SIX
Weeping Women: It is evening when I arrive at this disappointing border so I find a place to camp for the night beneath some huge rocks at the foot of the mountain near the fence.
I make my usual tiny cooking fire, prepare some tasty “hedge soup” from some roadside plants I have gathered, roll up in my blanket and settle down to sleep. A quiet hour or two passes but then I am awakened by the sound of a woman weeping nearby, apparently somewhere above me in the rocks.
It’s eerie, but stranger still, the crying and sobbing are soon joined by other wailing women’s voices. Uncanny. Frightening. I wonder if some local people have noticed me slip up into these rocks to spend the night and have chosen this bizarre way to scare me away. If so, they’re doing a pretty good job of it. It’s weird. It sounds like a dismal and noisy wake. The voices stop for a while; then the wailing begins again. It’s unnerving but I am so tired from riding my bike all day that I soon doze off and before I know it, the crying has stopped and dawn is breaking.
(The mystery of the crying women is solved sometime later when I mention this strange incident to my new Orthodox monk friends. They say that the sobbing was merely a few of the wild jackals which live in the stony crags of the peninsula serenading me.)
I peddle down to the dock where a small number of other Greek pilgrims, all male of course, are climbing into the passenger boats that will take them to their destinations--but no skipper will take me aboard without a Holy Mountain visa.
That’s the law. I must return to Thessaloniki and get the necessary document if I want to visit Holy Mountain.
Tomasito, 2009
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