passed around her without a sound, their eyes the colour of wet stone, and for a moment I could not tell who was watching whom. Dionysus moved through the abandoned vineyard terraces, touching the dry vines with his fingertips and smiling so faintly that it seemed more the memory of a smile than a smile itself, while Hephaestus sat deep beneath Avgo with the Cabeiri and watched fire breathe inside the hematite. None of them forged metals any longer; they forged time. Each blow of the hammer drove one age deeper into the earth and lifted another a little nearer the light. That is why Pangaio sometimes seems younger than it is and sometimes older even than the memory of the gods. Then I met Orpheus at the springs of the Angitis. He sat alone, his lips moving as though he were singing, yet no voice came from him; only the water changed its rhythm, the trout paused in the current, the poplars ceased trembling, even the ravens above Pilaf Tepe folded their wings as though listening to a music that had grown so tired it no longer needed sound in order to exist. Then I understood that myths survived not because people remembered them but because stone kept them alive. Every rock of this mountain hides within it a god who learned to age, a human being who learned to fall silent, an animal that learned to wait, a tree that learned to descend with its roots toward fire rather than rise toward light. And the more I encounter them, the less I distinguish one from another, because slowly they all acquire the same face, the face of one who has remained so long inside time that time itself has begun to inhabit him. There, among the Angitis, Akontisma, Avgo, Nikisiani, Moustheni, Proti, Palaiochori, Messoropi, the galleries, the chestnut trees and the wet gneiss, I felt for the first time that the anguish of death had never been the anguish of disappearing but the anguish that one day Pangaio might cease to remember me, because only then would I truly die. From that day onward I began to fear oblivion more than death, because death always returns to the earth while oblivion wanders homeless, searching for bodies weary enough to inhabit. I saw it many times crossing the ridges of Pangaio like morning mist, descending slowly from Avgo toward Akontisma, touching the beeches of Moustheni, slipping among the chestnut trees of Nikisiani, drinking a little water from the Angitis and continuing toward the old galleries where the Cabeiri still work without ever lifting their eyes, because they know better than anyone that the world is held together by what people forget and not by what they remember. Every time their hammer touches the gneiss, I hear not metal but names: first those of the Edonians, then the Satrae, then the miners who disappeared without graves, then the monks who withdrew into the caves of Eikosifoinissa in search of the same God that others once sought in the veins of gold. The longer I listen to those blows, the harder it becomes to believe that ages succeed one another. They all continue to exist here, one inside the other, as fire continues to exist in hematite and water in limestone. Only human eyes are made to see one layer at a time, and that is why man is so afraid: he believes that whatever disappears from his sight ceases to exist. Pangaio loses nothing, neither the sweat that fell from the brow of the first miner, nor the prayer of the last monk, nor the footsteps of Orpheus that still echo in the ravine before reaching the Angitis, nor the tired Cloud-Gatherer sitting above Proti and rubbing a small stone with his thumb until it becomes smooth as bone, nor the Grey-Eyed One still gathering fragments of white marble from the old quarry wounds, nor Dionysus passing the abandoned terraces of Messoropi and bending to smell the soil as an old man smells the last garment of a child who has gone away, nor Bendis following the wolves into the ravines of Akontisma, where even the moon seems to walk carefully so as not to wake the stones, nor Hephaestus, who has ceased making weapons and now repairs only broken picks, because he too understood that the world is saved by tools that open the earth and not by those that open bodies. Then I reflect that perhaps all the gods were exiled here to learn what man refuses to accept: that no power is greater than the patience of stone, no glory lasts longer than lichen slowly spreading over gneiss, no immortality endures as long as a root continuing downward into darkness without ever asking whether it will meet light. And I walk among them more and more quietly, attentive even to the sound of my own breathing, because I am beginning to suspect that every loud sound is a form of forgetting, whereas memory always works as water works within stone, so slowly that only after centuries do you realise it has changed the entire mountain. The more I learned to listen