Pop go the greetings
Pop go the bloblets
Since this is the first day of the rest
of my life I might as well depict what
I experienced years earlier up north.
It is awfully cold up there and winter
temperatures go to extremes. One of the worries,
and they had many ranging from fish to bears,
of my in-laws was the damages inflicted
upon the trees that they owned in their mountains.
Part of their businesses was furniture making
and for that they had to have high quality
timbers. However, under these extreme conditions
trees do succum to nature's preoccupation.
Water contents in their trunks get frozen and as
they do so they invariably expand, exerting
enormous pressures within the trees,
with the net result that they actually push
apart the trunks from within. When these happen
the forests reverberate with echoes of the big bang.
This process is commonly known as freeze bursting
(coined).
The energy that previously bonded the tissues
together is now released into the atmosphere
in terms of explosions that could be heard
throughout the northern nights in winter times.
My in-laws' worry, quite predictably, was that
priceless trees are rendered literally pricesless in
these natural processes.
Now, you might think that that is the end of
my story, but you are wrong. These extreme
cold temperatures affect all aspects of life
in the north.
Sure, you have road accidents, avalanches, and
hundred of other things arising from extreme
cold temperatures . You just name them and
you would be damn right in all of them.
However, there is one phenomenon that might be
of inrerest to many. Greetings are, of course,
not forgotten even in these extreme conditions.
People do exchange greetings day and night. The
problem is that as it is so damn cold greetings
get frozen the moment they are uttered.
They get frozen and fall to the ground. In fact,
that process takes only a millionth of a second
and consequently you get enormous temperature
gradients across the surface of the frozen
greetings, which form these tiny bloblets. Yes,
they are therefore amorphous in their structure.
An electron micrograph will bear that out
very cleary. They are also very unstable.
They contain all the phonetic energies
normally associated with greetings. Any
disturbances, no matter how tiny they are,
could bring in the onset of system
failure and mulfunction
and release the energies back into the universe
that we live in. How and when would that be?
Well, it is the arrival of
the very early spring. Of course, the atmospherics
will not be experiencing anything that might remotely
resemble that of the spring in full swing.
However, subzero temperatures do the tricks.
Bloblets lying on the ground are instantly
activated from their unstable states.
In fact, they rapture and pop. Pop go the greetings. Pop go the bloblets.
The phonetic energies thus released
push air molecures in the vicinity
and the waves so created propagate through
large distances and reach our ear drums. We hear
the echoes of past greetings, not perfect, of
course. No doubt that there have been
distortions and losses.
Collectively, they go something like this and
there are lots and lots of them to pop.
"Goo", "ood mor", "...ing", "ow you?..." and the towns
and villages suddenly reverberate with lively
echoes of the past greetings. Pop go the greetings. Pop go the bloblets.
What he was mucking about, I had no idea.
Not that I was too concerned, anyway.
A 6 star hotel? Whatever...
Still, he was a pleasant and unusually
cheerful fellow
and he had this unique
way of harnessing his own version of the language,
which still lingers in my memory to this day.
Where people would normally have said, "I've got to
find a place to stay", or something of
that sort he would pronounce every
single member of the sentence.
That is, he would say "I have got to find
a place to stay" He would say that with alacrity
and with every single sentence which contained
"'ve got to".
I got used to it soon, though. I naturally
wondered where he had picked up his
language skills.
He was a local tour guide, clean shaven
each morning with a radiant smile
all over his face, probably in his late twenties,
or early thirties.
I still have his namecard, somewhere.
No, I had not been in the habit of
going out with tour groups. I had been
drawn into it by a chance remark 
made
by an elderly Japanese gentleman,
who was staying in the same cave hotel
and had apparently crossed the border into
Anatolia from Iran by bus. 
Yes, he had come up the Silk Road from
Parthia!
He apperared to be a seasoned traveller.
Probably, in his late sixtees, but
still going strong.
I, on my part, was there upon an impulse
and a sudden urge I had felt while
chomping up my mackarel sandwiches 
down at the end of the Bridge, linking
the two land masses.
It was, after all, just a short flight
to Kayseri.
No well considered prior plannnig,
nothing, just go!
I actually had had somewhere else,
down south, in mind.
We went to a few places on that day. One of them,
still relatively unknown then, now fairly commonly
heard about was a non-starter.
Who the hell cares about dwelling right underneath
potato fields! Of course we went down
there, all stuffy and dimly lit small world
of its own. I gather that since then a few
more have been uncovered. I could not care less.
