If you become an apprentice in an alchemical workshop, the first thing you learn is the philosophical principles of alchemy. They will strike students of Western philosophy as Platonic or Gnostic, students of Eastern philosophies as self-evident and students of quantum physics as familiar. All things are as one; everything is alive; consciousness precedes matter; transform yourself before you try to transform anything else; creation is ‘divine’ or ineffable and contained within each being; a new flower, stone, substance, being, or state of being can be produced by human-divine intervention, but the laws of nature must be respected. This is transmutation, made possible through the raising of vibrations. This is one of the definitions of alchemy: the raising of vibrations. It starts at the mental level and ends at the material.

  You – the apprentice – would learn the physical and metaphysical properties of the four elements: fire, earth, water and air (in the Chinese tradition there are five elements: water, earth, fire, metal and wood). Each element is expressed on Earth and in the human body in myriad ways, and each has a guardian spirit. Modern alchemical psychologists named seven transformative stages of the psyche and four of them correspond to the four elements: calcination, coagulation, solution, sublimation. The order of the stages varies and the process is messy, full of false starts, relapses and failed experiments – like life itself – but the activator is always fire. Fire was taken from the gods by Prometheus, and for empowering mortals ‘the system’ punished him. But fire stayed. Without fire, there is no creation, no evolution and the hearth is cold. I almost wrote the heart is cold, which is also true. Fire cooks, impassions, electrifies and turns the experiment to ashes. The spirit creature of fire is the salamander.

  You, the student of alchemy, would learn that the holy grail of ancient and medieval alchemy was to distil a substance that contains the essence of life and heals all disease. From plants, rocks, metals: a drop of immortality. Hundreds of names have been given to this elusive substance: Amrita, elixir of life, lapis, the philosopher’s stone. The search for elixir was at times linked with gold because gold doesn’t tarnish, hence the idea of transforming ‘base metals’ into pure ones. Precious stones were treated as pure beings of high resonance. Hildegard of Bingen, who was an alchemist in the broadest sense, recommended placing a diamond in your mouth ‘against your own meanness’. The search for elixir is thrilling but risky. Over centuries of experimentation, medicine women and men, and at least one emperor from the Ming Dynasty, died by drinking what was supposed to be an elixir of immortality but turned out to be poison. This is radical curiosity: to be prepared to die in the name of immortality. That is, of ultimate knowledge, gnosis. Avicenna said it: ‘I prefer a short life with depth to a narrow one with length.’

  But the search for elixir is not really about a liquid or an object because it is a search for completeness. In Old English, heal means whole; to heal is to make whole again. This is the root of ‘holistic’. This is why the apprentice would train in all the arts: mathematics, astronomy, physiology, art, poetry, music and natural sciences. You would learn how to have a relationship with liquids, stones, plants, animals, the luminaries and your innermost self, which is a microcosm of all that there is. You would be in pursuit of a two-fold enlightenment: through direct experience and through lifelong study.

  You the student of alchemy know that humanity’s longing for elixir has never gone away. But we have forgotten its true meaning because somewhere along the way we gave up the search for it. We settled for a long, narrow life instead of a short one with depth. We forgot how to heal. We gave our power away and debased elixir to an anti-ageing cream. We settled for less than the whole. Your task is to remember how to make whole again.

  The Passage

  Each evening in Arif’s guesthouse, I’d sit on my high balcony like a watchtower over Clear Water. I’d eat slabs of fresh goat’s cheese as pure as snowdrift and track the cars crawling up the road. They were all coming from faraway places to here, the little village of Kribul with its one main street that climbed until the tarmac ended and a forest road began.

  The visitors drove past Arif’s guesthouse, past the ramshackle house of the goatherds who boiled 200 litres of milk every night, past the houses of the last tobacco growers with their golden leaf strung up on wooden frames, past the outdoor table where the village drunks sat without moving as if made of glass, past the Kebab café, past the older village women collectively known as babi, who sat on benches in floral headscarves and shalvars munching pumpkin seeds, past the village shop that did brisk business in lead bullets – not for hunting, but for diagnostic rituals performed by the babi – and that’s where they gave up. They got out of their cars and asked after baba Ava.

