Roumeli Read Online Free PDF

egg-cups, dishes, elegant waisted ewers with curling spouts, knives, loaves of bread and, scattered here and there, large white radishes still trailing their bright green leaves. The company at the Mystic Feast, clad in gay togas and tunics of red, white, green and lilac, turn to each other in animated discourse with light-hearted gestures. The atmosphere is that of a symposium or a banquet from the Decameron.
    I returned to the main church once more, catching a glimpse on the way of Bessarion kindling a fire of thorns in the sooty depths of the kitchen. A blaze lit up the lenses of his spectacles and the minute bronze saucepans for Turkish coffee with which he was busy. Beyond, over the lintel of the outer door of the narthex, the souls of the dead were being weighed in great painted scales. On one side, the righteous were conducted to paradise by angels. They floated heavenward on rafts of cloud, and the interlock of their haloes receded like the scales of a goldfish. But on the other side, black-winged fiends were leading the damned away haltered and hand-cuffed, and hurling them into a terrible flaming gyre. This conflagration, peopled with prelates and emperors, swirled them into the shark-toothed mouth of a gigantic, glassy-eyed and swine-snouted monster. Giant dolphins and herrings and carp, each one with human limbs sticking out of its mouth, furrowed a stormy sea in the background. Below were four compartments. In the first, the bodies of the writhing victims crawled with small white objects: “The worm that dieth not,” the legend read. The second was filled with tearful heads, their teeth bared and browsracked with anguish: it was called “Weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Naked figures huddled despairing in a penumbral cellar in the third: this was Tartarus. In the fourth, labelled “The Outer Darkness,” the vague shapes of the lost ones were just outlined in a rectangle of murk.
    Something pressed my shoulder. Looking round, I saw the great horny hand of the abbot resting there and, above and beyond it, his eye-brows raised high. “There you are,” he observed severely, “Hell” (he pointed at both in turn) “and Heaven.” His index-finger was aimed at the ascending airborne swarm. “Let’s hope that’s where you go.” As he turned towards the stairs, I thought I could divine the ghost of a wink. “Up we go,” the abbot continued, “Bessarion’s ready with the coffee.” We halted half-way up the stairs. In my preoccupation with the frescoes I had forgotten to look down into the gulf. The lower world was hidden beneath a snowy mass of cloud that rose in a solid waste to the edge of the parapet. Only the monasteries emerged like outposts in a Polar wilderness, as if one could cross the half-mile to the Transfiguration on snow-shoes. The bridge, the tiles and the rotunda of St. Barbara were just visible. The rest was snowed under. St. Stephen and Holy Trinity rode high on the pale billows, and a bell sounded over the intervening distance like the signal of an ice-bound ship in distress. Towering high above this white desert, the giant blue monolith next to St. Barlaam was hooped with three perfect smoke-rings of cloud.
    Distances between the monasteries are not so great as they appear from the plain. In half an hour the winding pathway from the foot of St. Barlaam led us down to a shallow saddle, then up a steep hill opposite and under some plane trees to the foot of the Transfiguration. Three-quarters of the way up the rock ofthe monastery’s pedestal, the cliff curves slightly backwards from the perpendicular and a narrow bastion of masonry, growing in thickness as the mountainside recedes, climbs for a hundred feet so that its platform may overhang the pathway in a clear drop. The rotting remains of a ladder, jointed every few yards, hung from a hole under the jut of the monastery. Before the steps were cut, this precarious