I did, however, make a small contribution
while down there.
I discovered another of the markings
left by the underground dwellers, the existence
of which this or for that matter no other
guides would have noticed before. 
It had been hidden from the normal viewing angles.
You know that physicists would love to look out
for oddities and odd angles forever!
The Grand Canyon, he said, a local version of it.
We went there, too. Oh well, interesting. There
were lots and lots of trees and clear streams and donkeys.
Oh, come on! Trees and steams and donkeys?
What were so interesting about them?
Only interesting, because out up there,
beyond the Canyon edges into the vast opennes,
vegetation was almost non-exsistent,
too barren for anything. No trees to speak of,
but coarse grasses were seen just about everywhere.
As far as I was concerend where there were grasses
they were not deserts. My deserts would only have consisted
of undulating sand dunes and camels.
There were none of them in sight. Somebody must have
bolted the pack.
"We are now arriving at our 6 star hotel",
proudly announced our guide. It was only then that I
realised what he had been mucking about.
What it was one of the stations on
the Silk Road!
It was a structutre to be amazed at.
For a start it was very large and tall
with stables for the camels and
sleeping quarters, canteens etc,
all in that solid rock building.
I would say that it was easily
50m x 50m across, two storeys
at that!
However, there were grasses all
around! It was not even
sitting on a sand dune, either!
It sat squarely on a very gentle and solid
slope, almost flat, with isolated trees
seen here and there, and over there, too.Looking back on it now, it probably was the
right decision to have joined the tour.
I did not have my car to drive around.
Distances were quite formidable.
You could see that
easily, looking down far below even
the mushroom place appeared a couple of miles away.
It was a vast country. It really was. And I was practically
in the middle of nowhere.
Around us in the far distance were
hills, very barren, and mountains, high.
I could even see Mt. Erciyas out there.
My thoughts were going back to the early history
of this region, the pre Romans, the Romans
and the Turks, and the Persians, and all those
main players in the history of the region.
I was right in the middle of the homeland of
Hittites!
Local geography
was simple and obvious and it would have
been the same to all those participants.
If you want to go east, say, to China,
you must go up that way
, passing the foot
of the volcano, Mt. Erciyas (3917m),
which sits right in the middle of Anatolia
and eventually, higher up and up around
Mt. Ararat, which is located at the eastern border.
Now, Mt. Erciyas is the fourth highest volcano
halfway down Anatolia between Mt. Ararat
and Istanbul.
Together, they must have completed
the process of making Anatolia as high
and flat as it is today
.
It is a sedimentation of 2 km deep, of white
and soft volcanic ashes and to anybody's eyes
it is a striking feature of the region.
However, the plateau does not continue as far
out as Istanbul. 
It, in fact, tails off quite
dramatically in the mushroom valley, just west of Kayseri.
Only a few days earlier I was standing
at a vantage point in the pumpkin field
near my hotel, half way down
from the edge of where it all started.
In the far distance was a vast plain
which was completely flat and horizontal
due to gravitational compression,
with Mt. Ercias in the background 
,
shinning white.
Its western edges abruptly clipped off
to make way for the valleys
which contained the famous mush room kingdom.Yes, this was where the eternal process of
errosion had been taking place, creating the
mushrooms and creating those mini
Canyons with small rivers running in them.
You start out from the airport, driving
on a completely flat region for one hour or so.
You see nothing unusual on your way.Shops are there, filling stations and
towns and villages are also all there
on the vast and flat expanse of the land.You are driving on the flattest part of
the plateau. Then, a sudden precipitation
is waiting for you at the edge of it all,
with the firm ground cascading into
the mushroom kingom and the valleys far below
your eyes.
It was quite a sensation to be at the edge of it.And, that was where I was.I was watching the whole area with exitement
standing in a small pumpkin field.
Ah!, there they go, in a single file.
Are they chariots? Look at those
horrible looking lances and swords!The snow began initially with only a few flakes 
spinning down from nowhere and then
became a steady fall,
quickly
obscurring the line of my thoughts...
"...up there. " My taxi driver pointed to it. Very long stone walls of uneven graynish yellow, perhaps 3,4 meters high obscured anything beyond it, except a glimpse of subtropical bushes through the narrow gap of stone staircase cut into the walls.
Yet, her singing was already audible in the soft drizzling mist, perhaps rare for this island striding across the tropic of cancer. As I approached the gap I knew what she was singing. It was one of the songs she had best covered, "Ye Lai Xian". Musical notes were tumbling down, overriding the walls, down the short flight of stairs. I could see them, all around me.
