The next morning, when it was time to go to church for the rite of anointing, Tichon was called. For a long time he was vainly sought; he had disappeared, leaving no trace behind him. Had he vanished into space?
CHAPTER III
Tradition says that the Apostle Andrew, who had come from Kiev to Novgorod, crossed in a boat to the island Varlaam, in the Lake Ládoga, and planted there a stone cross. And long before the conversion of Russia to Christianity, two monks, St. Sergius and St. Herman, came to Russia from the Orient and founded a monastery on the Isle of Varlaam.
And from that day the Christian faith gleamed in the North, like a holy lamp in the arctic midnight gloom.
The Swedes, on taking possession of Lake Ládoga, several times destroyed the monastery. In 1611 they razed it to the ground. For a century the isle remained abandoned. In 1715 Tsar Peter ordered the reconstruction of the monastery. A small wooden church was built over the tombs of St. Sergius and St. Herman in honour of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, a few humble cells were erected around it, to which monks from the Kirilo Beloserski Monastery were transferred. The light of the Christian faith was lit anew. According to prophesy it would remain there until the Second Coming.
Tichon escaped from Petersburg in the company of a monk belonging to the sect of the Runners.
The Runners taught that true believers, in order to escape Antichrist, should flee from town to town, village to village, unto the ends of the earth. The monk invited Tichon to follow him to an unknown kingdom, Oponskoye. This kingdom consisted of seventy islands on the “White Waters,” where, in its one hundred and seventy-nine churches of the Assyrian tongue, the Old Faith was supposed to have remained intact. It lay beyond Gog and Magog at the ends of the earth, where the sun rose. “With God’s help we shall reach it walking, in ten years,” said the monk.
Tichon had no strict belief in the existence of this Oponskoye kingdom, but he went with the Runner; it was a matter of indifference to him where and with whom he went.