‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ said the computer techie, ‘I’m an engineer’.

  ‘Well! This was the seat where priestesses were placed to recover,’ Elijah said, delighted, though he was really making it up. ‘They were drugged up to their eyeballs with wine and mandragora and other psychotropic herbs, and sometimes left for dead.’

  You had to be made of strong stuff to be a mountain priestess.

  Above White Mesta, I saw where he’d turned an old quarry into a lake and maintained it with his own hands by keeping it connected with a tributary. I helped him clear some stones. The idea was to introduce fish, not for fishing, but to give children a reason to leave their tablets for a day and come up here. Locals were generous with donations and money even came from abroad. ‘People need to see good things happening and they gladly join in,’ he said.

  The old name for Mesta was Nehta, a Thracian word that lives on in an alpine area called Nehtenitsa. We walked the old caravan track towards Cobbler Peak and saw wolf and bear prints. Elijah knew the bear couple who were the kings of White Mesta, their cub and another cub from the guy’s other relationship, he said.

  White Mesta and Black Mesta never flooded together. From the upper realms, I saw that in every wildnerness, there is order. The closer I got to the river springs, the more distinct everything looked. On a rough map, there is just Mesta. On the body of the land, Mesta becomes a galaxy of blood vessels, each with its own sun and moon. Each with a temperament, a micro-climate, and residents with faces. It is infinite.

  ‘This is the meaning of an ecosystem,’ said Eljiah. ‘This is the meaning of nature. Pri-roda.’

  Priroda is literally ‘with-the-clan’. To be in nature is to return to your own kind.

  ‘This is my mission. To bring people to their own kind.’

  That is why he’d appointed himself custodian of this corner of Rila. Behind the smile was Elijah’s sadness at seeing forests destroyed, rewilding opportunities bulldozed by greed.

  ‘But when I tune in with the place, it renews me. These boulders are special.’

  He was exhausted at the end of the season, but had taken me climbing to a crop of boulders below Cobbler Peak that were named after the cobblers at a resting station who once provided horses with new shoes. It was a pristine place. To one side were Blacksmith Lake and Potter Lake, up towards Musala was a peak called The Healer, and below us was The Saint, both feminine.

  ‘Healing goes back to the mineral waters,’ Elijah said. ‘There was once a water healer here, who treated the incurable in a cave. Free of charge. But people had to come to her.’

  Healers who worked free of charge were known in the medicinal canon as bezsrebrenitsi, ‘lucreless ones’, and the most revered lucreless ones were the peripatetic Syrian doctors Cosmas and Damian. They travelled with their three other brothers as helpers. When some hilltop or chapel is called Sveti Vrach, Saint Healer, it invokes the lucreless ones and those in their lineage.

  Anyway, Eljiah went on, so reknowned was this healer that people called her the Saint. It was the early Middle Ages. A Byzantine emperor summoned her to cure his leprosy-stricken daughter: but the healer wouldn’t travel. Irritated, the emperor agreed to send his daughter off with an armed retinue, and for some reason, with the girl’s entire dowry (a detail added retrospectively, after her tomb was raided a millennium later, because you already sense this story ends badly, as stories involving irritable emperors usually do). They travelled west from Constantinople along the Via Egnatia, dropped in at Nikopolis ad Mestum for some mineral baths, then followed the Mesta past Maiden Tower. But just before they reached the healer, the girl succumbed. She was entombed in a stone necropolis hewn by local masons. They laid her down dressed in a ‘gold and silver tunic’. Four golden goblets for the four cardinal directions were placed inside the tomb with her dowry. The necropolis was then sealed with a slab and covered with soil and rocks. It became one of those mounds beloved of treasure hunters.

  ‘I know this from an old man whose family managed the land. The story was passed down.’

  And perhaps the loot too. The site was levelled in the years of collectivisation and probably looted earlier, in the nineteenth or twentieth century when most lootings took place. And what of the very detailed contents of the tomb? Elijah smiled.

  ‘The instructions were: he who finds the tomb can take all except the tunic. Don’t touch the tunic.’

