Magic of moonglow on the mountains
We are in the mountains of Madeira, way out in the Atlantic Ocean.
My son Brent is driving us all. He understands the Portuguese road signs and the friendly banter of the locals.
The roads wind up like snakes and there are garlands of azaleas and alliums, storksbills and hibiscus. The mountains go up beyond the clouds. Their sides are sheer. Yet they grow trees and bushes and mosses because the rain torrents down upon this vast mass of old larva and makes it glad to bring back life. You can almost see the heat in this rock, a violent reminder of the ages. The ancient furnaces are petrified now, left towering into the sky.
I crumbled some old larva in my fingers and it looked like dried blood, a primaeval scab, a reminder of wounds past: a warning of wounds to come.
We stood on a cliff as though on the edge of the Andes. Clouds occluded, faded, formed again. Suddenly hot sun, then shivering cold.
Birds flew in and out of the cauldron, vanishing and appearing.
Blackbirds and blackcap warblers sang inside this vast wandering cloud and their pipes and whistles entwined themselves among the stems and leaves and shadows as if they were part of the physical presence of trailing vines and the snaking stems of wild laurel, the laurissilva of the cloud forest.
The mountains formed and unformed into a dozen different shapes as we stood watching. Sometimes their green tops floated like earthly clouds.
Then the sun was shut away and a mysterious underworld of gloom shrouded us, to be smashed like a dark mirror again with fragments of glinting water sharp as glass tumbling down the waterfalls.
White ribbons of surf garland the bottoms of the cliffs as they meet the ocean a thousand feet below. We clung to the edge of the precipice, a peregrine falcon was far more serene over the abyss.
Madeiran chaffinches and goldcrests hopped around us in the jungle, quite tame. There are heather bushes here like small trees and all at once we found ourselves on a plateau heathland much like Ambersham or Heyshott commons. As for the trout in the torrents: were we in Scotland or Norway perhaps?
Then the long-tailed blue butterflies, ravenous for the flowers of gorse, reminded us of our Downs with all their blues.
As for the Madeiran moon from the mountains, spinning a vast white web across the ocean right across to the African shore – a density of experience like nowhere else that I have seen.
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Weather for Bognor
Sunday 05 February 2012
Today
Light sleet showers
Temperature: 0 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Light sleet showers
Temperature: -0 C to 4 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: North west
