Holiday, outside

While I was away I managed to steal myself from the public sun and twittering crowd.

I found a valley, negotiated only by means of a stony footpath, at the end of which was a beach like a spew of immaculate ground rice. It was lost and the valley was overlooked by the ruins of a Cordovan fort.

This was my secret place for the week: the place in which I attempted to make contact with the austere horrors of nature. And it was the place in which I attempted to touch the beauty of nature. Horror and beauty are wild bedfellows outside.

I expected snakes and scorpions, but found none. I stumbled upon running-on-two-legs-lizards, skittish anti-gravity geckos, bombous devil's darning-needles, and huge columns of marching ants determined upon civilising the scrub.

The stream was dried to a stagnant skein of weed and mud, punctured by choked white boulders of yellow chalk, off-white stones and red-roasted soil. All vegetation was scratchy, brownish, bush-spine and parched pink thrift.

For birds I saw red-rumped swallows, azure-winged magpies, bee-eaters, and Sardinian warblers. Some of the colours were tropical. Almost like a child's illustration.

For butterflies I saw the blue-spot hairstreak, a couple of swallowtails, but mostly southern gatekeepers and cleopatras.

I found an upturned facies of rock that was once a beach, one hundred and fifty million Jurassic years ago. The squishing of the Tethys into Mediterranean, and the caesarian Atlantic belly-rip, had displaced it to an angle of some forty-five degrees from the horizon. I could see the petrified shells in the mudstones. I also spied three dinosaur tracks. Two the size of a hand; and a third, in the opposite direction, and much larger. Like monstrous, stupid, three-toed flightless-pigeon runways.

I was all squint-eyed and lens-flare stares, with dry breath, covered sweathead, leather arms, and walkers' boot, just thinking there about the past and the goddess, under the same sun.