  Treasure hunters are a superstitious tribe and stories of malediction and nemesis make up a whole genre in oral history. There is a peak here called Anathema, curses in Greek. Afterwards, the enraged emperor ordered the armed retinue to execute the healer and declare her a traitor to the empire. Then, they headed back to Constantinople. What a miserable expedition for those men and women, but at least they got to soak in the hot springs along the way. The locals quietly buried the murdered healer above her cave.

  ‘That hilltop is still called The Saint.’

  We sunned ourselves on the boulders until the sun went in over The Healer, which had its own story.

  This is where remnants of coloured truth survive the blight of official history – in the body of the land. In The Alexiad by the Byzantine princess and first woman historian, Anna Komnina, a fascinating and self-glorifying chronicle of the reign of her father Alexios, the Bogomils are denounced in the contemporary language of the establishment – they are the ultimate ‘coalescence’ of ‘two very evil and worthless doctrines’: the Paulicians and the Massalians. ‘By this time the fame of the Bogomils had spread everywhere. For Basil, a monk, was very wily in handling the impiety of the Bogomils; he had twelve disciples he called “apostles”, and also dragged about with him some female disciples, wretched women of loose habits and thoroughly bad, and he disseminated his wickedness everywhere.’

  Basil was the influential Vasily Vrach, a great healer in his time. And one of the ‘heretical’ behaviours of Bogomil-Cathar society was that women were treated as equals, while there was even the practice of ‘free love’ and some of the perfecti in the elite were women. Just like Sufism which allowed a fellowship of the sexes.

  Eventually, her father, Emperor Alexios had Basil burned at the stake in the hippodrome of Constantinople in 1111. A miracle was witnessed then and recorded by Anna – a column of white light appeared in his place.

  Cosmas and Damian died a cruel death with their three brothers, on the orders of Emperor Diocletian. And in the fifteenth century, sultans put great Sufi dervishes to death. The patriarchy does not like lucreless healers loved by the people. Ironically, a few years later, Emperor Alexios came to Rila to seek a cure for putrid wounds on his legs from another healer. After a regimen of plants and prayer, the pus came out of his legs and he went home, probably making a large donation to the monastic community that had saved him.

  Elijah had fallen asleep on the rock. Exhaustion was the cost of having this mountain as a lover, friend and life’s mission, of seeing every stone as a sign and every river spring as a portal into another dimension.

  ‘We are guests here,’ said Elijah on the way down.

  ‘What, of the spirits of our ancestors?’ I anticipated.

  ‘No, of the wild pheasant and the capercaillie.’ Two capercaillies ran fast next to us, unafraid, as if for company. ‘This is their kingdom. Thank God for the capercaillie. It brings us back to earth.’

  Back at Feri’s, Elijah had zoomed off and it was time for Redjep to drive a hiccupping Alish back to Black Mesta. Feri and his daughter were busy receiving supplies, Ibrahim reshuffled his vodka glasses and Erol and I drove to his favourite place.

  It was called The Manure, a one-word story of a millennial way of life. Erol was a slim man with blue eyes and a smoker’s complexion who wore a down jacket even in summer, as if suffering from a chill. The Manure was a series of playful dips among well-shaped hills dripping with greenery at this time of year. We walked along a forest road like an arboreal tunnel, which Erol called ‘The Eye’ because at certain times of day like now, you could look down the tunnel as if into a giant green iris with a light tunnel of a pupil.

  In 1972, army lorries rolled down the river road and deadlocked Yakoruda. Men fled to the hills. The rest hid behind barricaded doors. Erol was eleven when army men kicked the door in. A soldier hung a rifle on his shoulder and held him at gunpoint as a shield: ‘Boy’, he said, ‘let’s see if we can find your father.’ Civilians didn’t own firearms, but they forced him to open cupboards so that if the father was armed with a knife, he would stab his own son.

  ‘After that, I couldn’t speak for a year,’ Erol said.

  He regained his speech when his mother took him to an old woman who melted a bullet ‘for fright’ and after seeing the shape of a gun in the melted lead, made him take three sips from the water where the lead had cooled. Erol was twenty-nine when he officially recovered his name.

  ‘I have three birthdays,’ he said. ‘When I was born. When I crashed my motorbike on a blind turn of the Mesta and lived. And when I reclaimed my name.’

