Above Mount Olympus

I knew it was bad news when a teenage girl passed me on the trail, slumping up through the pines in hot pink shorts. She looked back and wafted scorn down towards her father, who puffed up the path behind me, shirtless and hairy, muttering in Bulgarian. He called something to her to which she replied only with a contortion of disdain on her sharp-cut face and a listless wagging of her bony frame.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. This was Mt Olympus, the throne of the Gods, I thought. I should have been answering sphinx's riddles and fighting Minotaurs in the dark, but the hurricanes of hair on the Bulgarian's back ensorcelled me and I drifted out.

I was feeling a good deal less the mortal, transparent in parts like the shades who greeted Odysseus in the underworld. I had gotten sick on my way out of the Agrafa (what was in that cheese?), and I hadn't recovered by the time I made it, a few hours before the Bulgarian contingent passed me, to Litohoro, the small town at the foot of Olympus.

Looking up towards the mountain from Litohoro, the summit was lost to me, dark clouds and deep clefts pulled in front of its face like a heavy blanket, as if behind the shroud of quilted dark there was some ancient, mischievous creature waiting to pull it all down and say "boo" when it would frighten me right out of my thick wool socks.

Through the bright canyon green

But it won't send me scampering, I thought to myself as I headed up lush Enipeas canyon. The trail was good, but it moved like a caterpillar across its favourite green leaf, undulating up and down and going nowhere at all, swooping and climbing along the canyon's flank with the attention span of a moth.

The trail had recently been refurbished, old paths blocked off and clearer routes cut through - and often straight up - rocky scruffs jutting from the trees. The canyon got narrower as I went on and the trees crowded the banks. New bridges, the wood still bright with the former life of the tree, crossed the river high with lush, lovely water. Air couldn't speak this lucid, yet it was so thick, it seemed to empty the space it flowed through.

Some five hours in, I came across an old couple stooped on a pair of benches, sitting and waiting for what I don't know. They didn't speak. The woman wore a floppy hat. Down from the mountain descended two young women wearing what looked like party clothes (are those sequins?), chatting exuberantly and flapping their arms as they walked off the trail and straight down an embankment, reappearing moments later as if nothing had happened. Then, out of nowhere, came the blazing pink shorts.

After snapping out of my daze induced by the Bulgarian's immortal hirsuteness, I stumbled up the trail as it broke into space below the summits of Mt Olympus. Mytikas, the highest, was lost in a crown of cloud burning with the sun falling through it. I gazed into it, trying to discern where among the jagged spires I would stand, rather than cling one-handed, screaming and laughing. But the wind came in and swept them out of sight, the skin of the swirling arms of fog bright with the light but their bones hard dark.

I thought I heard thunder but just in time I guessed hooves and leapt out the way as a horse barrelled down the narrow path, empty bottles and sacks of trash swaying from its side. One after another, half a dozen horses flooded down the trail, kicking up dust and stones and knocking the branches off unlucky trees. A man ran down after them, waving a stick and surfing with sandals on the current of loose stones.

After way too many hours in my boots, I dragged myself up the final few metres to Refuge A. The air was wound buoyant with crossing conversations and the smell of food. The tables around the stone courtyard were filled with Greeks, Romanians, more Bulgarians and a smattering of more international faces and voices - British, French, a Spanish couple chatting in English with a Dutch man in the lovely, poetic conversation that occurs between non-native English speakers. I set up my tent and went to sleep. It was still light outside.

To the sky


In the morning the sun rose from the Aegean standing on shafts of pink light, its white hands dipped in the dark clouds above the sea. Olympus above slept in the living dark of mist. Kathryn, a Canadian I had met on the trail the previous day, didn't like maple syrup and had never ridden a moose to work, so I doubted her Canadianness But she sure as hell said "aboot" so she was fine by me, and together we set out at around 7am, hoping to make it to the peak in the three hours or so suggested by our guidebooks

The trail began to change as it crawled above a field of yellow flowers at the edge of the last line of trees, which stood like a defence against the unassailable austerity of the Olympian highlands. Once the trail wove, but it seemed to have lost patience, blasting straight and wide up the side of the mountain, disappearing a short distance on into a wall of fog that slid heavy across the grey rock like a glacier in melt.

As we walked on through the mist, the sun shored some of its tips from the mountain. The slate-coloured rock faintly glowed and, as we climbed, the fog - like a herd - seemed to be moving on, teasing us with parting wisps.

But as soon as it seemed to leave, it stormed back and our world was enveloped in cool grey. Above us climbers as strange dark shapes hunched through the murk, the sun a white dot above their stooped shoulders, their hiking poles the eerie thin legs of unnamed beasts.

The procession

The long chain of us sundry and diverse stretched up into the indefinable heavens from the only occasionally present earth: Romanians in neon baseball caps, overweight Greeks in sandals with cigarettes dangling from their lips, a group of middle-aged women in matching windbreakers, swerving in a line following one another like mice chasing each other's tails. It was all roughly as strange and unexpected as seeing a dragon in a supermarket buying canned peas. Banality and the sublime don't often cross paths, and I still don't know what to make of the times in my life when I have been there to see their awkward hellos.

