But I will never forget this happy meadow of St John’s wort.

  Water dripping off me and the plants, I stopped to pick a few, and in the rain-and-sunshine all was blurred. When my hand reached for the flower, I didn’t know if the flower was coming to me, or I was going to it.

  As we approached Dry Lochen, feet squelching in boots, I heard a continuous ringing of little bells, like giggles. At first I thought it was women laughing somewhere ahead of us, or behind. But there was no one on the path. The last hikers we’d seen were on Djano Peak, before the fog.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ I asked Bimo.

  ‘Yep. Like samodivi laughing,’ he said. ‘Creepy.’

  ‘Raindrops hitting the needles of dwarf pine and juniper,’ Metko said.

  The rain eased and we stopped at Dry Lochen, the lowest of the lakes at just under 2,000 metres, where Ahmed and his brother had built a four-spout fountain and connected it to a spring by digging a kilometre of earth by hand. In memory of his brother’s wife.

  TO AVA

  1965–2015

  I love these lonely fountains that speak of the brevity of our personal lives, of asphodel meadows and meadows of St John’s wort.

  A small shepherdess in red shalvars and blue mantle appeared out of the dwarf pine wood. She held a plastic raincoat over her head. I saw her scattered herd.

  ‘Hey,’ she smiled, recognising us. ‘Where have you wet chooks been?’

  ‘To Godless and back,’ we said, hoping to impress her.

  ‘A fine thing too,’ she said, unimpressed. ‘Back in the day, Metya took milk on horseback from here to Bezbog.’

  ‘Wow,’ Bimo said. ‘My dream job is to be a shepherd. So I don’t have to deal with people and rumour.’

  ‘How would you like to sleep with the wolves?’ I said.

  He laughed. But it was my fantasy too.

  On the shepherdess’s back was a sadilka, for herbs and other things. ‘Cos you never know what you’ll find when you’re out on pasture,’ she said.

  Fatma and Metya had 300 sheep and milked them manually. He’d bought a brand-new Jeep, but continued to ride up here on horseback. He was seventy.

  Just before dark, we reached the private chalet built by Ahmed and his brother. It was the only house in this highland area called The Meadow – a series of wild pastures and pine forests. The rain stopped and everything looked laundered. I went outside after changing my clothes. I ached everywhere. We could stay the night in the two-room chalet with a big fireplace and a kitchen, but Ahmed had to milk his cow.

  At the other end of the meadow, a tall skinny man suddenly appeared out of the woods and walked to a mare and her foal, and lay down near them. He lay on his side – the age-old posture of the shepherd at rest. He was barefoot. The mare sniffed his face. Then a rush among the pines – sheep, goats, Karakachan dogs. Fatma walked past the chalet, smiling – and knitting – as she walked. Later I learned that Fatma’s father was killed during the changing of the names, when she was a young woman.

  ‘Tired?’ she said. ‘You’ll sleep well.’

  ‘Aaaya! Eeeeeey-ya, eeeeey-ya, ya ya ya ya!’ shouted the man with the mare, now standing, a voice like a megaphone, and the forest cantoed with him. The sheep ran. They were gathering the flock in a pen for the night, one meadow down. Then they were gone and only the horses remained.

  Ahmed’s son came to pick us up and I was grateful for his off-road vehicle. Back in the Birches Hotel, I slept at the bottom of my forest-well, this time without dreams.

  In the morning, I was spreading oregano on the table by Fatmé’s fountain when the tall skinny man materialised from the forest, moving past me so fast I almost didn’t see him, just as I hadn’t heard him.

  ‘Is there enough oregano?’ he smiled, not meeting my eye.

  He was dirt-streaked with sweat and walked on without missing a beat. He wore patched-up trousers from tweed and a filthy sleeveless top. He moved like he was wired to a higher voltage. The atmosphere became static as after a storm. A nutter, or maybe the last sane one. I recognised him from last night on the Meadow. He’d helped Fatma round up the sheep and slept up there.

  A rope was wound around his shoulder and arm, and he carried a small axe, the head in his palm, handle down. He looked like an animal tamer. This could only be the horseman.

  All afternoon, his voice rumbled like a river while he worked on the house roof with Shefket. He didn’t shut up once. In the evening, Shefket told me that Emin had gone home but could meet me here tomorrow. I was busy with Gyulten tomorrow.

