17th April 2011 MALLORCA. "A walk into heaven."

And it did stay away, the rain? It did, and the great globe of fire spun round and round making the heat dither off our skins and colour them brown, I go brown not red luckily but perhaps that is because I don't lie in it all day.

Wow the wow the wow of the holiday was the walk we made rather rashly, at our age, having not really studied the amount of time it would take; we took the local bus to the next town of Villamossa from where we climbed up through the valley, not taking the wild path to a hermitage, a ruin on the top of a little hill to the left, but on coming to where the paths went their own ways, we saw light through the tight dark Ilex trees as the light revealed coming up to the edge we gasped as the land went sheer down to the valley below, the rest of our path, we didn't know at that moment,(!!!!) went along the very edge of the ridge that stretched to the north a good way, making a dark shaded rock face which was being continuously caressed by soft gentle gray or white clouds rising and rising on their thermals, coming towards us from the regatta of cumulus ones across the blue of the Mediterranean sea.

Rosemary clung in cracks, the bluest I have ever seen it flower, a lovely contrast to the ochre to orange and white to blue limestone, crumbly type which made the paths slippery with their rolling underfoot-not nice for those over 70. Wow as we rose through the ever thinning wood we came to the comb of the hill, and here reached the 927 metres and peered straight down them to the forest of pines and Ilexes, it was breathtaking and tended to suck us down to fly into it, so airy and with the clouds rising mysteriously up beside us and giving glimpses of the view here and there, it was quite a void occasionally, the meditating Indians and Chinese would have loved it; its probably this atmosphere that they allude to when describing the nothingness of - - - - phew, it was the most beautiful walk; rosemary bushes with tighter rows of leaves than lower down in the warmth of the sun, were everywhere, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, a misty blue carpet among the warmed rocks. The path in neat stones laid by man, or fine worn white sand.

And out there... look below us, yes below us, the clouds floated, and the blue sea looked as if it were part of the air.

Then came the descent, and that was no joke for us, the leaves were like little boats that slid on each other, the stones slid, the rocks had to be climbed here and there, luckily with our strong boots we were prepared for such difficulties, but even in the Dolomites we haven't had such a steep path with so many hazards winding almost sheer down the mountainside among the dark trees. We became quite exhausted, but as usual had a snack ready, little and often is the best when one is walking so far we find.

The woods out to the left were those we had peered at from above, when we had been in The Heaven of Mallorca, like beings given extra wings to fly on in our feelings of elation; the rock face loomed over us and in places had moist patches of blue making river-like patterns among the orange and pale ochres of the wall, caves and potholes, some quite big.

Speaking of caves and such, we passed earlier on the other southern side, many charcoal burning ovens and huts, I called the places where they burnt the twigs dance floors as they were flat circles, with white stones round their edges, the grass grew like the finest of lawns on the top, about 10-15ft. in diameter. Then there were the stone huts, wow they are artists of the dry stone walls in Mallorca, some every bit as impressive as the Inca at Machu Pichu. Using occasionally the big rocks as one wall, they created the cosy hid y-holes for when the winds blew or even the snow came. So although we were luckily, mostly on our own, miracle(!) we felt the presence of the people of the past, and enjoyed instead, the tinkling of the sheep bells, meeting some of them with their long earring-like ears and doleful looks, their ragged woolly coats and their neat long-looking black legs.

We haven't got down again yet have we? The path became, half way down, a wider less steep one, with those homely, amusing, grotesque and twisted olives standing watching us go by in their sturdy manner, rattling their shock of hair leaves, pale green wigs, as we marched past; among them the asphodels flowered, their towers of beautiful white stars, looking almost like snow among the black roots and the very fresh green grass, the tufts of herbs pale blue-green and the red orange earth sprinkled here and there with sheep droppings.

The heat of the sun rose as we descended, into the lee of the breeze, and baked our already hot selves, then as we rounded a bend in the path there on a tiny hill, more like a pinnacle, was an old Moorish-looking castle ruin, its neat small bricks like toy ones, and the dark little window holes. trees billowed around and out of its walls and there was an air of expectancy, but for what I don't know.

Little streams that maybe run sometimes were walled so beautifully either side, now no longer gurgling, quite dry. And then came the road, after being confettied with yellow flowers, the hard tarmac seemed unwelcome. I told Erik to sit where it was comfortable and that I would fetch the car, quite a way up to the village and up, yes UP the steep hill to get it from its parking place right at the top of the little village of Deia.

The yellow flowers I took with me and arranged along the peeled off paper zipper to an aluminium foil box, it remained curved and with the flower head on it looked like some exotic Indian river boat, beside this was a huge lemon, the same colour, with two big leaves on it; when we had asked for a lemon in the village shop the woman had just gone out into her garden and cut some off for us; we had thought it odd that there were none to be seen inside the shop!

