I couldn’t tell if this was good news or bad news. ‘Did “they” land?’

  ‘No. They’re always moving,’ he said. ‘Discs or triangles of light that move at the kind of speed we don’t have on this planet. Sometimes they hover.’

  They never bothered him and he was pleased they were there. After a conversation under the frozen fruit trees, he’d ascend the stair and close the door with the key on the outside. His patch was fenced in from the road with wire at neck level that nearly strangled me, even in the daytime. I wondered whether the inn keeper and his fatal guest had been strangled with wire like this, and Pesho’s father too.

  ‘This is the last year,’ Pesho said in 2021. ‘Then the cataclysms begin. Cos we’ve really fucked up.’

  He spent the winters by the fire reading the Bible, the Koran and the prophecies of clairvoyants who foresaw cataclysms of every kind.

  After my chats with him, I’d drive across the winter valley. Past a landfill reopened by the rains where Roma men rummaged with horse carts. Past men loading bloodied horses with tree trunks. Past the riverbed quarry inside a bird sanctuary.

  It wasn’t only that we had fucked up. It was that we kept racing down the vortex on a death ride. We were not getting off. We were completely insane.

  Before the river road was built in the 1940s, you climbed above the canyon on foot and horseback to access the valley. You travelled at the level of Maiden Tower. The late nineteenth- century ethnogeographer Vasil Kanchov walked this stretch of Mesta, past the abandoned Maiden Tower:

  ‘I savoured the gorgeous panorama that lay between Pirin and the Rhodope, and wondered how it was that amidst such natural riches there could live such a wretched people.’

  One hundred and twenty years later, his local insight is a global truth.

  Pesho was dodgy, but from his river perch he grasped the true state of the world and lived accordingly. Pesho had been a construction worker. He had helped tar-seal the road in the 1980s. Until then, the road had been just gravel.

  He was also a notorious treasure hunter then. One day, he rocked up to the pub in Siropol. He sat down at a table but the floor was uneven and to steady it, he jammed its leg with a gold coin he produced from a bag. He had just found a spectacular hoard of gold in a necropolis and wanted to celebrate, which was a mistake because Siropol bristled with secret agents. The whole valley did, because of its proximity to the Greek border. His hoard was confiscated and he was beaten to a pulp. The deadly tango between the underground locals who had knowledge and the bandit state which had power has never stopped. Afterwards, Pesho was a ruined man – having lost his gold, his health and his arrogance, he returned to live with his mother in the shack. But he never stopped looking for treasure.

  ‘And what does that rockface remind you of?’ I wasn’t too sure, but he was.

  If he stopped seeing codes in the cliffs, he’d fall down dead with heartbreak.

  In late 2021, I heard that he had died. Dreading the sight of his collapsed shack, I squeezed through Maiden Gorge and pulled over by the fountain – and there he was, sitting with two villagers and a watermelon, like a revenant!

  ‘Madam is back,’ he croaked vitriolically.

  ‘I heard that you were – unwell,’ I said.

  ‘Dead, you mean,’ he snorted, coughing up blood.

  Born of the Maiden Gorge, he had performed a symbiotic merger with it, so that by driving away from the layby after nearly strangling myself on the wire, I could leave The Dark behind. And tell myself that I was safe.

  ‘Stay safe’: the mantra of the pandemic. It was a false mantra based on a misunderstanding. It is not possible to stay safe for more than a second. Life is dangerous. Maiden Gorge was a place where this became apparent.

  ‘I’ll tell you my happiest dream,’ Metko said while we were inside The Dark, perched on the vortex lip. ‘It takes place here.’

  He is with other children in a pool of river-polished stone. The bottom of the pool is refracted, like a mosaic of emerald tiles. In this pool are fish, and the children pick them up like glittering treasures in their hands. The fish communicate with the children through sound and vibration, and the fish tell the children the secret of life. It is something to do with light. Just – light. The children are free and out of bounds, they are one with the water and they let the fish go.

