some cheap photographic process, and Vincent, in any case, disliked such things.

  Vincent took it in his hands with embarrassed surprise and stared at it. For a long minute he did not know what to say. Ross was still gazing at him. ‘It’s hand-painted,’ he said (even I could tell it wasn’t). At last Vincent patted the icon in a curious gesture of conciliation, thanked Ross – his voice taut with pretence – and tucked it away.

  It was two hours more before we turned north through precipitous foothills. Our sporadic talk seemed strained, often died away. Mountain outcrops loomed through the trees, and cold streams flowed over our path. Soon we were all labouring, no longer speaking at all. The clink of our trekking poles sounded sharp and lost. The clouds came down so low that we were tramping in swirling mist.

  Then we crossed a watershed. Within a few steps our path had crested a little rise, and suddenly beneath us the whole western shore unfolded in brilliant sunlight. Behind us, grey crags burst from the forested slopes in slabs of living rock. In front and beyond, the headlands plunged to the sea for three hundred feet or more, before fading in parallel shadows into the haze. I caught my breath, thinking: no wonder the monks chose here.

  Ross cried: ‘How can people not believe in God!’

  But soon afterwards, where someone had raised a wooden cross, our footpath began to teeter along the cliff edge, fringed by stones laid crosswise to firm it up. Glancing down we could see, through clinging shrubs, the turquoise shallows hundreds of feet below. Once or twice our feet dislodged a stone, which disappeared soundlessly over the edge.

  For ten minutes, perhaps, we walked gingerly on, Vincent still in front. The air was bright and silent. A buzzard quartered the sky above us. I fell into a drugged stupor, eased by the level pathway and the sun’s warmth. Then Ross stopped dead in front of me. His whole body was shaking. He said faintly: ‘I can’t go on.’ His trekking pole clattered to the ground.

  I thought he was exhausted, and said: ‘It’s not far now.’

  But he sat down abruptly on the track, clasping his knees, his cap awry on his blond head. His eyes were clenched shut.

  Julian said: ‘It’s the height.’

  I crouched behind Ross, touching his shoulder. ‘It’s safe,’ I said. ‘The track’s safe.’

  But his voice sounded drained and high, like a child’s. ‘I can’t.’ His face was turned toward the hills, away from the chasm two feet off.

  Vincent had turned back and was standing over him. He asked irritably: ‘What’s wrong?’

  Julian said: ‘He’s faint. It’s the height.’

  Vincent bent down to Ross, his mouth close to his ear, and said quite tenderly: ‘You walk beside me.’ He put one arm round Ross’s shoulders, and pulled him to his feet. ‘Now, first step.’

  For a moment Ross did nothing. I thought he might sit down again. Then, like a robot starting up, he took a short, numbed step. Vincent was on his far side, closer to the cliff edge, blocking it from his view. Ross’s gait was stiff and unnatural. He might have been sleepwalking. For twenty or thirty paces this mechanical walk continued, while Vincent’s arm steadied him; then his movements started to loosen. But the path continued narrow, and the two walked on, crushed together on its constricted thread. Coming behind them, carrying Ross’s trekking pole, I sensed his terror draining away, until at last he seemed to go quite easily, with his head resting on Vincent’s shoulder. And for a moment I could not remember what I was reminded of – the fair head inclined to the upright body beside it – until I recalled with a start the fresco of the Last Supper.

  Then the track widened. Vincent said: ‘You’ll be all right now,’ and he strode ahead again, Ross following shakily, until we were trekking high above the roofs of a scattered hermitage. Chaffinches flittered ahead of us, and the path cast its sun-warmed spell again
, as if nothing had happened. It was fringed with violets and euphorbia now, where bumblebees sounded and saffron butterflies were flying over the shrubs.

  By sunset even Vincent was flagging, and the rest of us were exhausted. A sharp wind had got up. We had miscalculated our destination on the map, underestimating the steep terrain, and we were all relieved when through the trees, in the mouth of a wild ravine, the fortress walls of St Paulos monastery rose in the darkening sky.

  An austere guest master directed us to the dormitory, where we were the only sleepers. We were forbidden, as Protestants, to attend either vespers or matins, he said, and there was no food. The only other monks we saw looked old and oblivious. It had grown suddenly cold. Soon the wind was moaning round our windows, and we could hear the waves throbbing below. We ate biscuits out of our rucksacks, and fell dog-tired into bed. I must have been too strained, at first, to sleep, and instead remained half dreaming, distracted by incoherent thoughts. Later I mistook the breaking of the waves for the roar of passing traffic. But of course no car had ever been here.

  Hours later, near to dawn, something jolted me awake. The wind was battering at the windows, but the disturbance was close by. Somebody was sobbing. The sound was like a deep, hollow dread. I eased myself from my bed and padded over to Ross; but he was fast asleep. The trouble was rising from Julian. I could not see his face in the dark, but his weeping had the muffled, internal secrecy of a dream, not of waking sorrow. He would be ashamed, I thought, if I roused him, and I crept back to bed. But for a long time this enigmatic sobbing continued, as if from somewhere inconsolable.