to silence, the more I understood that silence is not the absence of voice but the place where all voices continue to exist without competing with one another. There, deep beneath Akontisma, in the damp galleries that keep dripping onto the gneiss as centuries drip onto a human being, I heard the low murmur of the Cabeiri merge with the breath of miners, with the prayers of the monks of Eikosifoinissa, with the song of Orpheus that never ceased descending toward the depths instead of rising to the sky. Everything became a single depth, a single body, and I moved through it as blood moves through veins without knowing the face it keeps alive. Then the Cloud-Gatherer appeared again. He had left behind every trace of authority. His beard had the colour of lichen, his hands smelled of wet iron. He bent before a broken rock and carefully gathered tiny grains of quartz, as though afraid that even the most insignificant part of this mountain might be lost. A little farther on, the Grey-Eyed One sat on a fallen beech of Moustheni and carved incomprehensible signs into the bark with a small knife, not to leave a message but to help the tree remember its age. Hermes climbed from Messoropi carrying on his shoulders a sack full of stones, not because he needed them but because each stone concealed a forgotten name. One by one he emptied them onto the banks of the Angitis and then washed them slowly, as though performing a rite older than every religion. Hephaestus and the Cabeiri continued working in the depths, only now I understood that they were striking not metal but words themselves. Each blow split a word in two, removed its arrogance, allowed it to return humbled into the stone from which it had been born. Perhaps that is why Pangaio does not love grand declarations. It prefers the sound of a pick that suddenly stops because the hand has understood that something living lies on the other side of the stone; it prefers the gaze of an old shepherd watching the mists descend from Avgo without feeling the need to explain them; it prefers the she-wolf passing beside Bendis without knowing she is passing beside a goddess; it prefers the person who kneels alone in the ravines of Palaiochori and places an ear to the rock, waiting patiently to hear something that may never come, because that waiting is already the answer. And the more I surrender to it, the more I feel that the anguish of death is born not from fear of loss but from the fear that one day this conversation between my body and the stone might stop, that the Cabeiri might fall silent, that Orpheus might forget his voiceless song, that the Cloud-Gatherer might let the last grain of quartz fall from his hands, that the Grey-Eyed One might cease reading the cracks in the marble, that the Angitis might cease carrying toward the sea the secret conversations of all those who once bent to drink from its waters. Then something far greater than a human being or a god will have died; then the way Pangaio remembers itself will have been lost. And I exist only as long as I am permitted to become one more breath inside this endless memory. All of Pangaio is a living cosmogony in which gods, humans, stones and place-names form a single body. Once I thought Pangaio had only summits; now I know it has a face, eyelids that open and close when the mists rise from the Angitis, breath that moves through the beeches of Proti and the chestnut trees of Nikisiani, blood running through veins of quartz and gold far deeper than human picks ever reached. The longer I look, the more clearly I discern upon it the forms of all who lived here. Orpheus continues to walk toward the ravine without turning his head, because he knows that whoever looks back always sees himself younger than he can bear. The Cabeiri rise from the galleries every dawn, brush the fine hematite dust from their beards and sit on the slopes of Akontisma looking at the sun as an old man looks at the child he once was. The Cloud-Gatherer walks slowly toward Pilaf Tepe carrying in his arms the broken trunk of a black pine as though carrying a dead companion. The Grey-Eyed One gathers small pieces of white gneiss from the ravines and places them in the nests of owls, as though even wisdom needs stone in order to hatch. Hermes crosses the old tracks of Messoropi, Moustheni and Palaiochori carrying a pouch full of broken bells from sheep that disappeared centuries ago. Every so often he hangs them on the dry branches of a beech, and when the wind blows a sound is heard that no human being recognises any longer; only the wolves slowly lift their heads and listen, as though some old brother were calling them. Bendis passes among the ferns without haste, followed by wildcats, foxes, roe deer and she-wolves, all of them forming a procession that has continued since the world was still young enough not to need names,