Literally, I felt that the air surrounding the place was swinging with the mist. And, with the mist were musical notes quietly dancing in unison. Teresa then was, at her best. She was singing for herself, obviously quite unaware of my presence. Initially, as I stepped out on to the cemetary compound I momentarily thought that she was singing through the stone piano that I had read so much about.
No, she was singing from much farther away, at her permanent resting place, which was heavily decorated with bunches of tropical flowers. I also noticed an elderly fellow standing near her tomb, obviously local. I did not like it, because I was wanting to sing for her there, one of her songs, "Ren Er Bu Neng Liu", which I had learnt through internet.
Looking back on it now I could not have done it, because she would not stop singing. Wondering if she was always singing the same Ye Lai Xian I approached her and knelt down on my knees in the mist. I had not brought anything with me in terms of extra flowers or anything else for that matter. It was then that this fellow produced a long stick of already lit incense for me to take, not even a single word exchanged.
I just grabbed it in silence and placed it in front of her photo. I only then realised that it was the same photo carried on one of her web pages. I remained in that posture for a long time indeed, because I was talking to her. Funny, that I had not known her in any significant way until recently, let alone her songs. It all started, historically, from my search for the identity of that virtual singer, who even managed to get a free ride on a flight to Venus.
Anyway, that then was the moment in life as it happened on a whim in December 2014.
My song?, yes, I sang it for her all in Chinese at the piano...hope she liked it...
I stood there watching, watching right across
miles of shallow and translucent waters in disbelief.
I was disturbed and dismayed perhaps,
because the whole thing just did not look right!
The tropical air was heavy and dense.
I was not there for the sun and beaches. I was not
being a bloody tourist.
Was I seeing parts of Indonesia? Was the whole thing
just a figment of my imagination? Was I watching anything at all?
I could not decide. 
In any event, we could not
have navigated in these extremely shallow waters. 
But then, I had meticulously planned to be here,
come right to the point where I was,
with a friend of mine and a local driver, who
we had brought all the way from the capital
on our chartered drive.I sat there in the sand at the edge of the
water, splashing in the foam as
gentle waves broke across my feet.
My mind was slowly drifting back to the days,
quite oblivious to the presence of my companion,
when I had been in my early twenties, 
aboard a huge ship that had left the port
of Kobe far, far back in time,
on my way to where history abounded and
my destiny still hidden away.
After all, I, at that time, was an ex who had
majored in the Spanish language, not knowing
that I would be reading physics in England
エイミ－、最近のマチュピチュで英語には過去過去完了がないと
言いましたよね？その一例がこれです。なので、 at that time
と言う副詞句で弱弱しく、その不備を補っています。
私にとっては理由は明快です。昔の人たちは忙しくて、
文など書いているひまはなかったのです。なので、
どの言語をとっても、過去過去完了など、あるはずが
ありません。丁度、３世代を超えてのお墓参りが
成立しないようなものです。過去過去完了など、
文の中でしか必要がないでしょう。
中国語でも似たようなことを副詞句で行なうとは、ずっと前に
言いました。中国語には動詞の活用がないので、
避けられないのです。
漢字が複雑なので、動詞の活用まで手が回らなかったのが
中国語です。
これが、名詞なら、言語が何であれ、辞書になくても
自分で勝手に作れば良いのですが、さすがに文法の
根幹はいじれません。
and doing experiments
day in and day out
in my postgrad laboratories, 
let alone
making spoons and chopsticks later on in my life!!!OK, it then must have been during the night
that we crossed this part of the Straight,
or had it been?
I had no recollection of having seen anything 
during our passage through the Straight.
I did remember, though, that I had longed to
catch a glimpse of the Straight
and all those things tropical that you would
naturaly have
associated with it and expected to see around it.
If my memory served me right our ship always
had left our port of calls during morning hours.
I was confused then as now.It could have been either during the night hours
that we had gone through the narrowest part of it,
or that even the narrowest part had not been
narrow enough 
for me to have seen
anything exciting during day time.
After all, if you were really out at sea 
you would not see a thing but waters and
a few occasional ships and flocks of birds.Waves were still coming in gently
in transparent sheets of water and
ebbing away in slow succession, breaking
only very occasionally and as they did
ever so feebly as if in near whisper
around my ankles.