  ‘Emin is the last of the Mohicans,’ said Shefket. ‘Uneducated, but no one knows this mountain like him.’

  Shefket gave me a handful of pods. Tagetes is a label given by Linnaeus and doesn’t say much about marigold, but Mary’s gold does.

  ‘Plant them in Scotland so you don’t forget us. Have you met the puppies?’

  I walked in the woods with four small Karakachan dogs that would come up to my thigh in a couple of years. They were elated. They sniffed every flower and chewed things, they ran ahead fast, then ran back, they tumbled in the grooves made by off-road vehicles, climbed out again, and each had a different expression on its little face.

  We are not what we are. Our tragedy is that we don’t even know it. The world is not what we think it is. It is fathomlessly alive. None of us is a single entity, we are many-formed, polytropos. Everywhere, all the time.

  There is a scene in Plant Hunting in Europe that moved me unexpectedly:

  ‘I had a curious experience in Cyprus,’ writes the photographer. ‘I had discovered the plant for the first time, and was anxious to get a specimen and began to dig round it with my trowel; soon quite a crowd of little boys collected watching the proceedings. When I thought I had sufficiently loosened the roots, I began to pull on the plant, immediately there was an uproar, I had no notion what they were saying for they spoke in Greek, but the eldest of the boys forcibly pushed me from the plant and by signs indicated that he was fetching something and ran off to a cottage near by to return with a mattock; he then proceeded to hack the plant out and presented it to me. Although unable to understand what the children said, I am sure their behaviour was the result of belief in the medieval legend, which has been handed down all these years.’

  I saw him struggling on that bright mountain where oregano grows, and mandrake, and children, and I knew how he felt. Who doesn’t? Our entire human drama is summed up in that scene.

  In that scene, we have a monomaniac, a man like an island, split from his own imaginatio, unable to speak with children or plants, surrounded by wonder he desires enough to climb peaks and vales, cross meadows of asphodel and meadows of St John’s wort, trowel in hand and Latin dictionary in pocket, roaming the Earth’s valley in search of a rare flower, and once he has found it, he kills it on the spot.

  Anima mundi

  European alchemists called it the quinta essentia, the fifth element. Plato called it the soul and intelligence of the world. The soul of the world is an animating force that runs through all living things in a web of interconnection. The world-as-a-machine does not have a soul. To reconnect with the fifth element, you must perceive the world-as-garden. This is the invitation of the Gaia paradigm – to step out of our mechanical isolation and step into a world of wonder.

  When the ecopsychologists of the 1960s realised that ‘the core of the mind is the ecological unconscious’ they described in modern language the ensouled universe in which Gaia is mysteriously but undeniably a player.

  ‘There is a certain truth in natural things which is not seen with the outward eye, but is perceived by the mind alone, and of this the philosophers have had experience, and have ascertained that its virtue is such that it performs miracles,’ wrote a fifteenth-century Belgian alchemist. I found this in Carl Jung’s Aion, an enquiry into the phenomenology of the whole self. Sometimes, the world’s soul is winged like a bird. Sometimes, it is spherical, like the metaphysical fish first mentioned in an alchemical text: ‘There is in the sea a round fish.’ Jung calls it the alchemical fish. This spherical creature from the primordial ocean stands for the dragon’s lapis, or philosopher’s stone, or al-iksir. It is both inside and outside of the self.

  It is supposed that the outward eye cannot see any of this. But there are places where the eye becomes inward and the soul of the world becomes outward. Places where something is collectively alchemised. The bottom of the ocean and the desert exist at the same time in the same place. There, the soul of the world roams free.

  Pilgrims

  Gyulten had been telling me about a place called Gold Leaf, with its millennial sycamore that grants wishes, and its resident spirit of one Stoyna who still appears in local people’s dreams when they are in need. Stoyna had granted Gyulten’s previous wish and she wanted to ask again.

  Stoyna was connected to another seer nearby: Vanga. The two women had died fifty years apart, but their similarities were striking. Both drifted here along tributaries of the Struma River. One from the south, the other from the west. Both were born into poverty and war and suffered misfortune in childhood that left them blind. Their blindness led to an acceleration of their psychic gift.

