Evening was falling over Troodos like a hand extinguishing the last candle in the world.
The snow glowed in fading greens and tired oranges, as if the mountain itself was asking forgiveness for all it had done to humankind. I sat on a high rock, carrying all of Cyprus in my chest, watching the few worn houses below; houses that looked like hearts still searching for a place to rest.
A tired dove appeared before me, digging into the earth as if looking for a small grave for a peace worn out by time. Yet she still held her olive branch, as if she knew that hope is the last thing that dies.
Far away, a flamingo crossed the line of the sea, pink like a beautiful wound, leaving a color in the air that refuses to heal.
Then Purja came from the direction of the snow, a man who had lived his whole life on the edge of death. He stood beside me as if he knew the path to my heart is the same way he knew the path to the summit. He spoke in a voice like wind passing through rocks: “We climb the same thing, my friend… You with words, and I with steps. Both are short lives, both are long meanings.”
He walked past the dove, and she did not fear him. She lifted her head toward him, as if all birds know who comes closer to the sky than to the earth.
Then he moved toward the white horizon, leaving behind a thin line, like a verse of poetry, like a life reduced to one scene: “A tired Cypriot dove, a migrating flamingo, and two men searching for a height worthy of what remains of the light.”
When the snow swallowed Purja, I felt the world had lost Prometheus… and that the summit he sought was never in the mountain, but in the human being himself. In that moment when one chooses to climb, even though life is shorter than the road.
Purja… child of humanity… Did you carry my letters with you as you passed over all the peaks? Letters white like your heart, like your love for what lies above the eagles’ nests, above what humans can endure.
In you, I mourn humanity, a humanity tired of graves, unable to find a place to rest except on forgotten summits, far from the crimes of humankind, close to the sky you loved, the same sky I dreamed of, until death.
Zouheir Shalabi
Nicosia 1/8/2026