  ‘Baba Ava? Keep going,’ the villagers said. ‘It’s the pink house at the top.’

  Kribul sat on the dry flanks of the western Rhodope above Clear Water. It was one of those hewn-into-the-hillside villages not suitable for people fearful of heights and drops: which some of the visitors were. Some were fearful of everything. The pilgrims ascending the road in the early morning or late evening were in possession of a wide spectrum of conditions, diseases and every kind of affliction under the currently waxing moon. They were riddled with anxiety and depression, mute, autistic, heartbroken, struggling to conceive or just having a bad time. Some were simply curious, they said, while nursing a secret hope.

  They came because of a remote megalith known as The Passage to locals and The Stone of the Black Snake to tourists. The place was ascribed curative value and became popular after a television feature about it.

  After hearing about The Passage at The Empty Village taverna, I packed up my dream house, said goodbye to my neighbours and Danera, swapped phone numbers with Rocky the Enchanter and moved here. Kribul was at the southern tip of Old Woods. To get here, you left the valley behind.

  You left behind Fire, Nikopolis ad Mestum, the ’hood, Thunder and drove past a long stretch of cultivated fields where people were bent in their furrows from early morning to avoid the heat. Here were the last tobacco fields of the valley, leafy and tall. The ‘mixed’ villages like Fire continued; mixed meant Muslim and Christian together. One of them sported an oversized Wahabi-style mosque that smacked of laundered money in this small village that already had a medieval mosque. Some young women wore the raised hijab imported from Turkey; ostensibly a statement of Islamic conservatism. But fashion was key, not dogma. Others wore nothing on their heads and looked Western, while the older women stuck with the traditional, relaxed floral headscarf. The Western look said: ‘I’m emancipated and urban’, the traditional look said: ‘I’m a Pomak villager and know my place’ and the high hijab said: ‘I’m a Muslim and a citizen of a global world.’

  The road climbed into the interior of the mountain. Clear Water was the next big tributary south of Kanina and dozens of waterways flowed into it.

  Geographic vitality and human diversity went together. The Mesta basin had sprouted an ethno-cultural web known as the Chech and historically, the mountain villages of the Chech were home to Our Folk, that is Pomaks, with large Christian and Gypsy minorities. The Chech began at the latitude of the valley and followed Mesta into the Aegean Plains. Its people spoke Bulgarian. Then the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Waves of terror, exodus and crude homogenising nationalism on both sides of the new border began. The new border tore up an old web of waterways and pastoralist routes. The Chech no longer exists as a geocultural entity. But some of its villages are still here – like Kribul – and its territory is still here because its territory is the mountain.

  The road passed glades full of rock stacks that looked like gatherings for some long-ago occasion. The Rhodope was like this – mimetolithic: a chameleon of a mountain. Millennia of cults had shaped the land. But the land was the original cult. It’s as if the mountain anticipated the human psyche by self-sculpting. The mountain thought herself into being in sympathy with rocks, plants, animals and finally, humans. Each had their own timescale but the mountain contained them all.

  One stone ensemble was scattered in a forest just before Kribul. The zoomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes had been named Dragon-snake, Priestess and Space Ship, but the most striking was a giant head. These figures were fancied as man-made thousands of years ago, though they were likely natural or mostly natural. Oddly, the complex had only been ‘discovered’ in the 1980s by a Polish archaeologist and only recently turned into a tourist attraction. Fragments of looms, ceramic pots and roof tiles had popped up in excavations, and there were stone thrones with carved steps.

  The head reclined on a green canopy, gazing through semi-open lids, Buddha-like. At dusk, the valley of Clear Water was infused with all the colours of the spectrum. The stone town took an hour to see and on a summer’s day it was a scorched place with a sheer drop. Archaeologists had measured the electromagnetic field and established that, because of the structure of granite, the area accumulated a high voltage. I have no idea what that means, but if you wanted serenity to be your superpower, you’d come and camp by the head until you glimpsed a moment in time without your little self, without humans at all. You glimpsed that the mountain had welcomed us, fed us, watered us, healed us, kept us going even when we hacked into it, dammed it and drained it, and it might just see us off too. The head would remain to imitate our long-ago presence.

