We sit like Platon's ideals in front of our fickle, monstrously distorted shadows, projected behind our backs by the force of a single frail flame of a candle propped up in the sand at our feet. The thick traces of soot on the ceiling melt and morph like shapeshifting ghosts when you put your head in your neck. When you stare straight ahead the vault of the sky stretches white with starlight out from under this blackened, soot-smeared arch.
Mars is laboriously slowly making its way through Taurus. Along the frayed edge of a neighbouring mountain ridge a first corner of grey augurs the idle advent of the following day.

The inside of the cave echoes with the music produced by Pedro on his Hutsul dulcimer. There are no words for this beauty. These are the most wondrous, fairy tale-like sounds I've ever heard. Vasya sits beside Pedro, blowing the Jew's harp.

I absolutely wanted my new friend Vasya here with me when playing stone age in the cave city Mangup. With his long scraggy dreads that reach down to his waist and his wild, tangled beard which right now hangs seperated in two braids of different sizes from his chin, he looks the closest to a paleolithic man I have ever seen.

As for Pedro, his hair is shaved to what some call "an inverted monk", and an assymetrical one at that.