while deep beneath Avgo Hephaestus and the Cabeiri still keep the first fire burning, the one they lit before men learned to separate metal from stone, and every spark that rises from that fire becomes, somewhere else, a winter, a rainfall, a root entering the earth, because on Pangaio nothing remains enclosed within the form in which it first appeared, everything passes into something else and continues there, and perhaps for that reason I gradually began to think of the mountain itself as a myth that had taken the form of a mountain, not because it concealed some secret story beneath its slopes but because every creature that had lived here, every god, every dead man, every tree and every vein of ore had become part of the same continuous account, an account whose beginning no one remembered and whose end no one seemed particularly eager to reach.

I remember the Sower of Stone, whom I met one autumn morning on a slope above Moustheni; he carried no sack, only a handful of small black stones, and every few steps he bent down, pushed one into the damp earth with his thumb and moved on, without looking back to see what would become of it, and when I returned months later the stones had almost disappeared, I could not tell whether the soil had covered them or the mountain itself had taken them back, only small lichens spread over the places where I had seen them vanish, and at that moment I thought that perhaps all the great acts of the world resemble this silent sowing, no one knows whether they bore fruit, yet the earth continues to change because of them.

Then I met Clotho in the low mists of Moustheni; she held no spindle but long beech roots, which she slowly passed through the cracks in the rocks as though weaving the very interior of the mountain; a little farther on Lachesis measured the distances between springs, galleries and trees without rope or measure, only by the span of her arms, as though she knew that every place possesses an invisible proportion that keeps it standing, while Atropos walked behind them holding a miner’s small iron knife, and from time to time she cut a dry root, an old rope, a rotten timber support, yet never touched a human being, and then I felt that even the Fates work first for the mountain and only afterwards for us, because if the memory of the stone collapses no human destiny can find a place on which to stand.

That same night I saw Hypnos for the first time, sitting at the entrance of a cave above the Angitis; his eyes were closed and his back rested against a moss-covered rock, and a little farther away stood his brother, Thanatos; neither approached the other, only the water flowed between them, slow and dark, preserving the distance the world requires in order to continue, and I watched them until they disappeared into the mist without exchanging a single word, and from that I understood that the deepest kinships require no conversation, it is enough that they breathe beneath the same sky, as Akontisma, Avgo, the beeches, the lichens, the old galleries, the Cabeiri, the Fates and all those who remained here so long that the stone ceased to distinguish their bodies from its own slow and endless memory continue to breathe beneath the same sky.

One dawn in late autumn I climbed alone towards Korni Dere, where the ravines narrow until the wind ceases to blow and begins to breathe, the ground covered with wet beech leaves, the yew still holding its deep green, indifferent to the season, and lichens spreading across the gneiss in patterns that seemed to record the geography of a land no one had ever inhabited; there I saw three women seated around a fallen trunk, none of them speaking, one carefully separating the seeds of a wild apple and placing them in fissures in the rock, another tying thin juniper roots around stones split by frost, while the third watched the sky without raising her head, as though she were seeing it through the earth.

There was no need to ask who they were, because at some point every human being recognises the Fates without being introduced to them: Clotho sowed what had yet to exist, Lachesis calculated with her fingers the distance between a root and a vein of quartz, Atropos cut only branches that had already died within, never the living trunk, and then I saw more clearly that the world disappears far later than man imagines and is saved far earlier than he can see.

A little farther on, on the slopes descending towards Ofrinio, stood an old man with a herd of wild horses; the animals followed him without bridles, without calls, guided only by the sound of his breathing. Someone might have said that he was Poseidon, yet I saw simply a man who had lived among horses so long that his body had acquired the rhythm of their steps, and there I felt for the first time that gods are born when a creature inhabits an element of the world so deeply that it ceases to be distinguishable from it, as Hephaestus became fire, Bendis night, Orpheus echo, the Cabeiri underground labour, Demeter fruit and silence, Hermes path, Artemis the gaze of an animal just before it turns towards the forest.

From then on I began to look differently even at the smallest things: an eagle-owl motionless among the black pines, a red-billed chough walking over the rocks as though reading their fissures, a golden eagle allowing the wind to carry it without moving its wings, and I understood that all these were themselves thoughts of the mountain, as lichens are its slow words and springs its breaths, and the more closely I watched them the less I wished to interpret them, because every interpretation removes something from mystery, while mystery remains the one place where a person can still encounter himself before immediately recognising who he is.

And so I continued towards Akontisma without searching for gods, knowing by then that I might meet them in a yew, in a grain of quartz, in an old sheep bell half-covered by moss, even in the slow persistence of a drop of water shaping the same stone over thousands of years, because there, more than anywhere else, eternity had ceased to resemble infinite time and had taken the form of an untiring, humble movement that continues even when no one is watching.

During the winter that followed I learned to read snow as I had once read human faces; every surface concealed a different history. Above Akontisma the wind cut it into fine undulating lines, an alphabet belonging only to the summits; on the slopes of Proti it grew heavy and deep beneath the shadows of the beeches, while towards Moustheni it still preserved the hoofprints of roe deer that had passed during the night without disturbing a single branch. I walked slowly, careful not to erase these marks because I felt that someone would return to read them.

It was then that I saw a blind old man climbing alone towards the old stone sheepfolds. He carried no staff, only a small bronze sheep bell; every few steps he shook it gently and waited for the echo, orienting himself not by the sound itself but by the length of the silence that followed. When I stood beside him he told me that stones speak more when they are covered with snow, because then they are freed from all the unnecessary voices of summer. I never saw him again, yet from that time on I began to hear winter differently.

