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He was attired in the same sort of flowing garb as that worn by the monks of Dariel, and with his tall, spare figure, long, silvery beard and deep-sunken yet still brilliant dark eyes, he might have served as a perfect model for one of the inspired prophets of bygone ancient days.
No monarchs will honor you now, but rather despise! for the kings and queens of this age prefer financiers to Laureates! Now, wherever you wander, let me hear of your well- being and progress in contentment; when you write, address to our Dariel retreat, for though on my return from Mexico I shall probably visit Lemnos, my letters will always be forwarded. Adieu!" "Adieu!" and their eyes met.
But whither? ... Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear shadow? ... This was a question to which the mystic monk, gifted as he was with a powerful spiritual insight into "things unseen and eternal," could find no satisfactory answer, and in his anxious perplexity he betook himself to the chapel, and there, by the red glimmer of the crimson star that shone dimly above the altar, he knelt alone and prayed in silence till the heavy night had passed, and the storm had slain itself with the sword of its own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.
Earlier in the century, Russia had acquired from Persia the vast provinces of the southern Caucasus, and had afterwards, partly by the consent of the tribes and partly by force, succeeded in keeping open the two great routes to these possessions, the one along the Caspian, and the other over the centre of the chain by the pass of Dariel.
At one mad passage of dancing semitones he started, it was as though a sudden wind, dreaming an enraged dream, had leaped up to shake tall trees to and fro, and the Pass of Dariel, with its frozen mountain-peaks, its tottering pines, and howling hurricanes, loomed back upon his imagination as he had seen it first on the night he had arrived at the Monastery but soon these wild notes sank and slept again in the dulcet harmony of an Adagio softer than a lover's song at midnight.
On, on! splitting huge boughs and flinging them aside like straws, swelling the rivers into riotous floods that swept hither and thither, carrying with them masses of rock and stone and tons of loosened snow on, on! with pitiless force and destructive haste, the tempest rolled, thundered, and shrieked its way through Dariel.
As yet he had only made acquaintance with two of the monks, courteous, good-humored personages, who had received him on his arrival with the customary hospitality which it was the rule of the monastery to afford to all belated wayfarers journeying across the perilous Pass of Dariel.
Then he suddenly remembered what the Monk and Mystic, Heliobas, had said to him at Dariel on the morning after his trance of soul-liberty: . . "If, as I conjecture, you have seen one of the fair inhabitants of higher spheres than ours, you would not drag her spiritual and death- unconscious brightness down to the level of the 'reality' of a mere human life? ... Nay, if you would you could not!"
Drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel, that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below, clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky.
His gaze rested dreamily on the opposite snow-clad peaks, above which large fleecy clouds, themselves like moving mountains, were slowly passing, their edges glowing with purple and gold as they neared the sinking sun. Presently rousing himself, he took up a pen and first of all addressing an envelope to he rapidly wrote off the following letter: "MONASTERY OF LARS, "PASS OF DARIEL, CAUCASUS."
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