Free Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis Page B

of a vacation. The world outside Mount Athos he finds somehow lacking.
    Cesar draws me a little map to use to get to Vatopaidi and gives me a more general lay of the land. The mere fact that I don’t have a beard will expose me as a not terribly holy man, he explains, if my mauve Brooks Brothers shirt doesn’t do it first. “But they are used to having visitors,” he said, “so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Then he pauses and asks, “But what is your religion?”
    “I don’t have one.”
    “But you believe in God?”
    “No.”
    He thinks this over.
    “Then I’m pretty sure they can’t let you in.”
    He lets the thought sink in. “On the other hand, how much worse could it get for you?” he says, and chuckles.
    An hour later I’m walking off the ferry holding nothing but the Eagles Palace hotel laundry bag and Cesar’s little map, and he’s still repeating his own punch line—“How much worse could it get for you?”—and laughing more loudly each time.
    The monk who meets me at Vatopaidi’s front gate glances at the laundry bag and hands me a form to fill in. An hour later, having pretended to settle into my surprisingly comfortable cell, I’m carried by a river of bearded monks through the church door. Fearing that I might be tossed out of the monastery before I got a sense of the place, I do what I can to fit in. I follow the monks into their church; I light candles and jam them into a tiny sandpit; I cross myself incessantly; I air-kiss the icons. No one seems to care one way or the other about the obviously not-Greek guy in the mauve Brooks Brothers shirt, though right through the service a fat young monk who looks a bit like Jack Black glares at me, as if I was neglecting some critical piece of instruction.
    Otherwise the experience was sensational, to be recommended to anyone looking for a taste of tenth-century life. Beneath titanic polished golden chandeliers, and surrounded by freshly cleaned icons, the monks sang; the monks chanted; the monks vanished behind screens to utter strange incantations; the monks shook what sounded like sleigh bells; the monks floated by waving thuribles, leaving in their wake smoke and the ancient odor of incense. Every word that was said and sung and chanted was biblical Greek (it seemed to have something to do with Jesus Christ), but I nodded right along anyway. I stood when they stood, and sat when they sat: up and down we went like pogo sticks, for hours. The effect of the whole thing was heightened by the monks’ magnificently wild beards. Even when left to nature, beards do not all grow in the same way. There are types: the hopelessly porous mass of fuzz; the Osama bin Laden/Assyrian-king trowel; the Karl Marx bird’s nest. A surprising number of the monks resembled the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercial. (“His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man’s entire body.”)
    The Vatopaidi monks have a reputation for knowing a lot more about you than you imagine they do, and for sensing what they do not know. A woman who runs one of the big Greek shipping firms told me over dinner in Athens that she had found herself seated on a flight not long ago beside Father Ephraim, the abbot of Vatopaidi (business class). “It was a very strange experience,” she said. “He knew nothing about me, but he guessed everything. My marriage. How I felt about my work. I felt that he completely knew me.” Inside their church I doubted their powers—in the middle of a great national scandal they have allowed a writer , albeit one who has not formally announced himself, to show up, bunk down, and poke around their monastery without asking the first question.
    But coming out of the church I finally get seized: a roundish monk with a salt-and-pepper beard and skin the color of a brown olive corners me. He introduces himself as Father Arsenios.
    For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Greek interest rates had run a full 10 percent higher than