A little higher, where the yews persist within the ice, stood a woman wrapped in grey sheep’s wool, slowly combing the long strands of lichen hanging from the rocks like old beards; each time she finished she allowed one strand to fall upon the snow, and in that moment I understood that the woman before me was Lethe, not a river but a face. She erased nothing; she merely covered gently whatever had grown weary of existing, as snow covers a fallen trunk without making it disappear.

I watched her descend towards Palaiochori and pass before Orpheus without touching him, because his song had already become stone; she continued towards Hephaestus, who sat beside the old furnaces, and he offered her a handful of ash which she let scatter into the wind, as though blessing a labour at last completed. Even the Cabeiri stopped their hammers for a moment as she passed, not from fear but from gratitude, because they knew that no memory survives without some measure of forgetting, just as no tree survives if it keeps all its leaves forever.

Later, when I reached the abandoned terraces below Nikisiani, I found dozens of small piles of acorns placed with absolute order on the stones. No human being would have devoted such care to so insignificant a task. Then an eagle-owl appeared and settled on a dry wild apple tree; it did not fly away, it made no sound, it simply looked at me with eyes the colour of old honey, and for a moment I felt the whole mountain observing me through its gaze, as though it wanted to make certain that I still remembered how to distinguish the essential from the spectacular.

For here no revelation arrives with noise; it comes as the yew ripens, as lichen spreads, as a fissure fills with snow, as a bell hanging outside an empty sheepfold grows old, and there, among the yews, the acorns, the lichens, the echoes of snow and the slow movements of Lethe, I understood that Pangaio sustains the world not through miracles but through imperceptible gestures repeated for thousands of years, until even time begins to imitate them.

In spring Pangaio changed its manner of thought. Trees were not alone in flowering; stones flowered too. Small orange lichens appeared on the gneiss, green moss spread across the wet schist in patterns resembling maps of forgotten kingdoms, and the first anemones emerged beside pieces of quartz, as though the mineral itself were bringing forth flowers. At that time I followed a beekeeper from Messoropi who carried his hives up the slopes and almost never spoke; he placed each hive beside a large stone and rested his palm against it for a moment.

Once I asked why he blessed the rocks before leaving the bees. He looked at me in surprise and replied that the bees choose the stone before they choose the flowers, because the stone knows in advance which spring will last longer. From then on I began to watch the bees as priestesses of a temple no human hand had built; they flew from flowering wild cherry trees to the yews, from strawberry trees to clearings filled with orchids, then disappeared towards ravines even the shepherds seldom approached.

There, among the shadows of the rocks, I saw a woman filling small clay vessels with pollen. She wore neither wreath nor gold ornaments; her hands had the colour of earth and her nails were filled with soil like those of anyone who has worked for a long time. I understood that she was Persephone only when I saw her smile at the first anemones,

not as a queen but as someone returning from a long journey who had finally recognised her home; she was not rising from Hades but from the galleries of Pangaio itself, carrying with her the smell of wet stone and iron. The Cabeiri laid down their hammers for a while and stood without speaking, as though welcoming the season rather than the goddess. A little farther on Hermes was fastening new bells around the necks of the young sheep that would climb to the high summer pastures, each bell sounding differently, as though every animal had to carry its own small music into the mountain, while Pan sat alone beside a dry cornel tree listening to the bells with his eyes closed; he had set aside his pipe, leaving music to the flocks, the shepherds, the bees and the wind moving through the ferns.

Then I understood that the greatest wisdom lies not in creating the world but in allowing it to continue by itself, and that day I encountered neither thunderbolt nor miracle nor prophecy, only an ageing beekeeper, his bees, Persephone with her hands full of pollen, Pan listening to the sheep bells as though they were the last music in the world, and Pangaio fragrant with thyme, wild oregano, flowering strawberry tree and wet iron. I felt then that even spring here was less a season than an ancient rite in which humans, gods, animals, plants and stones remembered for a while that they had been born from the same breath and returned silently into one another without the need for a single word.

In summer I climbed towards the high ridges before sunrise, because at that hour shadows still possessed weight and could keep secrets; the roads towards Avgo smelled of wild thyme, asphodel and mountain ironwort, the bees had not yet awakened, and only the lizards had begun to warm their bodies on the flat rocks. There I met a man carrying on his back a large wooden trough filled with water. Every so often he stopped and poured some of it into natural hollows in the gneiss. I watched him for a long time before daring to ask whose thirst he was relieving. He smiled as though he had forgotten that there were people who required explanations and told me that stones grow thirsty first and animals know this better than we do, then continued on his way, leaving behind small basins of water around which wasps, beetles, lizards and robins began to gather, and even a short-toed eagle that paused for a while without hunting anything.