My mind was swaying back and forth,
not being able to absorb what all these shallow
waters really epitomized.
In a sudden flash
, though, I spotted myself.
Standing right out there!, right at the very front
edge of the huge ship going majestically
down the Straight,
with me standing tall, clutching the railings
firmly, gazing into the vast expanse
of the Indian Ocean ahead,
trying to make sense of life, trying to
see what perhaps lay ahead and yet all
restricted from my immediate access.
I was being Kate Winslet
on the Titanic
It had not been 84, but mere 30 odd years ,
and I could still smell fresh paint, but no china.
エイミ－、この最後の部分はタイタニックの冒頭の台詞を知らないと
理解できないでしょう。その時、ケイトは１００歳以上
でしたが（映画では）、未使用の磁器等が沢山あったと、
言っています。
でも、私の乗っていた船にはそんなものはありません。なので、
この最後のパラグラフは、それを反映しています。
正確に言うと、船客の一人はドイツ人のお婆さんで、
彼女は香港で、なんと、磁器、陶器の類をトラックの
台数で５、６台分くらい買っていました。
あれも、もしかしたら彼女のタイタニック？
私もケイトも、でも、ペンキの匂いは覚えていました。
航海中はペンキを塗るのですよ。ヒマだから。
おまけに、皆で大きなハンマ－で鉄板を叩きつけて
サビを落とします。洋上で。私も勿論参加しました。
その後でペンキを塗ります！
All air attendants are formal and frigid creatures,
no matter what airline you are flying with,
no matter what their nationalities are,
let alone their agesI was out to melt and defrost and crack them,
but how and why?
The WHY bit was easy. I had been bored
to death as usual even with this relatively
short flight, and as ever
there was
nothing much to kill time by in my confined space.
I do not read books in flight nor do I much
listen to musics. And I abhore movies and games.
We had been out over the Med and
I could see wakes all over the calm
surface of the sea right down there.
I could even see boats and ships!
Somehow, we had not shot up into the stratsphere.
We were not doing an intercontinental,
if you come to think about it.
That I could see wakes must have
meant calm seas. I was therefore
quite excited about the prospect of
fishing off the Island.
I had brought my own primitive, but
devastatingly effective fishing gear
that I had made at home.
On our way out there I had seen the European
Alps, or so I had assumed, but then it could not
have been. The onboard flight chart clearly
indicated otherwise,
that we were flying over Marseille en route,
where my wife had been holidaying
with our children.
No, I had not seen the Alps, which must have been
way out somewhere down in that direction.
However, that snow capped mountainous
region off Marseille, immediately to
the north east must have been a bad omen
to Hannibal and his lot with all those
thirty odd elephants.
You clearly do not wish to waste them,
not so early on during your millitary campaign, if you
knew that you were going to cross
the Alps into where the Romans were waiting.
Books say that they went deep inland in Gallia
and that sheer mass of it, falling sharply
into the Med
must have been the reason, to turn away from
coastal areas, away from hot pursuits,
trying desperately to blend into dark forests.
My moments of thoughts were interrupted by
sudden wailing and shreaks of a small baby
girl who was seated
two rows down with her father.
He did not seem capable of coping
with his child, or even qualified to do so.
You know how annoying it can be with
crying babies. Air attendants were uniformly
conniving at the state of affairs. Oh, yes, they
were all pretty Malties
, except that
they did not seem to do anything
about it, not wanting to, perhaps.
I was therefore about to take the matter
into my own hands, but then, to my surprise
her crying came to an abrupt end. Finito!
I actually had some tricks in mind I was going to
play on the girl. So, I decided to savage one of the
attendants instead, who came down my way.
M. Excuse me, Ms! Did you see him?
Did you see him just now?
A. I beg your pardon, sir?
She was being amply formal, with a very stern
expression on her pretty and slightly Sun tanned face,
and that is exactly what you would expect
of them,
after so many hundred hours of solid training,
to be formal and yet friendly. However, under
these rather abnormal circumstances,
not explicit in their training manuals, perhaps,
she was obviously confused as to how to take
control of this situation. 
She did not know how to react to this
strange and perhaps crazy Oriental gentleman
,
probably to the extent of assuming that
my linguistic ability was causing some problems.
(Why the hell are you supposed to be
seeing anybody new on board or outboard, anyway?)
M. He was out there just now, flying with us!
I pointed to the window.
She was reasonable up top
and probably was
in her mid twenties. She was very quick to realise, however,
what I was on about!
