Solitary

Roman travelers in the century after Christ would return to Rome with stories of naked hermits met in far, desert places, whose repeated word was the strange word which eventually worried Rome into believing it: "God is love. . . ."

To the new Rome that is the U. S. has returned one of its adopted sons, the ubiquitous, restless Russian painter of Philadelphia, Capt. Vladimir ("Vovo") Perfilieff, erstwhile of the Tsar's Cossacks (TIME, Dec. 19, 1927). Some years he goes to the Balkans. Once he went to Haiti with Naturalist William Beebe. Two years ago he went "up" north down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. Last summer he went to see the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, which have changed scarcely by one syllable of a prayer since the 4th and 5th Centuries. Last week he was telling his friends, and editing a cinema film to show others, about a man of 79 who lives nearly naked under a rock on Mount Athos and whose word is: "God is love, and tolerance, and Nature."

The healthy, wooden-faced men in the Mount Athos monasteries were reluctant to tell where the hermit lived. The visitors found him in a high labyrinth of bowlders, a place with a pure blue sky and the sound of bees. "Come in," answered a frail voice (in Russian) when they called. "Here I am."

His eyes were like clear-shining little blue stones, without fear, without self. He cried softly, for joy, and knelt and thanked them for coming to see him. He had seen but 16 other people in his 37 years there. He kept history in tiny scratches on a stone, beside a meticulous lunar calendar. What could he do for them?--he asked it like a child. Once he had been proud, he said, so he had come here to see God. He had not yet seen God, but now he knew he could not see him until he died.

He had been a farmer, a soldier in Russia's wars, killing many people. He had gone to the monastery to be purified but had found too much comfort (two meals per day, four hours of sleep, eight hours of prayer or meditation, the rest work). So he had climbed the mountain to be alone.

At first he tried to subsist for 47 days on sea water, two sips a day, which he stole down the mountain to get. "It contains minerals," he explained. But his stomach had troubled him so he changed to fresh water, carrying heavy stones for penance on a thong about his neck. Then he had hanged himself by a thong under his armpits, but the thong broke and he fractured his ankle. Then he buried himself to the waist in earth. Faint though he was, God still would not come. That taught him humility.

Now he was very happy, waiting only to die. Could they bring him anything? He declined a two-year supply of food which they carried up to him in tins, but accepted an overcoat. He was getting old, he said, and the nights in his cave were sometimes so cold the snakes would creep to him for warmth. He thanked them for the overcoat--which had to be smuggled to him because the monasteries disapprove of him, the solitary--and in return asked them only one favor: they must never tell anyone his real name. Let them call him "Father Ilya" or anything like that. "Because I have put away the world," he said. "And now I will still know that no one is thinking about me, that I am here all alone."

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