ONE monologues: "Above the Winds, as God passes with His chariot above the clouds, announcing rain with lightning, opening eyelids to infinity, steps from ancient ancestral memories are heard on the historic cobblestones. They come from the magnificent temple of the Virgin, which lies in her bosom, beyond the paternal slopes of the horizon, like a plate of food seasoned with the weddings of heaven and earth; a wide contemplation spreads the city. The extensive view removes the mortal from the face, allowing him to understand what comes after, before the end and dissolution of natural consubstantiality. Then he feels foreign names become his own body. In his self-interested mind he retains nothing personal anymore, when even before dawn the gate opens."

THE BREATH OF THE DEAD stretched before him into infinity. It filled the voids of space, where the earth and all round worlds swirl. It was not confused with the air of the atmosphere or the ether of space, nor was it performed in two times like inhalation and exhalation. It stood, eternally remaining the same. A space that encompassed all time, intact. The breath of the dead is a vital, receptive source of the soul. An honorable house, a room with four walls, where he himself was inside and breathed.

THE DAY is beautiful. Yet as today the nature is sanctified by waters with a transcendent opening of the Sky, the beauty of the day does not depend on whether the natural sun shines or not. It is rather cloudy. It does not rain because yesterday all the tears of the repentant were shed. The clouds, holding back their own tears, give a pearly light.

A careful reading of the Expert Report reveals completely different things from the shapeless and loose sequence of heterogeneous narrative cells. The book simultaneously tells two stories. The first is that of the small Thessaloniki society, each person sympathetic in their own way, who live hard lives, love, abandon and die in order to be reborn in another form. The second is that of the progressive purification of the gaze of a witness who deteriorates and disappears into contemplation and whose literary work dissolves into an ineffable mystical message.

HENRI TONNET