The oldest of the mark-scars had crept, tagging along with the bark, up to some six meters above the ground. Cut a couple of centuries ago, the upper marks got blurred and distended by the inaudible flow of time into obscure, unreadable, contours over the uneven ripples in the gray bark that pulled the labor lost up, into inevitable oblivion…
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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…