  ‘We can visit both, kill two birds with one stone,’ said Gyulten.

  Vanga died in the 1990s, but Rupité where she lived was still visited by pilgrims, fans and the curious. I’d heard that Gold Leaf and Rupité had quite the atmosphere.

  ‘It’s not far,’ Gyulten said. ‘It’s on the other side of Pirin.’

  There was just one road that linked the sister valleys of Mesta and Struma. To Gyulten it was not far, but to me it looked like a pretty long way over the saddle and it was my first time too.

  Gyulten’s friend Sanusha joined us. Sanusha owned a grocery shop in The Birches and did well with it. Sanusha had a guileless face ready to welcome you as you were.

  ‘It’s being in the shop,’ she said. ‘You get to know people. Everybody has some pain.’

  ‘We get on because she’s not a gossip,’ Gyulten said.

  ‘When you walked in the other day,’ Sanusha said, ‘I knew you were one of the good ones. And now you’re driving us all the way to Stoyna!’

  ‘And Vanga,’ Gyulten clarified.

  Like me, Sanusha hadn’t been to Gold Leaf or Rupité. She had brought water for everyone and snacks from her shop. Then she handed me a bag full of gifts. Inside the bag was a pair of velvet shalvars made from fabric imported from India, with midnight flowers against a golden-yellow field like the sunflowers of the valley. And a round apron with silver-thread embroidery on a violet background, a white cardigan knitted with one needle and patterned hand-knitted socks. She and her mother had crafted it all, many years ago, for her dowry. Women here had large dowries, entire households of stuff. Outfits, blankets, kilims, furniture throws, cushions, towels, enough to fit out an entire life and more. Out of their treasure chests, they gave choice gifts to other women. The Pomaks are some of the last to uphold the homemade dowry and its sharing with the sisterhood.

  Gyulten had gifted me a pair of loose, flower-printed trousers in Arabian blue with a threaded belt, cowboy style. They were from the rhyming sister village of Laznitsa. The shalvars of Mesta are like yoga slacks, but encoded with meaning. You could tell a woman’s birthplace from the patterning of her shalvars. Even the three rhyming villages had different colour codes and Ribnovo of the weddings was known as ‘pink pants’. Wearing shalvars was like wearing an atlas. I wore these today – even if Gyulten and Sanusha chose to wear jeans and smart shirts. The Pomak trousers signalled difference in places without Muslims and today, we were going to such places.

  We drove through the city in the valley and began the climb to the saddle of Papaz Chair. Along the high road, signs pointed to forest chapels. The stereo played a yoga mix and Sanusha dozed off in the back. It was a still September day dripping with birdsong. The road was empty. The whole world felt empty. We could hear the bells of sheep and goats. A Karakachan dog lay in the shade of a tree. One of its ears was missing.

  ‘They cut them off when they’re puppies,’ Gyulten said and laughed at my shock. ‘To make them mean.’

  She grew up with this. This was her old stomping ground. Shepherding dogs were there to protect the flock from wolves and thieves.

  ‘It was a very basic life, but free,’ Gyulten said. ‘Always an open horizon. Like this, like what you see now. The nights were so full of stars, you can’t imagine. The stars keep you company and you’re never alone.’

  We passed over the saddle of Papaz Chair. Majestic panoramas unfolded fast, snatching my breath. Western Pirin and the Struma Valley opened up. The peaks and valleys ahead were so blue and still they brought tears to your eyes. It was like driving into infinity.

  Papaz Chair was also called Popovi Livadi and both meant The Priest’s Meadows. Papaz was a Greek word, reflecting the long-standing presence of Karakachans. The Karakachans were nomadic shepherds, Greek- and Bulgarian-speaking, who travelled seasonally with their flocks between Pirin and Rhodope, and the Aegean Plains. Just as Gyulten’s parents had travelled between these highlands and the warm basin of Struma.

  Before this road blasted its way in the last century, there were entire highland populations: shepherds; monastic communities; forest workers.

  The Monk, Priest’s Meadows, Karakachan Church, the place names said it all. A Bektashi monastery and a church had stood on Papaz Chair, but the twentieth century had wrecked them all, even at the top of the mountain, even without a proper road.