  ‘Visit the Interior of the Earth and Rectify what you find there, and you will Discover the Hidden Stone.’

  Visita interiora terrae rectificando occultum lapidem (VITRIOL). An alchemical recipe encrypted for adepts – something the alchemists enjoyed doing but also had to do, to protect their work from thieves. Vitriol stood for sulphuric acid, one of the chemical elements. And thanks to the alchemists’ knack for uniting the material with the figurative, it acquired a psychological dimension too. Vitriol: virulence, violence, vortex.

  Metko and I visited the interior of the earth that day. But he had already done it in his imaginatio and glimpsed the hidden stone.

  Autumn was here. I packed my dried herbs and said goodbye to The Birches. Gyulten gave me a pair of silky trousers made in a sewing sweatshop. I heard the song ‘Black Rose’ one more time, drank from Fatmé’s fountain and Shefket made me eat two kilos of sheep’s yogurt on my last day.

  ‘Everything repeats itself,’ Metko’s sceptical blue eyes crinkled in a smile. We cracked sunflower seeds in the empty square. ‘You’ll be back next spring, I think. Like the stone flower.’

  Vortex

  Pesho was the closest I’d met to a mining gnome. He lived inside the fissures of the earth and the basements of the psyche. He was part of an underground web of soil-munchers, gold-miners, pentacle exchangers, tomb raiders, skull-duggers, conspiracy-spinners and like a djinn, he guarded the edges of things and could hurt you when disturbed. He did not make the world a better place. Yet he was integral to the valley’s ecology of meaning.

  The gnome is the alchemical creature of the earth element. He is a trickster who moves from underground to overground. His disposition is miserly. Alchemists called the passage into matter coagulatio. In this earth phase, things must solidify. Or they remain volatile like fire, run away like water and dissipate like air before they have a chance to take form. In Maiden Gorge, the submerged contents of the psyche took form. Then, form once again became the starting point of the journey.

  ‘The nature of infinity is this,’ wrote William Blake in Milton:

  That every thing has its

  Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity

  Has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

  His path, into a globe itself unfolding, like a sun,

  Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty. […]

  Thus is the heaven a vortex pass’d already, and the earth

  A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity.

  Source

  * * *

  WATER

  Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  Honey Sellers

  The honey sellers appeared suddenly at a roadside market. Alpine pastures opened up behind them in quick succession, a show the Earth had put on in an outburst of genius for its own delight.

  At the market was everything that the mountain produced, including mursala. I had missed it, even if I admitted that a break in our relationship in favour of juniper had been good for me. It was late summer, the first of the pandemic. Spring had come and gone, the stone flower too.

  I had landed just the day before quarantine for arrivals was lifted. In the capital, there were mass protests against the mafia state, with masks – a new sight.

  On the stalls were honeys, syrups, jams, milk, yogurt, butter and cheeses – fresh and matured from cow, ewe and goat – dried and fresh berries, walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds, broad beans and dried porcini. The sellers were Pomak women, with fair skin burned by decades of summer toil without sunblock, their hands huge from planting, sowing, hoeing, digging, weeding, watering, harvesting, shelling, de-stoning, drying, stringing, milking, boiling, preserving, birthing, killing and cooking. I knew nobody in this highest part of the river, but seeing these women, I instantly felt at ease.

  They extracted round cheeses from chilly bins and sliced off generous chunks as tasters, on the tip of a knife, or scooped a spoonful of honey for you to lick. Everything was grown, soured, sweetened and shaped by their hands. The cheeses were creamy with tasty grasses. Their speech stroked me with its archaic lilt – the preserve of the Mesta Pomaks. But behind this gentleness was the familiar steely note. Their power was not on display, only the fruits of their earthly work, yet behind them was the mountain. Always, the mountain.

  I filled the car with jars of sheep’s yogurt and blueberries. The road ran south until it converged with the first miles of Mesta. After the market, solo women with individual roadside stalls popped up, like fairies. Occasionally you saw a man at the stalls but nobody bought from the men, people only stopped for the women.

