he evening bells of Saint John Monastery shook Avedis out of his day-dream; he crawled out of the pit and into the chapel, opened the door and came out into the bright sunshine.

That night his soul was inundated with new lights and new sensations. Through an opening in the wall the moonbeam rested obliquely on the floor of his cell. Millions of particles danced there like the thoughts in the flashes of his mind. His poor and desolate cell was full of voices now... Whispers, hums and blurred words came to his ears. He tried to sleep but couldn’t.  He got up, took the History of Zenop Klag near his cot and scurried through its pages.

He read about the battle between the forces of the Christian and the Pagan Armenias on the Innagnian Mountains. He read it with intense feeling and emotion and stopped at the point where the Pagans were defeated, their temples ransacked and destroyed and the monks were thrown into the bottomless pit.

The description of the battle was so vivid and realistic he could actually hear the whinnying of horses, the groaning of the wounded, the proud shouts of the victorious Christians and the wailing of the defeated Pagans...

He could clearly see the onslaught of the Christian soldiers into the temples; the terror of the monks and nuns, their prayers before the bronze statues, their terrified screams, the bloody swords... He was greatly moved by all of this but in his mental turmoil a question stood high and clear in his mind.

What of it?

The pagans were physically overpowered. Were they defeated?

A superb view of the underground world unveiled itself before his eyes.  ...Fountains of multicolor lights illuminated wide panoramas... Human shadows moving around, conversing, singing, reciting...from the fields  rapturous music spread out its veils like a golden mist...from the vineyards, the wine flowed like rosy poetry...in the prairies, the plowshare, with lyric poetry, broke the ground into long furrows which lay parallel like pregnant rays of the sun.

Absorbed in these thoughts his heart was melting like a burning candle....Sparks of meditations sputtering around...dark veils of mystery floating in the air...intellectual intoxication pregnant with immortal creations...philosophical struggle in the dark waters of mysteries...colorful bonfire of daring imagination...underground symphonies shaking the mountains into a weird dance.

...Who got defeated?  The Pagans?  Their parchments, and their statues?  No they’re not dead.  They are inalienable and eternal.  They are our sources of inspiration.  Some of them have actually returned to their corporal lives.

Reincarnated!

They are breathing, moving, living and working with us.

Engulfed in these thoughts the morning came and the bells started ringing.

hat spring morning a group of students in the company of their teacher, Kazrig, were climbing up the Innagnian Mountains.  Avedis was following them. The sun had just risen and shreds of clouds blushed from the rising sun, floating indolently in the crystalline lake on the top of the mountain. According to tradition that lake had been torn off from the sky and was thrown there by an infuriated tempest thousands of centuries ago.

In the daytime it was silent and dreamy; in the night, starlit and pensive.

From the top of the Innagnian Mountains one could see the entire country of Armenia spread out from Zeitoun to Ararat.  Rapt  before this view, Kazrig gathered the students into the hollow of weather -beaten rock, took a worn-out book from his bosom and said:

---”Kevork has sent this book “The Road to Liberty” for us to read and to return to him.  Get closer.  I want to read it now.  It won’t take more than two hours to complete it.”

We were proud to have this opportunity.  We were not looked upon as little children anymore.  Our guerrilla chief, Kevork, was preparing us to be men, fighting men.

As he was reading, we were trembling with joy and excitement. It wasn’t like any book we knew, such as the Bible, the Psalms and Catechism.  It didn’t smell of incense or prayer. It was a book of gun and gun-powder. A call for the Armenian youth to get ready to fight for his country.

While the boys were profoundly silent he kept reading and looking, every now and then, into our eyes to see our reaction to it, murmuring:

---”After I get through reading this book you will feel yourself baptized in its patriotic waters as future guerrillas.”

“Kazrig!”  roared Avedis from the top of the rock. “Throw that book and all your books away, including the Bible and read these children the genuine book of our fatherland.”  Sliding down, he lay on the ground, with his face against it, looking at us inquisitively and roaring:

---”Can’t you hear it?  Can’t you hear those voices?  Wrinkled-faced rocks dressed like old archbishops, reciting unintelligible poems...from the canyons and caverns come echoes of underground concerts...nightingales and partridges are bursting their throats to take part in that universal outburst...from the tops of these mountains I can hear the cries of our people coming down through the many centuries...”

“Listen carefully!  They are like the angry wind hitting the shoulders of the mountains and roaring away.”

“Listen!  In those winds you can clearly hear our Biblical readings...our Sharagans...our rebellious poems...you can hear the descriptions of the coming sunrise...of our creative potency ... you can smell the perfumed air of our wild flowers that cover everything like a transparent mist; Can’t you hear the rumbling of our underground rivers? Look at our eternal hearth, with huge caldrons boiling to mold new ideas, new thoughts, new philosophy. From divine music, rose colored wine flows to inspire the poets in their creative flights.”

“Of course you can see how the subterranean world feels about us. Their population is greatly multiplied. Prayers and religious services are foreign to them.  They write, carve, sculpt and philosophize about the enigmas of the universe---drunk with pride and proud with drunkenness.”

“Their God is their Mind - the Creator of their Microcosm.”

“It’s autumn now, there. How beautiful! They are gathering the grapes and squeezing them into huge rock-basins. The rosy liquid flows into huge earthenware vessels...it bubbles up like poetry...the writers flock around the wine jugs to quench their thirst and to color their writings with the color of the wine...”

Sail with me children, and you will see that our fatherland is far more enchanting than all the glories of Heaven.

Follow the wisdom of your ancestors and don’t let anyone deceive you. Don’t budge from where you are. Heaven is far away, cold and apathetic.  Stick to your soil, above and below...in order to become a source of strength and inspiration for your children’s children. A powerful posterity! Do you hear that heavenly symphony that envelops our dreamland?

Is it coming from Heaven?

---No!