I no longer struggled with the communicative aspects of our already profound relations… and the words flowed out of me, I spoke the tongue of the Zorza with class and with finesse and I do it to this day with sophistication and I have always been hungry to learn more! The tongue of Zorza, the language isolate immemorial... and it is a weird but pretty language, obscure to me until the moment I fully understood it with the blink of a tiger’s eye: it is full of swaying diphthongs and triphthongs that flow about slowly and create ligament and tendon to long words ripe with many different meanings at once. It has a hissing, mysterious phonologic aura to it; vibrant and free-flowing... the speculations of the layman linguist such as myself would draw to the consonant-heavy harsh-soundingness of the Slavic tongues, particularly perhaps the western ones. It is reminiscent to some degree to old proto-Polish, although it is way denser with vowels, so it could not be that. As I mentioned, the triphthongal words are rather a standard variety than a hidden curious oddity – it is in this regard completely different from, say, Polish, or even Belarusian which I also considered… yet it definitely sounds Slavic. But it is different in some fundamental elements from everything I have heard before – the strange, random and loose syntax with which they construe their sentences was alien to me for the longest time, and the melodies and intonations they interweave into their speech are underpinned with a lot of emotion; it is almost as if emotion is a constitutional part of the language itself: they spit and throw ugly words, and they make love to beautiful ones…

My steps are heavier than yesterday and the air feels denser. Colder, damper. I chip more and more in order to take breaths and it becomes more frightening with each and every one. The air filters through the grossness of my palate and becomes distilled of its natural freshness. A cloud of vapor forms in the strained breathings of exhaled air and the hairs on my arms bristle in the morning cold. The ground is frozen in wreaths of hoarfrost and the sudden, strange drop of temperature from yesterday is baffling to my senses; in the wake of this thought I shiver in body and mind. There is an uncanny atmosphere, an ambiance of natural Nordic melancholy convolving these woodlands now, a dismal fogginess… a foreboding imminence startling and unsettling… and the landscapes have shifted accordingly, along the lines of these eerie impressions – the terrain is churlish now: hundreds of robust roots, stumpy and sinuous and like serpents fleeing a scolding earth, penetrate the frost-bitten soil and reach like murky antennas towards a bitter sky exploded with a matted, lifeless, sullen coloring… like old lead it reflects the shining of the sun, and what comes of that disgraceful light is heavy, and it is sure to evoke a gloominess of the soul. Gone is the fragrance and the opulence, the softness of the scenic wanderings of yesterday, and gone is the warbling of the larks followed by hoarse answers from crows and magpies; gone are the deep green verdures and the redness of their abundance of berries. Where is my luscious , warm forest? The moist, mossy ground covered in delightful, edible mushrooms seems to have sunken deep into subterranean caverns beneath, as if undermined by a malignant magnetism of nature… the sprawling growth of the ground – an animal’s banquet in which I too have been reveling – seems now to have withered inexorably and unexplainably, as if under the cosmic nigrescence and reversion of a mighty sun... and it is an outright curse and horror… I no longer find lusciousness in the soil I tramp, but death, death and death… and I love it as much as I feel bothered by it.

the heart of the earth appears before me in a web-like cluster of black veins yet to be slit and punctured – by the dagger I so wield with my white hands!