  You passed places like the titles of unwritten stories: Saint Petka; Arab Peak; Yuruk Mound; The Horned One; The Treasure. The mountain kept them pressed between the pages of its hills.

  Struck by the arcadian meadow behind the last seller, I pulled over. She was smiling already. I bought a jar of caramel-like pine syrup.

  Her granddaughter picked berries in England. Her daughter was a nurse in Germany.

  ‘It’s better for them over there,’ said the honey seller.

  I asked her name.

  ‘My name is Zaidé. I’m from The Birches.’

  Ah! This was Metko’s aunt. She was delighted that I knew him. Later, I learned Zaidé had been battered by a soldier with the butt of a rifle. She’d been in that march across the hills to Kornitsa.

  The travellers who stopped to buy the ecologically pristine food made by Zaidé and the others didn’t know what these women had been through, and didn’t care. They haggled, tossed money to the sellers whose unflappable grace highlighted their customers’ arrogance, then squeezed back into their cars en route to Greek beaches. But not this summer. This summer, the border was closed because of the pandemic and the road was empty.

  Something came full circle that summer. Resistance to the communist mafia state had been initiated in the 1960s by the Pomaks of Mesta with great sacrifices at the time and no recognition later. Sixty years later, new resistance to the oligarchic mafia state would lead to repeated elections that would bring it down. It had taken Zaidé’s entire life.

  I said goodbye to Zaidé, but not before she piled the top of my yogurt jar, which I had opened to eat, with a thick mint syrup.

  ‘Because I have a lot of everything and it’s the thingiest thing on this earthly earth,’ she waved me off with her big hand, ‘to give a soul something to eat.’

  The fortifying syrup was prepared by boiling large quantities of wild mint with mursala and sugar. I can’t forget the flavour of her mint and mursala syrup, and her pine syrup which I ate every day until it was gone, even after the many other faces and tastes of the valley. The taste of pine and mint merged with Zaidé’s face, with her steely blue eyes under the headscarf, like a clear note of welcome struck by the birth-mountain of the river.

  Pine syrup

  Young tips or cones of black pine, cedar, spruce, or dwarf pine, a handful

  Brown sugar or honey, 500 grams

  Water, 2 litres

  Boil until the water is reduced to half a litre. If using honey, add at the end. Strain, and eat yourself a spoon a day on an empty stomach, said Zaidé, and say goodbye to gallstones, gastritis and coughs.

  Pine is for bronchitis, asthma and to clear anything trapped in the chest, like heartache. Pine is for indigestion, acid and to fortify you against pathogens, like injustice. Pine is a nobleman in all its guises. There are several families of pine in the three mountains of Mesta. The only type I can spot easily is the white or Scots pine, because I see its lonely individuals with gnarly branches every day on the shorn hills of rural Scotland. The Scots pine is a star of Scottish lore. The cones produce a light-brown dye and rope was made from the roots. Their sap was used as lamp oil on sores and boils. Pine was brought to the brink of extinction in Scotland over the last 300 years – to clear grazing and shooting grounds, to build the boats of Empire and then the coffins of the world wars that were sparked off in the ashes of Empire. By 1950, ninety-nine per cent of Scotland’s pine population was gone.

  The oldest pine individual in Scotland is about 500 years old. And the oldest in Europe is the Baykusheva mura in Pirin, at 1,300 years old and named after the forest ranger who aged it in 1897. It is a Bosnian pine, whose last native communities are in Pirin Mountain, Slavyanka-Orvilos Mountain and the mountains of Calabria.

  Black Mesta, White Mesta

  There is something about a highland train station that feels like a theatre set. The earth is an amphitheatre and you get on and off the train, on and off, you don’t really know why.

  Your whole life has been like this: on and off, highs and lows, from one thing to another. The drama is yours, not the land’s. You brought it with you and wherever you go, you look for somewhere to play it out. You saw your condition clearly from the scenic narrow-gauge train. Your condition was precarious, like the skinny train attached to a rail only 76 centimetres wide. It climbed the terraced mountains and plunged into precipices with joyful abandon. ‘Toot-toot!’