Her ice cold face melted
in a billionth of a second into that of
a pretty woman of her age.
Her subsequent reaction was something I had not
expected, something quite extraordinary!!!.
In fact, you were not supposed to
do anything as naughty as that
with your guests!
She smacked me
right on my head and then nudged me
hard with her elbow with a big and rupturous
smile, which was highly contageous and
bordering on a laughter!
That precisely was the moment I had cracked an air
attendant while on duty. Yes, she did bring me an
extra glass of champagne to celebrate the occasion.
We had not shared that moment with anybody else.
After all nobody could have overheard our fleeting
conversation in such a short span of time.
It probably was all over within 15 seconds from
the onset of it all.
Our captain was blaring out something about the local weather, no
significant air turbulance ahead. I was now rapidly
approaching the days of fishing in the Med.
Earlier, I perhaps waxed poetic on her.
However, the compound atmosphere on that day looked very surreal, with
all that faintly shining, eerie mist in the soft drizzling rain, hiding her
resting place on and off, and partially.
Besides, she was singing, from nowhere, and it was quite obvious that she was
not exactly happy that she had had to depart from this world, so prematurely.
Recent news relating to her anniversary alone compels me to accept it, that
she had regrets. I would not have been surprised had she been there and
slowly turned my way and smiled, as if she had been expecting me, wanting to
tell me all about them...
Yes, we would have talked in Japanese, perhaps, or possibly in English. She was
fluent in several different languages anyway, and that alone would have taken
care of one of her worries. I would have patted her on the back. About her
other worries and regrets I could not have said a lot, I think...
We all live with that sort of things. Perhaps, she would be there, trying
to sing them away. Perhaps, we could do with talking graves. You point your
smart phone at the bar code, engraved somewhere on the stone and you hear of
all the things she would have liked to talk to you about.
It would not be purely by way of her pre-recorded voice. Rather, it would have
been computer generated, and subsequently modulated by her own recorded voice
for reference purposes...
Would I want one? I think I do...
All that day summer sulked and gathered
intensely over the university, and heat
shimmered on pavement.
I had at long last made it back to
where we were staying for the rest of
our project.It had been so damn outrageously hot,
and it felt enormously reassuring to
be back in such a colossal volume of space
that had been constantly deenergised
for comfort. All of my fellow project
team members had dispersed into
their own retreats and I was on my own,
wondering if I should go for some ice cold
beers., or even hydrogen beers.
I then realised that a live piano performance
was starting right next to where I was
contemplating on my next move.
She appeared to be a student, although dressed
profusely and formally for the occasion I could
see that she was one, perhaps from a nearby college of
music.
I quickly abandoned the thought of going for
beers and decided to stay there for the next
ten minutes or so.
After all, I had been yarning to be able to
play those what might be described as screen
musics. She was playing good.
I was being entranced by what I was listening to
after all those long hours of work, first into
the heat and then out back into the heat.
It would have been a perfect combination of
heat and subsequent comfort, bar one thing I
was about to witness within the next few seconds.
There, to my sheer astonishment, I saw it
She did exactly just that, too! I could not
take my eyes off her very attractive hip,
that had so blatantly made such an unbeliebable
move, coming no doubt from hours of training
at the keyboard from morning till night,
which was a stark contrast to what
I could have afforded to myself.
My mind flashed back to the humiliation
I had suffered years earlier at a small concert
where I was supposed to be
playing, for the first time in my life,
Chopin's La Adieu, an Etude, op 10-3,
which is one of the most difficult by him.
I had gone over it, spending long hours,
for the occasion. There had not been any
significant problem with my playing it.
However, I must now admit that I had been
totally optimistic that I would be able to
perform it without hitches.
It was a grand piano I was sitting to.
My fingers flew, quite elegantly for the first
part of the score.
Then, soon, I realised that I was getting
quite a strong glare into my eyes. I had not thought
about the hypnotic effect of such a bright light source.
After all, it was a formal occation. However,
the worst was still looming over the horizon.
As anybody who plays La Adieu knows the
introductory slow start will soon turn into
frensic motions of fingers,
just like mixing mahjon pieces on the table.
It was that part my fingers could no longer
follow the score properly.
The reason was obvious to me as I tried to
continue. With my own piano, which is an old
Steinway, its chair is intended for tandem use.
I could occupy all of it to myself, gaining
all the space I needed to cope with the
most rigorous part of the score.
Alas, on the mini concert stage the chair
was intended for a single player only!