  Later, when he was conscripted into the army, his commanding officer thought he was a Turk. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘I’m a Pomak.’ ‘What sort of a name is Erol, then?’ ‘A worldly name,’ replied Erol with pride. He was from a distinguished family and one of his ancestors had been a hodja. There were learned people in the family and Erol was a worldly name in the sense that it wasn’t a religious one, like Ali or Mehmed. It was a mark of education.

  Erol’s daughter was married to a Christian and their baby was named Elif, another worldly name.

  We stood on the edge of Rila and looked at the Rhodope.

  Yakoruda was on the Rhodope side of the river. But its lakes, legends and pastures ran up the Rila slopes. In The Manure gully, we were surrounded by lush forested hills dotted with ruined houses. This is where people used to live with their immense herds. Rila’s meadows, colours, shapes and smells had their own tone. Erol was a Rila soul.

  ‘I can’t describe Rila,’ he said. ‘Because it’s indescribable. I can only feel it. Because it’s a part of me.’

  Place names in Upper Mesta had one of three words attached to them: koliba (hut), mogila (mound) and mahala (’hood). Pashovi kolibi, Avramovi kolibi, Evrovi kolibi, Pironkovi kolibi, hundreds of house clusters named after mountain clans. They spoke of the recently expired aeon when humans and mountain were one. Lots of place names were derived from Yuruk, the old nomadic pastoralists known for their woven rugs, now gone from the land, though some of the rug patterns remain. The mounds were said to contain treasure, or tombs, or both – as with the leprous Byzantine princess and her dowry.

  Erol was not a fantasist. For him, communion with the mountain was a private matter. He climbed up here when he felt a tightness in his chest, walked through the Eye, from one mound to another until the chill of White Mesta reached him, though the river itself was out of sight. And when he looked at his mountain through the eye of his camera, he saw how blessed he was to live here, where the two mountains became one and it was impossible to choose between the two, you loved them both.

  Another evening, I drove upstream to the White Mesta with the skinny mushroomer. From a human perspective, White Mesta was terrifying. Set in a narrow gorge with high cliffs on one side and a massive forest on the other, the river raged in its bed even now, in the driest season. If it erupted from its bed, it would flood the ribbon of the road, already full of puddles through which the car barely made it and bash you against the rock. Once the road ended, a pathless hike took you to a plateau called The Cauldron where the sources began and bears roamed. Not even mushroomers went there – it was one of the most inhospitable sites. People and animals had been bashed in The Cauldron of White Mesta.

  One day, I drove above White Mesta with Redjep the star mushroomer and Ibrahim of the drinks. We walked across one rushing meadow after another, like turning the pages of a gripping book. The place called you to be alone, so we kept scattering and then calling out to each other. Ibrahim struggled with the sun and disappeared in the shade. Redjep went into his mushroomer state: deaf, mute and invisible. He found lots of ceps but hadn’t brought a sack.

  ‘Because when you bring a sack, you don’t find any. They hide.’

  I stood in the middle of a high meadow, vast like several stadiums that opened up into an unfolding panorama. It was inclined like a funnel – you ran down it and you slid into another dimension. I stood and felt waves of orchestral sound pass through me. My whole being vibrated with a joy so intense, I almost lifted off the grass as if I was inside a crystal palace jubilant with harmonies. There was no floor or ceiling. I saw that the mountain extended much higher than the eye could see. That I was much higher too, and linked by an invisible thread to something above. That the meadow was full of other beings – they had no form, they were pure joy.

  After these expeditions, I’d drive back to Black Mesta, past the daily honey seller who set up her cornucopia of goods awkwardly at the blind turn where Erol hadn’t died in a crash, so that you risked a head-on collision every time you pulled over. Yet she made up for it with her extras – three jars of sheep’s yogurt instead of two – and we swapped recipes. Then I’d wade across Alika’s green beans with relish.

