Translation:The High Mountains/47
Phanis had rested a while below the fir tree; he wanted to cut a stick.
From where he was, he looked in the distance as ever. He saw the overhanging rocky slopes, the pine tree plantations and the upright fir tree, and then he felt a strong urge to go somewhere else; to see new places far away up high.
For some days he has been thinking about going up to a very high spot to gaze at the sun plunging into the sea.
“What can we see from that rock standing up there? Maybe the sea, he said to himself... maybe towns, villages with their bell towers... What a strange rock! How it stands erect! Has anyone already climbed up there?”
Phanis is going to climb up there.
At the time when the others called him, he was far away. He was moving forward, further and further on.
If someone had seen him, he would have wondered: “Where's that child going all alone?”
On the way, Phanis looked at nothing. He didn't pay attention to trees, or to the green lizards, looking as if they'd been freshly painted, who buried themselves under the bushes.
A blackbird shiny black, with its yellow beak, came to perch on a branch in front of him. Another time what joy it would have been for Phanis! How he would have wanted to have it in a cage! Now he hardly looked at it.
“I'm going up to the summit, he thought. I'm going to see the sun go down. That'll be wonderful... there will be red clouds with gold lining. There will also be distant mountains; there'll be the sea too... and perhaps boats”.
As he was imagining all that, he lost his way. It happened just like the other time when he had gone to the Vlachs.
The path he was following had disappeared, he couldn't make it out. He would have needed a herd of goats to pass through there.
He tried to find the way to the right and left but he found only undergrowth, no path.
Should he still go on? He had walked very far. He looked attentively to find a path somewhere else. And as he didn't find one, he carried on, determined, going down the hillside in order to reach the bottom of this one.
“The hill slope is bound to bring me to the foot of the rock”, he thought.
In fact, he came down into a vale. From there he quickly found himself on the opposite slope, on which was standing the uprght rock.
“Now there's nothing to stop me, he thought. I'll go up this way.”
From afar he would have seen things differently, and indeed totally differently.
He found himself right at the foot of the rock and he could climb halfway up.
But beyond that? Large stones, sharply vertical, as if ready to fall, encircled the rock. Phanis would have had to scale several of these. But if he managed to climb the stone, so enormous, when would he get to the top? And when would he get down?
It was then that he began to realise that he had gone really far and that it was getting late.
The sun threw a red light onto the fir trees, showing that it was late and that he should retrace his steps. To go back to the fir tree? He'd have to retrace the whole route he'd taken – climb up all he'd gone down, and go down all he'd climbed up.
However the children will surely now have left and must be looking for him all over. Maybe they'll come up here?
Phanis began to shout.
He heard nothing. “They must have returned to the mill”, he told himself, and he shouted once again:
“Costakis, Matthias... boys”.
He cocked his ear in the prevailing calm.
In the silence he heard a distant noise, a blowing, like the wind, like the water. This noise came from the other side of the rock, from down below.
Phanis moved in that direction and looked about. He saw on his left a steep and deep water gap. And below, right at the bottom, he saw a river.
He even saw that the water gushed out of a fault in the cliff, abundantly, a jet as big as the root of a tree, and it spilled over into the river. It fell in a beautiful spray, from the height of a fathom, full of energy and vigour.
Many dense green trees hid the river. And under the trees Phanis made out white houses.
Oh what luck! Here's how he's going to find some people.
He leaves without wasting any time.
He follows some paths, loses them, finds others. He jumps down the hills. He sometimes risks falling into the precipice, but joy makes him go on, light as a young goat.
He came to the plane trees and close to the water. Here it was deserted too!
His desire to see people had made him take the great white stones for the houses, which stood on the other river bank.
No, there wasn't a living soul here. What would people do in this wild place?
How the noise of the water echoed in the water gap.
And now what? Is he going to stay the night here? Or rather is he going to go looking for people? But he's very tired. He takes a break to enjoy the last rays of the day which is fading. In a short while, everything will be dark.