The distinction between sky and mountain was traced over with smoke, any line that divided them swept by solid blindness. Our feet might as well have walked on hardened sky; our eyes might as well have gazed up into swirling, flocculent earth. All heightened the impression that this was some common passage, some shared avenue of silence that led to a destination we all expected but did not know how to name. It could have been a pilgrimage, or a procession of the dead bound not by the longing to return to life, but by the want to glimpse the next world, a world above us and behind the veil, forming itself out of the fog crafted from the dark materials of our mingling desires. If there is an underworld, this is the path to its door, door of the sky, and the sound of our knock upon it will be the sound of thunder.

But no time for that just yet; no thunder resounded. The summit was still somewhere out there. Near the branch of the summit trail, a Japanese hiker I had seen in Litohoro - lost and smoking a cigarette, clenched up in a ridiculous set of tights - now sat on a rock overlooking the breach into nothingness, staring out toward where the summit must have stood. The fog swept away for a moment - like the crash of an ocean wave in reverse, recoiling from the sand - revealing the jagged peak of Skolio to the west, stark against an abrupt blue sky. Ahead of us, tangled in the woolen mass of grey, a small Greek flag floated dark in the middle of the sky. The summit.

All the world a mystery


The trail to the top, affectionately called the Kakoskala, or Evil Stairway, was barely even that. It was no more than yellow and red dots splattered haphazardly on the rock, probably, if I could connect them on a map, forming a question mark, followed by an exclamation point.

Kathryn and I scrambled hand-by-hand down a crevice, skirted the edge of the cliff and descended again along more or less naked rock. "I'm almost glad I can't see anything!" she yelled from behind me. If the fog had cleared, maybe we would have known how far we had to fall. But as it was - with all sound and life swallowed up and the sun white, wet, and cool - it was difficult to imagine ground, the surface, the earth existing at all.

We climbed on. Weathered spires, lumpy from the countless years of winter's howling left hook, shot up below us and above, the sun languidly dripping down their dark forms. The rocks broke with clefts opening into nothingness; climbing up the side of pocked rock wall, I noticed a snail tucked against a purple flower.

I looked down, searching for Kathryn in the visible dark. She emerged slowly from the soupy sky, low to the stone, crawling like a crab up the cliff. "Can you wait for me!?" she yelled up.

Putting our hands to any ledge we found, we made our way farther up, hugging the raw flanks of the mountains, the stone primordial like it had just been birthed, still shapeless like it had not known what rock was and formed itself as best it could guess.

In the above

And there was the summit. A few boulders, a tin Greek flag leaning in the stillness. Two Czech hikers posed for photos. A Greek couple with their children signed the guest book with all the gravitas of signing in to a boutique hotel. Around us nowhere hung thick and tangible as curtains, obscuring us to the world that felt just beyond our sight - the immensity not only of all Greece, but the world atop it.

It is very difficult to say where precisely we were and what, exactly, the rocks upon which we stood were connected to. Was Greece really out there? Was anything there? I felt as if I was staring into a world of the unknown, fantastic and living, but unable to see it for its beauty, so ineffably overwhelming. If I stared into the faces of the gods, could I recognise them? Or would my vision, as it did now, only melt? If I believed only my eyes, there was no more world, and we had reached the utter end of it, standing upon the last little bit that could be spared. Everywhere else was void, waiting to be called into being.

We signed the guest book and had our picture taken. The Greek family, ever the protectors of normality, looked a little bored. They intended to return the way they came, down the much more difficult and dangerous path on the opposite side of the summit.

"You're not going back down that way, are you?" I asked.

The father looked at me as if I had just asked if the way to walk is to put one foot in front of the other.

"Yes, we've done it before," he replied, trying not to laugh. His simplicity met my giddiness, reeling back our island summit before I had us drifting off altogether into the sky curdled thick. Maybe they knew the mountain better than I: It was nothing special. It just was.

The dark creatures and goodbye

Kathryn and I turned around and made our way back, slipping and clinging most of the way down. Briefly, just for a breath, the fog cleared and we had one glimpse of the down - pure, essential down - funnelling our vision to the Refuge minuscule among dust-mote trees. Then the fog was back, and we were nowhere again.

We descended the way we came, sliding down the slope. The fog fell apart and into itself, splotches of sun falling through upon the green-hued humps of stone, sun soft and round as snow, as if it had fallen ages through a sky dense and deep as the sea.

On a ribbon of dirty snow slipped into the bowl of the rock, three strange shapes played with one another, hopping and skipping on the ice, flowing in inky circles, forming and breaking and reforming, pulsing and spinning. We wondered what they were - jackals, I think, but Kathryn thought they were deer, with their long, strange legs (yeah, right, Kathryn). We watched the nameless dark creatures play for awhile, listening to their paws on the fog-swept ice, the white ribbons bright in our above.

We left the fog a short while later. It was not yet 1pm, and the sun was warm. On a pile of rock, just off the trail, a man stood like he stood upon the sky, thrusting his hairy chest into the mild wind, his chin turned up just slightly, as if to acknowledge the mountain, but also to goad it. His hands on his hips, a smirk upon his face, he turned to us and smiled, Zeus joyous and mad, daring us to say we hadn't loved the view.

Sean Brander writes for The Athens News and appears here with permission.