  ‘Way over there is Eagle Reserve. And Chemerika Meadows,’ said Gyulten. ‘Chemerika makes your hair strong. If you come across it, get yourself some roots just in case.’

  False hellebore again! After she told me this, I bought some roots of false hellebore and boiled it with burdock root, because my hair was in fact falling out – it happens to people with thyroid problems. The results were instant. After two rinses, the problem stopped. But before I made my rinse, I recalled Rocky’s sniffing ways and put my face in the bag of dried roots. To get to know the plant. I only recalled what Metko said about it when I was seized by uncontrollable sneezing. It didn’t stop all day and drove me mad.

  Respect to false hellebore, a plant that has the last laugh!

  ‘I love the shadiness of this road,’ Gyulten beamed.

  After the mountain pass, we entered the climate zone of the Struma basin. It was warm, lush. Mixed forests formed tunnels over the road. We stopped to pick sour cherries and plums. The odd broken village – overgrown handsome houses, gutted streets, as after an exodus. Men and women sat with dogs outside ruined municipal buildings.

  ‘They cultivated peanuts here,’ Gyulten’s voice choked, though she was not one for wistfulness. ‘Grapes, hazelnuts, peaches, lemon trees, olives, and figs. And afiyon. You could walk along this road and fill your belly all year round.’

  Afiyon: poppy seeds. The names of villages bore their fruitful past. And potential future: Cherry Village; Village of the Peppers; The Onions; The Vineyard; Vinograd (Wine Town). There was no Opium Village, but it was a safe guess that the communist state had operated a neat opium economy, for export.

  Gyulten liked to return here.

  ‘I love this side of Pirin,’ she said, ‘I feel free here. Look!’

  I pulled over. It was the cooperative farm where her family had spent many winters. The small house was gutted. A curtain hung over a broken window, the kitchen of her childhood. The pen where the animals had lived was disused, though in the hills above was a flock of goats.

  Sanusha woke up and spotted a fig tree, and we picked a bagful of leaves.

  ‘You dry them and they make delicious tea,’ said Gyulten.

  ‘Regulates the blood sugar,’ Sanusha gave me the whole bag.

  ‘See that bridge,’ Gyulten pointed to an Ottoman bridge over a tributary, ‘it’s where I slept with my passport in my pocket the night I ran away from home. My folks were thrashing us so much, I couldn’t take it and made a runner for the border!’

  She’d been ten years old. She ran to the Village of Peppers, which still has the best red peppers and was the last before the border, but it was perched on a canyon and bristling with border soldiers. She turned back. Border soldiers found her under the bridge and brought her home, in time for the next thrashing.

  ‘I was a wild one even then!’ Gyulten laughed her hoarse laugh.

  Sanusha, who’d never been a wild one, shook her head in awe. What impressed me was that Gyulten chose to love her childhood. When I sip the infusion of fig leaf, her bitter-sweet memories of the Struma Valley mix with my own, seep into my blood and perhaps even lower its sugar.

  To get to Gold Leaf, we came off the main road and followed a sandy dirt-road. The landscape changed, like a stage curtain lifting. From a shady forest to an open semi-desert.

  Gold Leaf (population: 7) had emptied after the demise of the tobacco industry that had been its raison d’être. It lay in a plateau overlooked by a ridge of sandstone pyramids called mels. Rain and wind sculpted them without cease.

  The valley of the mels was bleached and deeply strange, an unexpected piece of biblical desert. In the shimmering heat ahead, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see cloaked pilgrims with bare feet or ghostly horsemen riding towards us like a desert storm.

  Beyond the white mels rose more blue peaks. I felt far from anything familiar.

  ‘I’ve never been to a place like this,’ Sanusha said, awakening from her nap again.

  ‘This is my heaven,’ Gyulten said. ‘See those mels? We used to climb them and look for wild partridge eggs. You could get twenty in a nest!’

  They were 100 metres high, with crumbly ridges. I would have never been allowed to climb them and didn’t see any kids climbing them now. We passed the derelict houses of Gold Leaf. The afternoon heat flattened all with its 44 degrees. Birdsong stopped and sound was muffled as on the bottom of a sandy ocean. I was behind the wheel with my foot on the accelerator, but time stood still. There was nowhere further to go.