For some reason, you have a sub-directory within /russ/perl_scripts/monks whose name is "...". The cd command from cygwin does UNIX-like things with . and .., but ... is just another dot-file like .bashrc. Or directory, in this case. Since you typed cd .../. instead of ../.. (what you probably originally meant to type), you used cd to go down into the ... directory, and then into . within it (which we all know means "current dir"[*]). So your final destination was /russ/perl_scripts/monks/....

--rjray

* Of course we all know that the concepts of . and .. are a little more involved than that. I'm just limiting this to the relevant information.