It became clear to me that the man served a rite far older than any temple; he was giving water not to the animals but to the thirst of the mountain itself. A little later, on the slopes below Pilaf Tepe, I saw Hestia sitting before a small heap of ashes. There was no fire, only its smell. She slowly stirred the ashes with a juniper branch as though searching for the final sparks of the previous winter. She lit no new flame; she guarded what remained, because every new fire is born from an older one, never from emptiness. I remembered the old shepherds who always kept a little ash in their bags when they changed pastures, not as a souvenir but so that fire would never need to begin again from the beginning.

Higher up, where the ferns reached the knee, a bear stood upright before a wild cherry tree and watched the fruit fall of its own accord to the ground. It left untouched what still clung to the branches and waited, and its patience seemed to me older than any human law, as though it knew that everything must first yield by itself before becoming food. Artemis passed beside it without a bow, stopped for a moment, and the two remained motionless facing one another; neither laid claim to the forest, because the forest belongs not to whoever loves it most but to whoever passes through it leaving the fewest traces.

When I reached the stone watering troughs again, I found an old stonemason carving small undulating lines into their inner walls. I asked why he troubled to carve a place that would immediately be covered by water. He replied that even water needs something to remember when it is alone at night. He said nothing else and continued carving the same lines until the first light fell upon them and for a moment the incisions resembled small mountain ranges.

Then I felt that the whole of Pangaio was filled with people labouring for things no one would ever notice: someone cools the stones, someone guards the ashes, someone carves the inside of a watering trough, someone leaves acorns at the roots of an oak, someone cleans an abandoned gallery without expecting a miner ever to return. Perhaps these are the last true gods of this mountain, not because they possess some power but because they continue to care for a world that could perfectly well exist without them, with the same quiet devotion with which a spring continues to rise even when no one bends down to drink.

One August afternoon, when the sun had dropped low enough for the rocks to begin breathing again, I found myself among the old dry-stone walls above Nikisiani, where terraces cross the slope in unfinished lines, none ending where one expects, none leading exactly to the next wall, as though they had been built by people who conversed more closely with the gradient of the land than with the straight line. I spent a long time touching their stones; each had a different temperature, some still retaining the sun, others already filling with night.

There I met an old builder carrying only a small hammer and an iron wedge. He stood before a dry-stone wall that winter rains had opened, and instead of repairing it he began carefully removing the stones one by one, setting them all on the ground, cleaning away earth and moss, turning them over as though searching for their proper face, and then placing them back without using a single new stone. I asked why he had added none. He answered that every wall already knows how many stones belong to it and every excess becomes arrogance. Ever since, when I see a dry-stone wall, I think that perhaps the world itself was built in this way, through precision rather than abundance.

A little higher, where the wind passes among the junipers, Nemesis stood holding neither scales nor sword but a flat stone on which she slowly rubbed away the letters of an ancient inscription. From time to time she stopped, blew away the white marble dust and continued. She punished no one; she merely removed the excess left behind by human ambition when it attempts to become eternal. I saw more clearly then that even inscriptions must one day return to anonymity so that stone can breathe again.

At that moment a strange crash sounded from the ravines of Avgo. I looked up expecting a landslide, but instead hundreds of swallows emerged together from a vertical fissure in the rock, circled briefly above the summits, then scattered in every direction as though carrying small fragments of the same sky. I thought perhaps every cave holds within it a folded sky that opens only for a few moments each year.

Then a heavily built man appeared with a sack full of beech seeds. He sowed them not wherever he found soil but only beside fallen trunks, as though he knew that a new tree must first enter into conversation with the death of an older one before it can stand upright. I never learned his name; perhaps he was a man, perhaps Time itself, because he worked with a slowness belonging to no mortal, and when he vanished among the beeches I remained alone among the dry-stone walls, the junipers, the swallows and the stones that had found their places again.

Then I understood that Pangaio is sustained not by the grand narratives fashioned by human beings but by countless small acts of balance that no one will ever record: a wall rebuilt with the same stones, a seed left beside a rotting trunk, an inscription gradually returning to silence, a flock of swallows releasing for only a few breaths the mountain’s hidden sky. I felt that perhaps true eternity is not duration but the ceaseless care of the balance between everything that is born and everything that quietly yields its place.

