He was to give his address and await his orders. That had been in November. This was the end of March, and still no orders had come from Antioch. Did that hide some impenetrable intention or merely the impenetrable chaos of a Turkish military office?

 

 

But, in that moment, Gabriel knew for certain that today would bring him a decision. On Sundays the post arrived from Antioch -- not only newspapers and letters, but government orders from the Kaimakam to commoners and subjects.

 

 

Gabriel Bagradian was thinking solely of his family. The position was complicated. What was to happen to Juliette and Stephan while he was serving? Gabriel was delighted with Juliette's leniency. But not all her indulgence prevented the fact that his wife and son, if they stayed on alone here, would be cut off from the rest of the world.

 

 

The ilex grove was behind Bagradian before he had reached any further clarity on this point. The stampedout path led northwards, losing itself on the mountain in a tangle of arbutus and wild rhododendron. This part of Musa Dagh was called the Damlayik by the hill-folk. The two peaks to the south rose to about eight hundred metres. The Damlayik did not reach any considerable height. These two peaks formed the last ridges of the central mass, which then, unexpectedly without regular gradations, fell sheer, as though broken off sharp, in huge stony cliffs, into the plain of the Orontes. Here in the north, where the wanderer was beginning to feel his way, the Damlayik was lower. Then it fell in a saddle-notch. This was the narrowest part of the whole mountainside along the coast -- the waist of Musa Dagh. The plateau at the summit narrowed down to a few hundred yards, and the confusion of rocks on this steeply jutting side was thrust far out. Gabriel believed he knew every bush and rock. Of all the pictures of his childhood this place had imprinted itself most vividly. The same wide umbrella-pines forming a grove. The same creeping gorse, which struggles over the stony ground. Ivy and other clinging plants embrace a circle of white stones, which, like the giant members of a senate of nature, break off their deliberations the instant an intruder's step is heard. A departing tribe of swallows twitters in the midst of the quiet. Excitement ripples the greenish, land-locked sea of air. As of leaping trout. The sudden spread and beat of wings is like the flicker of many eyelids.

 

 

Gabriel lay down in a grassy place, joining his hands behind his head. Twice already he had climbed Musa Dagh in search of these pines, these blocks of stone, but had lost his way. So they don't really exist, had been his thought. Now he closed tired eyes. When a human being comes back to any former place of contemplation and inner life, those spirits which he, the returned, once cherished and left there return and eagerly possess him. The ghosts of Bagradian's childhood rushed upon him, as though for twenty-three years they had waited faithfully under pines and rocks, in this charming wilderness, for him to return. They are warlike ghosts. The mad dreams of every Armenian boy.