Ah then there were the lamb chops, thin and young chopped for us by the black haired woman in the market her name was Anna and her colleague Dolores. These chops we fried in olive oil and unsalted butter, then ingeniously (Erik) put them into the terrible scratched non stick pan with a layer of alu-foil under them then another layer on top to rest them, the pan on the two other hot plates on low, while the runner beans (fresh), the big tomato, the ratatouille I had made with courgettes and aubergines, tomatoes and rosemary, garlic of course too, this made a good vegetable for the meal; only the potatoes didn't reach standard, they were somewhat tasteless even though they were the size of golf balls, or smaller, and should have been delicious. We like the "Mandel," or almond shaped ones with yellowish flesh that taste divine, best.

Oh I MUST tell you about the tea making, the kettle (non existent), a small pan with handle, and the lid for the big pan with lugs, when it boiled the steam made the lid fall off which made a whistling kettle obsolete! :)

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We read some books, mine was called "Sissinghurst: An unfinished history." by Adam Nicolson.

All about the house, once used by Queen Elizabeth 1st, and how it was so idyllic when this writer was a boy, fishing in the streams and walking the woods with his father, watching the hops being used, the geese and pigs, chickens and cows herded, the arable fields ploughed: to witness its downfall on being opened to the public. And how he built it up again with the National Trust, making produce from the farm to feed the millions (literally) of visitors that come each year. His grandmother was the poet Vita Sackville West , and his father, also a writer, was slightly like her in that he fancied the same sex!! So it made for an intriguing story if not laced with a little too much information about the numbers of bushels etc. Adam has a wonderful affinity for nature, naming the birds and beasts, the flowers and trees in detail, here is a excerpt about the Kingfisher:-

p 7. " Then rarely, as a treasure from nowhere, something different; I remember the first time I saw it, here. I was standing in the river, the water running up against my boots, and dragging at them, so that the rubber was wobbling with the pull of the current and the tops of the boots were opening and closing like a pair of lips. I had the dog with me, splashing in the shallows, shaking the drops from his muzzle so that his own lips were slapping against his teeth. Then from nowhere it came past us; a kingfisher, searing through the gloom, making its turns along this river, sunk beneath the fields on either side, a soundless riff played on the river air.

That swerve, a taut, cut line of wing through air, with so much verve to it, as if running the length of an electric wire, was a form of quickness the life of a plodding mammal could never approach, a magnesium strip in the light and the dark of the river travelling through those patches so that it seemed to flash as it passed, a stroboscopic continuity, a driven line leaving only an after-burn on the mind's eye, an under surface glamour in the shadows of the stream."

p.3..."the smoke finding its way out through the roof of the coppiced chestnuts as if through a thatch of a medieval hall."

p.23..."You could make a mattress of the papers( letters) lie back on it an feel the past seeping up into your flesh like a kind of damp..."
" Was this world of written intimacy and posted emotion, of a long distance paternal and filial love, in fact a simulacrum of the real thing?
A substitute for it Nicolson closeness had been a written performance, for a hundred years. And that unbroken fluency in the written word mad me think that it concealed some lack. If closeness were the reality would it need o be so often declared?

p 25. ..." It was as if my father spent his life not existing, but making himself up, endlessly fashioning a papier-mâché skin to cover the hollow he both knew and dreaded beneath it."

P35-..."I went down to the Hammer Brook. It was a quiet and windless afternoon. The stream, at the end of summer, was low and the feet of the alders exposed, but here and there along its length, over some of its darkest pools, so deep that there is no telling where the bottom lies, the big, old oaks, were standing on the banks and stretching their arms across the river to the other side. One by on, quite regularly, every now and then, the acorns fell from the trees into the river, a slow, intermittent dropping, occasionally hitting a branch on the way down and ricocheting through the trees, but more often steady, damp, percussive music: a plum-like plop, a silence, and then another, glop. The acorns didn't float, but sank into the depths of the pool to join the piky darkness of the river bed.
When there was a gust of wind, some of the leaves came floating and zigzagging down to the water, where they landed on the surface as curled boats, to be carried away downstream, or more often caught in the banks, or on the logs and branches that stuck out from them, where in the damp they started to rot, already becoming humus, returning nutrients to the soil from which they had sprung. Meanwhile the soft, slow oak-rain continued, swallowing, a cluck or two each minute, the dropping sound of history and time, mesmeric as I listened to it, the twin and opposite of fish rising, the gulp of a river swallowing seed."

p-36..." the past is never behind" wrote john Berger in "Pig Earth." In his great collection of tales and meditations on life in a small village in the French Alps " It is always to the side." You come down from the forest at dusk and a dog is barking in a hamlet. A century ago in the same spot, at the same time of day, a dog, when it heard a man coming down through the forest, was barking, and the interval between the two occasions is no more than a pause in the barking."

That is what I (Adam N.) have come to understand about acorns dropping into the Hammer Brook. Nothing is intelligible without the past not because it is the past but because it is the missing body of the present..."