  The Rhodope bristled with cult sites like this, big and small, on hilltops with strategic positions. The head complex, Goat Stone in Old Woods and The Passage above Kribul were survivors of an ancient network, just as the villages were survivors of the Chech.

  The overnight television fame achieved by The Passage had startled sleepy Kribul awake. On busy days, visitors outnumbered locals.

  ‘It’s the energy,’ a voice came from the garden below, where guests gathered every evening for dinner, drinks and therapeutic chat, overseen by our host Arif.

  ‘It’s a triangle,’ said another voice. ‘Kribul, The Monastery of H. and Goat Stone.’

  The once harmonious nearby monastery of H. had been wrecked by over-restoration in a gaudy neo-Orthodox style. It was the equivalent of the new mosques with their cold neo-Islamism.

  Kribul had a little old mosque whose minaret had been broken with a crane by the communists. You could see where it had been reattached.

  ‘Have you been to the nymphs’ spring in K.?’ another voice said.

  ‘No, but did you know that if you wash yourself in the St Athanasios spring near the Golden Meadows, you cleanse your family of karmic debt?’

  This was the woman who was here with her emaciated adult daughter. Her daughter stared into space with her skull-like face.

  ‘Have you been to the Black Madonna for orphans in H.?’

  A couple from Belgrade. The woman wore outlandish make-up.

  ‘And The Passage in K.,’ said her husband. ‘We’re touring the Balkans.’

  ‘Until we find relief,’ his wife rejoined.

  ‘We already feel better,’ he said.

  Something about them was so damaged it walked everywhere with them.

  Arif’s voice was rarely heard. He let his guests get things off their chests. He drank the homemade spirits brought by them, although he wasn’t a drinker and he chuckled politely at the men’s poor jokes, while the women tried to ignore the men and gazed at the moon, unhappy with their lives but happy to be here.

  Arif was a slender man in his fifties with beady eyes that betrayed nothing except impatience with the more unbearable guests. His wife worked in the city in the valley. His daughters travelled to England to pick fruit and work in cafés. The women were worked off their feet and he’d built the guesthouse. Otherwise, the livelihood for men was quarrying and cutting the slate stone of the Rhodope. Unregulated quarries proliferated in the area, causing deforestation, erosion, drought and water shortages.

  ‘Come on, Arifie, open the other bottle. The night is young.’

  The international lorry driver who addressed everyone in the diminutive. He was a large, loud man whose doctor wife made her excuses early and sat on her balcony next to mine. They lived in Spain. Twenty-five years ago, he’d been drawn into some shady business and she had refused to be a gangster’s widow, she said, so they emigrated. On our high balconies, we talked late under the stars. Her daughter had become ill with diabetes after suffering a shock and this had changed her approach to health.

  ‘We know little about human health,’ she said. ‘The biochemistry of emotions. The effect of the environment on the endocrine system. Immunity. The key to health.’

  She was studying Eastern health traditions and found the chakra system useful.

  ‘Because everything is connected but not always in an obvious way. Yet Western medicine still has a mechanical approach to the human being. It teaches us to take patients apart, but not to put them back together in a meaningful way.’

  Her daughter had chosen not to take medication for her diabetes but changed her diet and lifestyle, supervised by her mother, and her blood sugar had normalised within a year.

  ‘You know what these conversations always come down to?’ Arif asked us one night in the garden.

  ‘Illness,’ I said.

  ‘No, belief,’ he said. ‘What people believe and how that impacts their health.’

  ‘Correct. The patient’s mental-emotional state is ignored by medicine, because it can’t be quantified,’ said the GP from Spain. ‘Yet it’s a powerful factor. I see it again and again.’

