The monastery is attached to St. Michael’s church through a series of inner gardens, tucked in between tropical pine trees on a branching street. Not too far from the Square. Most of them are closed off to the general public. But they'll open their gates to the rambling and wandering ones run off from the Holygrail. I told Zosi this story when I first met him in the city. When it had him firmly in its cruel mystic grasp and he was ready to give up.

  I can’t really say whether it’s a true story or not. The veil of myth will twist it that way. And Zosi’s looked through the monastery archives and he hasn’t found any proof. But I like to believe it’s what made him see through the city’s schemes and what makes him go out into the desert. He thinks it over and over in his mind - at night, when he looks out the window of his room. He'll stare out into the darkness, pretending he sees more than the outline of the mountains. He’ll light one of his secret cigarettes or snuck-in wine bottles and he’ll get angry. He’ll question his understanding of the transcendental and he’ll hate the vanity in the paleness of his own eyes.

  I know the story doesn’t leave his mind. Not when he tries to gather his words for prayer nor when he’s labouring through the inner gardens. Maybe you've heard it before, too. In different threads and nuances as it spilled into the world.

  The story goes, an old woman had a dream and left her life behind because she was called. By the dust and the wind and the far-away aridity.

  By the voices of the desert and the wailing rock.

  It wailed because of the riddle it held captive in its innards. The woman walked for days but the sun didn’t seem to leave its place in the sky. She walked and it seemed she heard sea waves crashing and the whistling cool breeze of a Northern forest. She walked and the subtle chill of winter brushed by her shoulder. And when the heated rock burned through to her feet and there were palm trees overhead, when winter was just behind with a frozen threat and the sea washed its salt-foam waves up to her ankles, she knew it was the crossroad and she struck the rock there.

  And the desert spirits finally sighed and the spring water flowed out – at first, as a weak trickle. They were silent for a while as she toiled, managing to dig a narrow tunnel in, just enough to crawl through on bended knees. Then, the rock just gave way and crumbled and let her in to see. Above the entrance, a carved alphabet she couldn’t read. The sun finally set and in the pitch-black, matches kept watch one by one as they painfully burned down to her fingers. In the short span of golden luminosity, she saw the faces on the walls.

  Faded and chipped in places – the faces of the gods. In crowns of flowers, their fiery locks and bright appearances. At times, even, formless beings, painted like smoke. At times, she didn’t know what her eyes were taking in. At the very top, a pair of large wings, now just ghostly white things of great length, framed the altar. And around the cave, a path was painted – a recounting of steps. A rewinding of events.

  She left the cave, exhausted after days and days of work, and laid down on the warm rock beside the clinking of insect feet and the scorpions. She slept and dreamed of the wings. They covered up most of the night sky, though sky it wasn’t really, more void-like so she couldn’t tell. But she was aware of her surroundings. She felt the sweat gathered on her forehead and the taste of dust in her mouth. She followed the wings with her careful gaze and they were never-ending. They went on and on – vast over space and motionless in time. Clear but immaterial - their light both perceivable and incomprehensible. A contradiction. A reconciliation of opposites.

  No voice spoke to her, so she didn’t hear it. But her mind understood.

    “If you dig further, you’ll find the resting place of someone who held me very dear. But you will not find her. There are other caves in these mountains and there live her disciples and they’re thousands and thousands of years old.”

  When she opened her eyes, they were full of tears and time finally moved into dawn and it was gentle on her - dyed in a sweep of pastels, and the sun was red at the edge of the horizon. Her hands grasped at young grass and all around her, flowers and trees and shrubbery had bloomed into vivid greens. She marvelled at the words entwined with her thoughts and the spirits settled, finally.

  When she opened the tomb, she knew wisdom was in the desert and she wouldn’t disturb it but she’d bring it water once in a while, gathered there in the joining of her palms, when it tired from wandering. She stayed in the mouth of the cave. She stayed and walked with forms born out of the singularity. She gradually lost her heart and her thoughts and she turned weightless. The perpetuity of the old ones became her vigil and she almost disappeared.

  Others were called on, again and again, because the wailing rock grew lonely and it always would.

  I don’t know if anything haunts me, leaves me livid and filled with awe, more than the first moments, the first years of consciousness, when divinity had no shape. When we had minds but no words and no imagination. Or early concepts of a different nature. Fears throats couldn't say but scream. What scares me more than the cutting psychology and the Dionysian frenzy of worship is its origin. What’s sweeter and more treacherous than the obsessive and maniacal love of a god?