Where I would have normally moved my hip
around on the tandem chair I now had to extend
my arms and fingers to the limit.
I simply was not coping. There was no room
on that damn single player chair for me to move
my hip sideways.
Well, what she had was a tandem chair
She would have coped with a single player chair,
if that had been what she had to be content with.
After all, she was a student of music, and after all
it was not a contest of any kind. Who else would have
noticed except me anything extraordinary about her hip
movement during that pocket money earning performance
of hers!
Her fingers were happily dancing
over and across the keyboard.
Anatolia, and with it the whole of Asia Minor
is lopsided, very.
Mt. Ararat stands prominently at 5,165m on the
eastern border with Iran and only a few winding and
steep, trecherous roads precipitate into that part of Asia.
Amazingly, though, they were part of the Silk Road
into Anatolia and they continue in the opposite
direction literally right down the middle of Anatolia
to Istanbul.
And, two rivers emanate,from half way down
its slow decent, directly to the south of
Mt. Ararat, into the great plain of Mesopotamia,
which is really Syria and Iraq, the cradle of
civilization and where the two rivers will meet.
何故、この記述が必要かというと、あくまでも
ロ－マ人の視点からアナトリア以西の歴史を
見てみたい、それは、文明が初めて大規模に
激しく衝突した時期だったからです。アナトリアは
その舞台でした。長い間。。。
まず、大枠を確定する、その特徴を理解して
おく、それが今後の旅行や滞在に欠かせないと
思っているのです！
それがコルレオ－ネ村に滞在する時の歴史的な
背景ブリ－フィングになるのですから！
The average altitude even at the centre of
Central Anatolia is staggering 2 km !!!, that,
running down from Mt. Aratat, westward
over a distance of 800 km, past Mt. Erciyas,
standing at 3,917m, which is located
to the south of Kayseri, the town
the Romans named after Julius Caeser.
So, you can see that the whole of Asia Minor is,
not just simply lopsided, but that it is a
lopsided highland, twice as large in area as
Japan at that!
This story will soon unfold around that town,
nearly four thousand years since the days
of the iron people, the Hittites.
They had a spell in and disappeared as an entity
from history, not knowing that I would be there
one day right in the middle of their homeland, 
that after a lapse of four thausand years
I would be watching the same mountain
they called "the white mountain",
nor that I would be there, reflecting upon
the intervening sanguine history of the area,
that was to emerge in their long absence...
In the mean time the gradual decent still
continues west towards Istanbul with
a tell-tale example, down the descent
in terms of the Great Salt Lake, which is the
product of the sheer heat in the region,
with river waters being unable to reach
the Srtaight area as they were exhausted
through a massive evaporation process on
their way down there.
In fact, there are no major rivers
making it successfully into the seas in the
whole of western half of Anatolia.
The Romans knew it, must have known it
and that explains what they did with the pagans
in this region.
This area was largely treated as
a single entity by the Romans, to
protect the Empire from invasion
from further affield, Parthia.
It was a buffer zone where the two
civilizations met seriously for the
first time in history, Asia and Europe.
That is exactly what makes Anatolia
such an interesting place to history freaks.
The poor Turks still do not know whether
they are Asians or Europeans!
The Romans, however, would have been
very much more interested in controlling the
areas south of Anatolia, Syria in particular.
In describing these I have been heavily
supported by satellite pictures
of the whole region.
Where would natural paths be for
waters and the movements of armies
and soldiers, and logistic supplies?
By looking at satellite imagery
I begin to see how the Romans might have
thought about the whole area.
People would have moved like streams
of water, taking the least painful and perhaps
sometimes hazzardous, but logicaly sound routes,
with roads spontaneously being created along them,
water and food supplies sometimes guaranteed
along the routes.
You will see in my narratives soon, why
I think that way, how roads might have
developped in these virtually inhabitable places.+The "White Moutain" stood shining aloof in the far distance,
covered by snow from top to bottom, but somehow appeared as if
inviting me to ski on his slopes in the not too distant future.It was very sunny and bright, and slightly warmer than a few days earlier
when it had snowed. Blown in the wind
I was treading over snow-coated and half-perished pumpkins.I was chasing them one by one,
trying to destroy them all.
I looked up again for a puf, and the Mountain
sprung back into view.With all spontaneity I saluted in silence,
in my own humble way
, just in case I might...Was it my imagination then that the Mountain
appeared to notice my tiny presence there
and echoed with a nod of approval?