CHAPTER 2

Waxing

It’s a fine evening in spring and I’m walking a wide old path in the Pyrenees. The trees are in brilliant new leaf; the day has been grassy and green. The farm where I’m staying is propped below me on a narrow plateau. Its cluster of barns and walls and courtyards is sheltered by a dip in the land and a handful of tall beech trees. This path edges out from the back of the farm, over two huge flat stones which lie across a fast stream, and up a rocky slope. It’s an ancient route from the valley to a high crossing point in the mountains, bounded by gnarly dry-stone walls and lined with more trees, hazel mostly, the lithe limbs sprouting from coppiced trunks. At this point, it rises gently although later it narrows and becomes steep, climbing up into the lingering snow.

Here in the mountains, sunset is never where you think it should be. Sunset always varies, of course, depending on location or even which way your view faces, but in the mountains, it becomes a particularly movable and uncertain experience, light and time and the incursion of the dark slipping from valley to valley, between ridge and summit. It’s entirely dependent on the huddle of peaks. At the back of the farm, where morning comes early, the sun will disappear long before it sets for someone higher up in one of the lodges I can see on the opposite slope, facing wide open skies to the west; I’ll be shuffling through the shadow of a mountain while they are still in full daylight. In such commanding terrain, sunset can douse you in a sudden gloopy shadow under one peak before a turn in the lane has it skimming away from the warmth of late sun. The colours of the fading day can feel like an intimate show, a reminder that time and space are arbitrary, and experience inescapably personal. Here in the mountains, dusk is negotiable.

For me, for this one path of many mountain paths, the sun has set. The light darkened quickly, without spectacle, and now there’s a glassy greyish-blue sky with a hint of nicotine yellow. The land has bulked up with shadow. I don’t intend to walk far but the evening is beautiful; I dawdle. It feels as though the day has slowed as the light has fallen. My steps slow, too; my breathing. There’s a touch of magic here in this twilight suspended in this nook of mountain. Glow worms spangle against the walls; a wispy mist slinks low to the ground. In the clear sky above, a waxing moon falls, leaving a slight trail of a cooler pale light.

I wonder about the dusk, its familiar strangeness; its otherworldly everydayness. I consider my expectations. Spirituality? Epiphany? Surely, at least, an intensity of sentiment. But actually nothing much happens. It’s a pleasant evening stroll. I make my way to a bend in the path, after which it becomes steep, and I walk back down to the farm. The chickens that have been scratching in the yard all day, chuntering their conversations back and forth from barn to barn, have gone to roost. That’s about all. But looking back, I remember this evening walk very clearly, the textures of the darkening foliage, the smell of distance, the sense of possibility and of endings. I remember the glow worms and the wrap of translucent mist. I remember it as special. Was it?

What was it about the dying light that set this experience apart?

In my discovery of the dark, I begin thinking about the push-pull attraction of dusk. Darkness is more than an absolute. It