I didn’t go back retracing the route which two days earlier brought me to the famous tree. Instead, my intention was to follow the ridge of the toombs (so in Karabakh they call the rounded mountains stretching in wavy chains, under the blanket of grass and woods, to tell them from giant lehrs pricking the sky with their raw rocky tors of peaks) by which stratagem I would bypass climbing all the way down to the valley of Karmir-Bazaar and trudging back up the highway to the pass in the vicinity of the Sarushen village.
That’s why I took a well nigh indiscernible trail tilting up the steep to the right. I did not know whether my plan was feasible at all but if there’s a trail it would eventually bring you someplace, right? And I walked on along it, inhaling sweet fragrance from the infinite varieties of mountain verdure, admiring the fixed waves of merrily green toombs flooded with the sunshine, looking forward to the delight from the breathtaking vistas which would unfurl from atop the ridge…
And it turned out just so—a view surpassing the most dainty epithets by Bunin-and-Turgenev as well as the subtlest brush strokes in Ayvazovsky-and-Sarian’s pictures—and, against that terrific background, the trail flowed into a narrow road coming up from nowhere to the next toomb from whose wood, there were descending, dwindled to specks by the distance, a couple of horses, two men, and a dog.
We met in ten minutes. The horses dragged three-to-four-meter-long trunks of young trees cinched with their thicker ends onto the backs of beasts of burden; the loose tops, peeled of the bark already, kept scratching and sweeping the scorched stony road. Two boys and a dog escorted the firewood for keeping their homes warm next winter…
Entering the wood, I met another party of loggers; they were three horses, and three men, and no dog. We exchanged greetings and I asked if there was a way to reach Sarushen if moving from top to top in the chain of toombs.
The woodchopper in a red shirt sun-bleached by the decade it weathered—a well match to the drum-tight skin in his face presenting his skull structure in detail—replied he been heard of such a trail but never tried himself, and that after another three hundred meters I would meet a one-eyed old man cutting wood up there, who should certainly know. I walked as far as I was told to, then another three or five hundred meters, but never heard an ax; the old man was, probably, enjoying a snack break combined with a good smoke and sound nap…
Before reaching the top of the toomb, the road split into multiple paths. I picked the one of a more promising width but soon it just gave out as if it never was there at all. A pathless mountain wood stood around where you can’t walk without grabbing at the tree trunks—trunkhanging, a thoroughly tiresome recreational activity, it must be confessed. I omitted climbing the summit in an attempt to outflank it while looking for a passage to the following toomb in the ridge.
Suddenly, there cropped up the feeling of some odd change. The sounds of summer wood died away, the daylight dimmed into a weird twilight dissolving the sunlit patches between the bushes and on the tree trunks. What’s up, man? A flash-mob of clouds in the sky?
It took a couple of puzzled looks around to get it—instead of lofty giants interspersing diverse undergrowth I was surrounded by frequent trunks of peers whose crowns interlocked at four to five meters above the ground into a dense mass of foliage impenetrable for the sun, and it was their joint shade that gave the air that grim uncanny touch.
Something made me look back and eye-contact the beastly intent stare… A jackal? Dog? … ah, none… look at this brush of a tail… a fox no doubt… or maybe a vixen… and surely a young one, never met hunters yet…
“Hi, Fox. I’m not Prince. I am not young. Go your way.”
I moved on, dodging the long web-threads, bypassing and sometimes scrambling through the prickly brier; the fox followed. Who invented the bullshit as if animals cannot withstand your fixed look and have to turn their eyes away? Faking quack!.
And so went we on. Occasionally, I addressed him with one or another conversational clue but he never picked gossip. At one point, I took off my haversack and opened it to angle and throw him a piece of bread.
At first, he didn’t seem to know how to approach it but then wolfed the treat down, and quite efficiently too, keeping me all the time under his most vigilant surveillance. Considering the donor for a potential prey? Easy, schemer, we don’t need no hurry… And only when between the trees ahead there stretched a sunlit clearing, he began to cast evasive looks behind himself and soon blend into the woodwork. Fare thee well, Young Fox from the young forest…
I went out into the clearing to realize that I had almost completed a rough circle about the summit never finding the passage over to the next toomb. A couple of decayed roofs peeped from under the distant cliffs. Enough was enough, fed up with the search for an imaginary trail running along the ridge, I switched over to looking for a way to reach the ghost village of Skhtorashen.
The steep footpath soon showed up and brought me to an abandoned orchard of hulking Mulberry trees from where I proceeded to the village spring of delicious water superior to that back by the long-liver Plane.
Then I walked the thirty-meter-long street of two or three houses lost under the crashing overgrowth of blackberry bushes. The cobblestoned street cut abruptly replaced by a barely discernible trail tilting down the slope which faced the Karmir-Bazaar valley.
(… the village of Skhtorashen was deserted before the Karabakh war, that’s why the houses were not burned down and though barred by blackberry still keep their rotten roofs up.
The village, like many others, got killed by the dimwit decision of the Soviet Leadership on the Resettlement of Population from High Mountainous Areas to lower places. The USSR, over its seventies by that time, was sinking into senile dotage because political systems tend to follow the life circle of man, their creator.
Servile authorities of the then Mountainous Karabakh Autonomous Region, along with the like polities in other Caucasian regions obeyed loose-brain Big Brother’s injunction and finished off more than one village.
I mean, with all due respect to septuagenarians I’d rather skip entering their venerable funny club… )
On the way down the slope, like an incurable bolshie, I made two more attempts at finding at least a minor shortcut, yet both deviations were blocked by deep gorges and sheer cliffs, so the highway met me exactly where I left it two days before, near “The Old Plane Diner”.
(… gently is a docile kid led ahead by fate, while stubborn brats are dragged along gripped at their forelock to unavoidably get to their destination… )
After several turns in the smooth serpentine, the highway took a beeline to the pass out from the outspread valley of Karmir-Bazaar.
Up the tilted roadside I trudged along through the repulsive yet somehow fetching stench of the sun-thawed asphalt. Panting, sweating, plodding ahead, I had to move the haversack straps to different positions over my shoulders more and more often, ridiculously often, but all the same at any place after a few steps they dug into the flesh anew and hurt to the very bone. The salt of sweat ate into the eyes that ceased their joyous frisking around to catch a beautiful view or 2, the dull weary gaze crawled along the coarse asphalt under the worn army boots stomping my shadow, which began to gradually grow longer. And yet, at times my eyes took the liberty of casting wishful glances uphill seeking some shady tree nearby the highway, though I knew perfectly well there was not a single such one all the way up to the pass top.
Once or twice, I left the asphalt to slacken thirst with blackberries from the bushes below the road shoulder, looks like this year we’re facing the blackberry crop failure or else it was the stretch of barren bushes ‘cause I hate to be a bearer of bad tidings… And again my heavy boots were tramping uphill along the steady tilt…