  Its inter-wagon doors flapped open and closed over plunging forests, and you could lean out with your hair wind-whipped and just a step separating you from the plunge. You squeezed through tight tunnels blasted in the rock a century ago, a feat of engineering forced by the remoteness of the Rila-Rhodope massif and lack of roads. The railway was meant to follow the Mesta all the way to the Aegean, but money and goodwill ran out and it ended just before Maiden Gorge.

  At Avramovo, the Balkans’ highest train station at 1,267 metres, the train stopped for a break and you got off, then on again, looking at the round station clock which looked back at you. Are we there yet? The clock hands pointed at some other moment in time.

  Inside the carriage were signs: ‘Wear masks at all times!’ and nobody did. You breathed in the alpine air that rushed through open windows like whispers of the forest and you listened. You stopped briefly at once-handsome, now gutted little stations where the honeysellers with sunburned faces got off with their food bundles and headed off to hidden forest settlements. They didn’t drive and the narrow-gauge train was their livelihood.

  One of the gutted little stations was called Black Mesta. This is where you got off. You crossed the railway on foot with your bundle and entered the miniature village.

  There was something of the dark fairytale about Black Mesta. You felt it as soon as you arrived, but the full effect seeped in over time. The daily visitors with number plates from faraway places, who arrived in a cloud of dust and parked next to the street tables of the village shop, didn’t take the time – they came to see Alish ‘the blind healer’ and quickly left. Though quick is not the word. Some of them could barely walk and were propped or half-carried by helpers. This was why I stayed for three days which turned into ten: to be close to Alish and the homeland of the river. By the end, the two had merged in my mind.

  Built on six streets in a fold of the gorge like a kink in a birth canal and facing the looming hills at point-blank, the village was the nearest inhabited place to the sources of the river. Black Mesta and White Mesta made up the bulk of Upper Mesta. People said that the names came from the black stones found in one and the white stones in the other. The stones looked the same to me, but the double nature made sense. This was a place of echoes. The Rhodope threw you against Rila, like in some tossing game of Titans.

  The village sat at 1,190 metres above sea level and went black at night. The hills were like Gothic ruins under the stars. A Gypsy encampment stood on the other bank of Black Mesta. They scratched a living from logging and lived here with their dogs and horses as permanently as you could live in a tent.

  The river sounded closer at night, as if it grew in volume. At 5.30 a.m. I was woken by the first loud call to prayer. The ezan was sung with feeling by the self-appointed village hodja Alika, who was also my landlord. I rented a one-room converted barn in his garden, by his rows of green beans and next to the empty sheep pen. Alika sang with a lyrical voice that didn’t match his fox eyes and weakness for the ladies. His prayer voice expressed something in him that couldn’t be expressed otherwise.

  ‘Allahu ekbeeer,’ in a minor key and rather too loud for dawn, ‘Eshedi en la I’llyallah’. A love call to his valley that the black hills echoed back, making it sound like two voices, and the Gypsies’ dogs howled back. His genuine passion for everything he did – religious ritual, community projects, his garden – won him the respect of the villagers who were a long-suffering, faithless lot.

  Alika’s daughter-in-law walked a pram across the garden, cooing.

  ‘Please pick an apple,’ she’d say, rocking the pram where a newborn with an astonished face gazed at the blue sky, a face struck by a premonition of all that human life contains. He had asked for nothing, yet here he was, thrust into this world of dark vales and bright peaks.

  ‘Yes, he is brand new,’ said the mother wistfully. ‘Pick some beans. We have too much. Isn’t it good that you get to see different places and faces, and are changed by what you see? It’s the finest thing in the world! Here, we go round and round the garden, round and round. And we look at the sky.’

  She gathered her own herbs in the hills for her little family, especially elder, which for her was the most medicinal plant of Rila. ‘And of the Scottish Highlands,’ I said.