That evening I remained above the terraces until the last light withdrew from the summits and the shadows began to join one another. Pangaio then acquired another face, one people seldom see because it requires the absence of the sun to appear. The stones lost their colour and became almost black, the trunks of the beeches stood in the dark, the bells of the flocks from the high pastures sounded distant, less a present sound than the memory of one, something that had occurred in another time and continued to reach me. Then I saw Time.

He appeared neither as an old man nor as a figure carrying an hourglass, but as a labourer returning from work, in worn clothes, with dusty hands and a small metal tool at his belt. He was descending from the old galleries above Palaiochori and every few steps stopped to examine a fissure in the rock; he broke nothing, removed nothing, simply observed, as though trying to understand when a stone is ready to change form. I followed without speaking, and after some time we reached a small hollow where dozens of objects had been carefully arranged: a rusted shepherd’s knife, a wooden sheep bell, a fragment of ancient pottery, a child’s shoe, a broken piece of a figurine, a mining tool, a small wooden cross. They rested side by side without distinction of age or value, and then I felt that Time preserves things not because they are important but because someone once touched them with the whole of his existence.

At the back of the hollow lay a small pool of water, so clear that it seemed less water than an opening in the earth. I bent over it and saw faces I did not know: a Thracian warrior with sun-burned skin, a woman carrying wood on the slopes of ancient Edonia, a monk writing with wax on a wooden tablet, a miner holding a lamp inside a dark gallery, a shepherd watching the clouds above Avgo, a man like myself standing silently before the same pool thousands of years later. It became clear then that memory is not something lying behind us; it lies beneath us, an underground water passing below every age and waiting for a small fissure through which to appear.

When I returned to the slopes the sky was filled with stars, yet they did not seem remote. I heard Pan playing his pipe again for the first time, not with music made for human ears but with sounds resembling a door creaking in an abandoned house, a branch breaking in the forest, wind passing through a crack, the breathing of a sleeping animal. I felt that this was the true music of the world, a music that reveals the invisible interval between things.

From that night onward I began to see Pangaio as a vast sanctuary without an entrance, where every creature is at once visitor and guardian, where man passes briefly, the god grows tired, the tree ages, the animal disappears into the forest, the stone breaks, yet everything merely changes its position within the same slow movement, as the waters of the Angitis travel through darkness and appear again elsewhere. I continued walking, knowing by then that every path on Pangaio ultimately leads to the same point, the place where man first encounters the ancient truth he has always tried to evade: that he was never the owner of the world, only, for a brief time, its memory. After that night I began climbing Pangaio carrying nothing with me, neither maps nor notes nor the need to remember the route, because I understood that every attempt to map the mountain reduced it, while it always existed beyond every line and every name; its paths altered with the season, the rain, the fall of a tree, the movement of an animal, insisting on remaining a relationship, a slow conversation between whatever is born and whatever returns.

One day I followed an old path above Domatia, once used by shepherds to drive their flocks to the summer pastures, yet the farther I went the less it resembled a human road and the more it became an animal trace, a line made by thousands of passages without anyone ever deciding to create it. There I found an abandoned sheepfold; its stones had turned green with damp, the wooden roof had collapsed, and inside there were still pieces of sheep’s wool caught in the boards, an old water vessel, a rope hanging from a wall, small traces of a life that had departed without taking anything of the place with it.

Inside the sheepfold I found a reed pipe.

It was not old and bore no mark that made it exceptional, yet when I lifted it I felt I was holding something that had heard more than it could ever sing. I brought it to my lips without blowing, and the air passing through a crack in the stone produced a sound by itself, so low that it resembled memory more than music. Then Pan appeared, not in the form described by men, but as an old shepherd with rough hands and a gaze that had seen more summers than a face could bear.

He sat beside me without speaking.

For a long time we listened together to the wind.

Then he told me that people had always made the same mistake: they tried to create music instead of listening to the music already present within things. He pointed to the wall of the sheepfold, the stones, the fissures, the moss, the tiny insects moving across the limestone, reminding me that all these were instruments in a vast symphony that had begun before there was any human being to give it a name.

When he left, I did not see where he went.

At some point the place beside me was simply empty and the air had changed.

I descended slowly towards Messoropi through the chestnut trees, and there I met another guardian of the mountain, a young man collecting old seeds from plants that had almost disappeared. He carried small glass vessels with names written on them, though most of those names were no longer known to anyone. When I asked why he preserved plants no one remembered, he replied that the name of a thing dies long before the thing itself, and that someone must guard that brief interval before silence becomes final.

Then I thought that perhaps this is the true work of man upon the earth.

Not to conquer.

Not to explain.

