All this had very little to do with the spiritual life of a Uraler, who put candles, by the way, in front of popular icons and during the Blessing of the Water at Epiphany readily took a dip in a moonlit ice-hole whose solid ice grabbed his wet soles like strong glue. No matter how far from his ordinary place and life a Uraler's intellectual interests strayed (many rock hounds, in the licit part of their lives, worked in space research and defense), he knew that the veins of ore and gems were the rock roots of his consciousness. The world of mountain spirits where the Uraler has always resided is a pagan world. It includes, specifically, UFOs three to fifteen meters in diameter whose movements through the air look like the bobbing of a spindle, as well as the silky green quasi-men that outsiders take for aliens. In fact, these are the locals: practical reptiles guarding semi-precious lenses. From time to time, prospectors get to see the Great Snake. This subterranean snake with the head of a gigantic old man looks like something straight out of Ruslan and Ludmila — except that the Great Snake's head is bald, with dark, burnished spots; his lips are mottled and fleshy, too, and he has a broken nose the size and shape of a boot. The Great Snake travels underground as if it were underwater. His body, stretching out in rings in front of the dumb-struck prospector, looks like a stream of thundering gravel being dumped from the back of a truck: dust rises, whitened bushes stir, the ground turns gray in spots, forming a wrinkly trench — and it is along this trench that one should search for the alluvial and vein gold that royally fills the prospector's ruined trousers.
Sometimes a mountain spirit is hard to tell from a human. The Stone Maiden, also known as the Mistress of the Mountains, looks nothing like the beautiful actress in the fake blue eyelashes and green headdress who represents the Mistress in the matinees at the local drama theater. The Stone Maiden can appear to a rock hound in the most ordinary guise, for instance, as a middle-aged lady vacationer stained with berries, besieged by mosquitoes, and carrying a pail of cucumbers; or like the woman at the train station snack bar, with her starched tower of bleached hair and puffy, yearning eyes; or like a fifteen-year-old girl who has a breeze flying down the neck of her loose t-shirt as she bends over and works the pedals of her rickety bike. The Stone Maiden doesn't keep just to the remote parts of the forest and mountains. She's no beast. She feels perfectly free to appear in the city with its four million inhabitants, which is standing without realizing it on mighty knobs of malachite, like a subterranean cabbage field, and on fat gold in ribbed quartz.
In the narrow eddies of the urban population the Stone Maiden is recognized only by whoever she has come to see. Suddenly, at the sight of a perfectly unremarkable woman, the rock hound's soul is strangely magnetized. Suddenly, unfamiliar features and gestures compose themselves into a dear and desired face, and to the atheist it seems as if literally before his very eyes, out of ordinary matter, of which there is so much in a crowd, God has created for him a unique and miraculous being, as if he has been presented with obvious proof of man's creation by divine sleight-of-hand. And the bearded fool can't stop himself from making a bee-line for the stranger, who is filled with inexpressible fascination, who serves as proof of his uniqueness among all other men, and who everyone else around him is prepared to reject.
It's not true that the Mistress of the Mountains needs stone-cutting skill from a man. In reality, she, like any woman, needs love, but it must be real love of that special and genuine composition whose formula no one has ever been given. Any feeling has shadowy parts, sometimes it itself is a shadow. Lacking any basis for comparison or real expertise, the Stone Maiden's chosen one feels he has been granted much more than ever before. Doubts lay intersecting wrinkles on the chosen one's face, and the life lines that the ordinary man sees in his palm and in some sense holds in his hand appear on his brow. The subject alternatively does and does not believe in the authenticity of his own emotion; on a disturbing night, when his girlfriend's perfectly still body suddenly gets very heavy in her sleep and crushes her half of the bed, like a toppled statue, it occurs to the man that it would be easier to rip open his own belly than to open up and check on his own soul — at least the former is physically possible. Suicide over a happy love, over a fully reciprocated feeling, is not such a rarity in the Ural capital. If you dig in the police files, you'll find quite a few puzzling instances of suicide, when the deceased was found with a blissful smile on his petrified lips — that is, his mouth had literally turned into a mineral, into a hard stone flower, lying there as an eternal adornment on his sunken face. Somewhere nearby, in an obvious spot, there was a neat white document accompanying the deceased and lying parallel to the lines of the furniture and room — his suicide note, addressed to a woman and consisting for the most part of mediocre verse. She whom the suicide addressed had vanished completely, as if she had fallen straight through the earth. Descriptions of her, related by the deceased's family and neighbors, proved so contradictory that it was a wonder how the powerful optics of their collective — and now even greater — dislike had distorted the suspect.
Sometimes, though, a Uraler would survive an encounter with the Stone Maiden. Never again did a man like that venture beyond the city limits or have anything to do with the gem business, and according to rumors he couldn't see himself in mirrors, as a result of which he lost his feeling of self and would restlessly finger his own face, squeezing the solid parts hard and grabbing the soft flesh into thick folds. Whenever anyone addressed him, the poor man would immediately get distracted with verifying his own presence and the presence on his person of appropriate clothing. The pause, which was accompanied by a survey of his buttons and a bow to his own trousers, was brief but so unpleasant to his interlocutor that a former rock hound who sincerely promised himself to henceforth lead only an ordinary, licit life could never get a career going at all. In individual cases, the Stone Maiden's lover would run off with his girlfriend, taking none of his possessions along, and laying out his money — sometimes wads of dollars in rubber bands — neatly in that same obvious place where his last letter would have lain had he killed himself. Experienced cops who had studied the m.o. of these kinds of disappearances called this the «post office.»