The mountains are wild. One minute you are open to everything, you can make out the lines of a city one hundred and fifty miles to the east, and to the west the great lapping folds part before your eyes to a faraway blue, and below you a village freckles the mountainside and above you the sky passes the entire day.
You don't see it coming, if you looked carefully you might see a strand of pale smoke and a whitening, then the fog takes everything - the far horizon, the near tree, the earth and the sky, and you are thrust in on yourself on a little cut-out of land around you. We saw it pressing at the windows white at twighlight and we ran out. We are in a cloud which falls upon us like dew, a total immersion, and our clothes are mysteriously soaked. "We are on an island" says R, an island suddenly cut off from the earth and floating in a thick grey mystery. The bats came out from hibernation under the eaves and we listened to the flip of soft leather and watched the freeze frame dark flutters and on a high invisible tree, a blackbird sang with all its force, its song penetrating the the blindness in a long stream.
The wind is a terror, out from behind a rock and over the side, the gale is unspeakable, the snow forgives everything.
When it rains it is forever and there is no hope, when it shines, so has it always been: a thousand faces of a hundred flowers turn themselves up to view.
With thanks to B who took the four landscape photos in the centre.