To hand on.

To hold something fragile in one’s hands for a little while and then let it continue by itself.

As Pangaio does.

It holds within it the Edonians, the Satrae, the miners, shepherds, monks, gods and animals, not as a museum of dead things but as a living underground current, like the Angitis travelling secretly through darkness before appearing again in the light.

And then I saw more clearly that perhaps the greatest anguish of death is not the disappearance of the body but the loss of relationship, the moment when man ceases to hear the wind within the pipe, the water within the stone, the voices of trees within silence.

For as long as this act of listening remains, as long as this fragile bridge exists between us and the ancient body of the earth, no one is truly lost.

One merely changes form and returns to the mountain’s great dream.

During that period I began to descend deeper into Pangaio, not towards the summits but towards its lower reaches, where human beings had left the greatest number of marks and time had worked longest to transform them, towards the old paths of woodcutters, the forgotten fields between Moustheni and Domatia, the places where dry-stone walls had begun to return to the soil from which they arose. There I met a man who collected sounds.

He carried no machines or unusual instruments, only a small wooden box with an opening at the top. He left it at different places on the mountain and waited. When I asked what he was waiting for, he told me that he was waiting for what people leave behind when they go.

I stayed with him all day.

At the first place the box recorded wind moving through junipers; at the second, water falling from a spring onto broken pieces of marble; at the third, the distant bells of a flock that had vanished behind a ridge. But in the evening, when he opened the box, I heard something I had not expected.

I heard footsteps.

Not an animal, not a person passing at that moment.

Old footsteps.

Footsteps that had remained within the place.

Then he spoke to me of how every mountain keeps within it a second road, a road made from movements that have taken place and continue to exist without bodies, and how people leave behind not only objects but ways of walking, ways of touching, ways of looking.

That night I began to think of Charon.

Not as the stories describe him, guardian of a river beneath the earth, but as a solitary boatman who had grown tired of carrying the dead and had settled on Pangaio in order finally to learn how the living live.

I saw him beside a small lake above the Angitis.

His boat was tied to a bank covered in ferns, but he never untied it.

He sat alone watching insects walk upon the water, leaves fall and continue their journey, reflections of trees break apart in the wind.

He had understood something no human being wishes to admit: death is not a passage to another world but a return to a world that has always been here.

That was why he had abandoned his boat.

There was no longer another shore.

There was only the moving water.

I spent many hours beside him without speaking, and when I rose to leave he gave me a small piece of wood from an old boat and told me to keep it, not as a talisman but as a reminder that everything that travels eventually becomes part of its journey.

I held it in my palm as I climbed towards Akontisma.

There, in the last light of the sun, I saw Cronus for the first time.

He did not resemble a god.

He resembled an old worker left alone after the completion of some enormous labour.

He sat on a rock drawing circles in the earth with a stick.

I asked what he was doing.

He told me he was counting how many times man tries to escape what he is.

There were many circles.

Far too many.

And within every one of them lay the same point.

The same centre.

Then I understood that perhaps what we call life is the slow course around a centre we never see, and that all our anguish is born from believing the road is straight when we are always returning to the same ancient point.

Pangaio knew this before us.

Its stones knew it.

Its roots knew it.

The Angitis knew it as it travelled secretly beneath the earth.

And perhaps that was why the mountain remained so calm before man.

For it had already watched empires, gods, languages, peoples and names pass away.

It had seen everything we call eternity pass as a brief shadow over the gneiss.

And still it waited.

Not for someone to conquer it.

For someone to stand still for a while and listen. From that moment I began to walk differently, because Pangaio had begun to reveal that a road is not a line leading somewhere but a living thing that changes with whoever crosses it; every path possessed its own memory, every stone its temperature, every shadow its age. One day I left the familiar routes and took an old road descending towards the northern slopes, where people had once carried timber, metals and animals, where their voices had remained among the trees in thin deposits of memory.

The road led me to an abandoned village where no one lived any longer. Its houses leaned towards one another, the doors had opened of themselves, the windows looked into the forest without glass. In one house I found a table still laid with earthenware plates, not as though someone had fled in haste but as though they expected to return after a sleep lasting centuries. On the wall was a painting of a mountain, yet the mountain painted by the unknown hand did not resemble the Pangaio outside the window; it had more summits, more rivers, more paths, as though what had been painted was not its outward shape but its interior.

Then an old painter appeared in the courtyard, mixing earth with water to make pigments. He asked neither who I was nor why I had entered his house, but told me that people paint the world when they fear losing it, whereas the mountain paints us every day without using colour: it carves us with wind, darkens us with shadows, changes us with the seasons, leaves us upon itself as rain leaves fine lines in rock.