  I lay on the grass and let the sounds of Black Mesta rock me into slumber under the gold of the August sun. The voices of villagers, the toot toot of the train every two hours, the Allahu Ekbeeer at five o’clock, the shuffle of old women at dusk, Alish’s coarse voice as he walked, without a cane, up his street after a day of clients, away from the smoking men and the foul philosopher at the table rhyming cock with mock, and on reflection, he was doing a public service by providing an outlet for bottled-up passions, the cooing of the mother with the pram, the disturbed woman who came down the street in her filthy clothes, asking politely for ‘a sweetie or a chocolate, or something’ to sweeten her existence.

  I heard the happy hum of drying nettles on my porch. Nettle is an optimist. Nettle is strong and never despairs, and if you eat nettle, you’ll become the same.

  My back soaked up the earth’s warmth and I became a worm. The rustle of the green bean forest, the resiny smell of stacked logs, Zaidé’s pine syrup in the jar, the swallows circling the hills without sound – everything quivered in the light like a gossamer web, then broke the moment I woke up, with my face burned and the sun gone.

  At night, I sank into my iron-framed bed under a duvet. The nights were cold and the Gypsies’ dogs howled. I felt the black-and-white beginnings of the river, their veins branching off under the skin of the mountain, the yin-yang whose wholeness is the Mesta. Black Mesta, White Mesta. Black pine, white pine. Black fir, white fir.

  A single star above the hill looked like Venus but it was in the wrong place.

  There was something constantly on the verge of manifesting here, like an unfolding bud. The mountain was saying something. I tuned in. I was inside a circle, a kind of ouroboros where the mouth and the tail meet. Discovery and sunlight filled each day, then at night, the mountain closed shut and everything felt remote, prehistoric. As if everything was yet to come.

  The Arabic al-kimia borrowed the word from Greek and Greek had borrowed it from the Egyptian kemi, meaning black or black earth. That was the fertile soil of the Nile. I inhaled the fertile soil of Mesta. Underneath my bed was the great city of mycelium. Above me was the crystal palace of the mountain.

  I almost knew how Zosimos of Panopolis felt when he had his alchemical visions in Egypt. He became the homunculus sacrificed in elemental processes in the divine laboratory. He’d wake up and exclaim to himself:

  Is this not the composition of water?

  Fire?

  Earth?

  Then he’d dream again. The ouroboros eats its own tail and gives birth to itself.

  Zosimos was tormented because of his love for his student Theosebeia. And he transmuted his desire into discoveries that became conversations with her. She asked him tough questions in a philosophical dialogue. Like the homunculus, he had to die and be born again from the ashes of his personal passion. Sufi poets called this the search for the Beloved.

  Everything you love dies but returns in another form.

  One night I had a fever. Was it the virus? Would I stay forever in the grave of Black Mesta where nobody was afraid of death because they were death’s familiars, just as the black cat is the familiar of the witch? Shivering under the duvet, racked with aches and loneliness, I dreamt that a disembodied voice said to me:

  ‘Wow, there’s a lot of pain here. But you’ll be all right.’

  I know it’s Alish because there’s no mistaking his rough voice. And I know he means not just my achy neck, my fever, my quest for how best to live and best to die – but everybody’s.

  Mycelium

  ‘You walk past a tree and there’s no mushroom. Two hours later, you walk past it again and – mushroom!’ said the shy mushroomer in an oilskin jacket on the second evening, in answer to my question. ‘And it’s big! What the hell?’

  ‘They pop up behind your back,’ grinned the skinny man.

  ‘Aye, they’re clever.’

  ‘Mushroom knows things that we don’t know,’ said the skinny man.

  ‘When it rains in the evening, mushroom will be big.’

  ‘The best median temperature for mushroom is 12–13 degrees Celsius.’

  ‘You know how you identify the good one from the poisonous? By the gills.’

  ‘Rings around the stem are bad news. Red spots means either poisonous or hallucinogenic.’

  ‘Most people who die of mushroom poisoning are mushroomers.’

  ‘If I don’t recognise it, I treat it as poisonous.’

  ‘The cep is heavy because it’s full of wood.’

  ‘It tastes heavy too. Like meat. I can’t eat them.’

  ‘I prefer chanterelles.’

  ‘The cep grows till first snow. It wants to grow.’

  ‘Just think about it. Underneath our world is another world. Mycelium.’