On the way to this church, not far from the mouth of the cave, stands a lonely little cemetery, filled with crosses of wood. Here the monks who have lived out their solitary lives are finally laid to eternal rest. Dark are those crosses, standing like spectres against the naked rock. The summer suns scorch them, the winds of autumn beat them about, and ofttimes the snows of winter fell them to the ground. But in spring-time early crocuses and delicate anemones cluster around them, gathering in fragrant bunches about their feet.
Meseems that, in spite of its solitude, it would not be sad to be buried in such a spot....
*
*—*
Once I was riding through the melting snow. The road I was following, like all Rumanian roads, was long, long, endlessly long, dwindling away in the distance, becoming one with the colourless sky.
It was a day of depression, a day of thaw, when the world is at its worst.
All around me the flat plains lay waiting for something that did not come. The landscape appeared to be without horizon, to possess no frontiers: all was dully uniform, without life, without light, without joy. Silence lay over the earth—silence and dismal repose.
With loose reins and hanging heads my horse and I trudged along through the slush. We were going nowhere in particular; a sort of torpor of indifference had come over us, well in keeping with the melancholy of the day.
A damp fog hung like a faded veil close over the earth; it was not a dense fog, but wavered about like steam.