  Under the stars, among the honeysuckle, knowing they might never meet again, Arif’s guests opened up. The vast majority were not Muslims and this was their first contact with a Muslim community. Many of them returned, they liked it here.

  ‘I look at a person when they arrive and I see what they need, even when they don’t know what they need. Then I try to provide it,’ Arif told me privately.

  Like a good doctor.

  ‘And like you, I take notes, but mentally,’ he added. ‘For the book I’ll never write.’

  Arif’s generation were raised to be tough and obedient. They’d walk to the nearest secondary school, through dark glades, across the river which swelled in spring. They’d spend the week in dorms. In winter, parents accompanied them to make a trail in the snow, but they had to find their way back: two hours each way. After finishing high school with top grades in the city of the valley, then two years of compulsory army service, Arif wanted to study further but was recalled home to help with the tobacco harvest. He was bitterly disappointed because he wanted a life of the mind, but bowed before the double judgement of state and clan.

  Arif seemed tense and in the morning I discovered why. Kribul had fallen prey to Passage politics. I had come looking for baba Ava, but her house was full for the night and it didn’t take long to find out that she was one of five women who operated at the stone.

  ‘You don’t need baba Ava,’ a woman told me. ‘You can go with another baba. They all have drivers.’

  The babi’s role wasn’t very clear to me but that was about to change. Early in the morning, we piled into Arif’s Jeep: me, the couple from Spain and a young Roma couple. The mother and daughter took their ‘karmic debt’ elsewhere and I was glad.

  Squeezed in the back hatch with her walking stick made from cherry was our baba, a woman named Acivé. Arif was her friend, driver and champion.

  ‘She is the only genuine baba,’ Arif said.

  Acivé was self-contained and rarely spoke uninvited.

  ‘I’ve known her all my life. Her mother was one of only two women who frequented the stone during Communism. In winter too,’ said Arif.

  As with the stone above Dogwood, visiting The Passage had been banned and the relationship between people and stone had all but vanished.

  I liked Acivé straight away. For all that her life had never extended beyond this side of the mountain and her formal education was basic, she had a bright intelligence. Being in her presence was like enjoying fine weather. She was small and had a limp; a granary door had fallen on her hip and crushed it in her youth, and it hadn’t been fixed. ‘But I’m fine, I have my cane,’ she said, and she did move with surprising speed.

  ‘I used to stutter too,’ she said. ‘My mother took me to the stone and it stopped.’

  The Jeep bumped roughly over the dirt road. We entered a sparse glade.

  ‘The old road used to wind over the mountain,’ Acivé said. ‘But then they made this new road that takes you straight there.’

  Straight there was pretty crooked and we were trailed by a cloud of sand. Before the village became wealthy enough for Jeeps, there were Soviet UAZ vehicles and before that: mules.

  Inside Arif’s car, the Roma woman kept pulling away from me on the back seat. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she kept saying. The couple from Spain had come without previous knowledge of the stone, just for the mountain air.

  ‘All sorts come,’ baba Acivé said.

  ‘Stop touching me!’ the Roma woman recoiled again.

  ‘I’m not touching you,’ I said, ‘you’re paranoid.’

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ said her uxorious husband.

  ‘Some that can’t walk,’ Acivé went on. ‘Some that can’t talk. Some that can’t see and some that can’t hear. Some with tumours and fright. Some come for babies. Some with sick children.’

  To her, there was no hierarchy of ailments, or people.

  ‘We try to help them all,’ she said, ‘but it’s not us that helps. It’s the stone. The stone is God. We are nobody.’

  ‘A Spanish woman came,’ said Acivé, ‘with six miscarriages. After passing through the stone, she gave birth to a living child. A government minister came to have his bad energy cleared.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we helped him. It took a while,’ she said, deadpan but not mocking. She didn’t mock anyone, even corrupt ministers.

  The road ended in a small clearing where two army stretchers rested against trees. We walked to The Passage through an eerie forest. Every tree had clothing tied to it. The forest teemed with ragged spirits, the sick parts of themselves that people had left behind.