I asked what he was painting now.

He replied that he was painting a man who had not yet been born but who would one day walk the same path and believe he had discovered it alone.

Then he took a little soil from the courtyard and placed it in a small vessel, reminding me that every place has a colour invisible to the eyes and visible only to memory, and that Pangaio bears the colour of those who departed but left behind a way of standing before the world.

As I left the village I saw a symbol carved into a stone that I did not recognise. It resembled neither a letter nor an ancient sign but rather a road continually returning to itself. I touched it and felt a strange warmth, as though the stone had retained the palm of someone who had touched it thousands of years before.

Then Janus appeared, god of passages, not at the gates of cities but at the borders between forest and stone. He had two faces, yet neither looked forward or back; one looked towards man, the other towards the mountain. He revealed that every road has two directions, the one followed by the body and the one followed by memory, and that man loses himself when he forgets that he walks both at once.

Then I understood that Pangaio is full of invisible gates: one between two stones, another between two ages, another between life and death, another between the person who believes he knows and the person who begins to listen.

Perhaps this is why the ancients searched for gods here, not because gods inhabited the summits but because the mountain itself produced that strange condition in which man briefly ceases to be merely human and becomes something in between, a creature between flesh and memory, earth and sky, what ends and what continues without a name.

I continued walking into evening through old courtyards, abandoned paths and the shadows of beeches, hearing the village behind me slowly return to silence, not as something dead but as something patiently awaiting the next voice, the next footstep, the next person who would stand briefly in its heart and discover that Pangaio never speaks to those who demand answers, only to those who have learned to inhabit questions. And then I felt that Pangaio had never truly separated the centuries: within it the age of the Edonians still breathed beside the age of the monks, ancient sacrifices still burned beneath the ashes of abandoned hearths, the voices of the Satrae still passed among the black pines and the summits of Akontisma, as though the great fracture men called time had never existed, because time here did not advance but sank, descending as an underground river beneath stones, roots and old miners’ galleries, to the depth where the Cabeiri still guarded the first fire of the world.

There I met Prometheus.

He was not bound to a rock as men remember him, but free and more unhappy than ever, because his punishment was no longer the eagle devouring his liver; his punishment was memory. He remembered every fire given to humankind, every war born from it, every city raised and every city reduced to ash. He sat near the old furnaces of Nikisiani watching people still search the earth for power, while he knew that the greatest fire lies not in metal but in man’s desire to exceed his limits.

He told me that the fire he stole had never been his; it was part of the earth’s own anger, a small memory from the age when stones were still seas and mountains were born from the collision of ancient forces. He said that every time a person lights a fire on Pangaio, that first moment of creation awakens briefly, when the world was still without form and the gods wandered through chaos searching for one.

From there I descended towards the gorge of the Angitis, where Acheron was not a river of death but an old guardian of secret waters, standing in the mist with a body covered in weed and stones, holding a black vessel filled with water from underground springs no human being had ever seen. He reminded me that the dead do not travel towards Hades; they travel towards memory, and the true Hades lies wherever no one remembers your name.

Then I saw Persephone rising from the dark hollows beneath Pilaf Tepe, not with the sorrow of one returning from the underworld but with the serenity of one who knows both sides of existence. In her hands she carried black pomegranate seeds and planted them at the edges of paths where people had forgotten how to walk, because she knew that every ending contains the seed of another beginning, not as hope but as a natural law of the earth.

Higher, on the summits above Avgo, Aeolus had imprisoned his winds in stone caves, not because he feared their destruction but because he feared the silence that would come if they ever ceased moving the world. Each night he opened one gate and let a wind pass: Boreas descending from the northern forests, Notus bringing the smell of the sea, Zephyrus moving softly through the chestnut trees of Moustheni, Eurus carrying dust from distant places no one remembered any longer.

And beneath all this, in the deep veins of the mountain, Cronus continued his work.

He no longer devoured his children.

He devoured time.

Each dawn he swallowed a moment of the world and each dusk returned it transformed: a stone became soil, a tree memory, a human being a story, a god a whisper in the wind.

And I walked among all of them, among Prometheus, Persephone, Aeolus, Cronus, the Cabeiri, Orpheus, Bendis and the ancient shadows of the Edonians, across the slopes of Nikisiani, Messoropi, Moustheni, Palaiochori, Akontisma and Avgo, and began to understand that perhaps