ABSTRACT
T he following evening I sat alone on the first-floor balcony watchingthe sun slide away to the west beneath Mt Kazbek. The town beforeme seemed ravaged by beauty and decay at one and the same time. Furthermore, up here in the High Caucasus there existed a quality of light I’d never seen before. A translucent, airy emerald in the grass that seemed to penetrate everything; the rock, the sky, one’s thoughts. In the face of so much snowy splendour, so much infinity right before one’s eyes, what did the smaller things in life (like work) matter?
