not a bad thing at all

entering morocco from spain is like walking out of your front door into the street.

it is obvious that i am not from morocco and  this creates a lot of attention for me.   

a parade of eyes follows my progress down the street.    voices call out

"hola tio, que pasa?"  ( spanish equvalent of  "hey man, what's up?")

and want to find out where i am from and where i am going.

being in an unfamiliar country and not knowing anybody, it is so natural to want to accept another's words as genuine, especially when their words are helpful and friendly words.      but Mustafah's advice was well given: it is important to know that are people in the world who chose to behave positively badly, and to regard until-recently-unknown-others with a certain wariness.

upon arrival in tetouan, i spent a while looking around for a cheap second hand bike, soon attracting a retinue of attentive helpers,  who guided me around the narrow market streets of the old medina, opening up garages crammed with bikes and other paraphernalia;  after a lengthy search it was i who decided to renounce the task in light of my stinginess; but then came the request for a little money for their help but i dont want so much to give them money and the friendly attentiveness is destroyed (how to inquire "where can i buy a bike?" without ending up causing offence?) and then merely meandering alone through the medina and a man is making polite conversation and "would i like to buy hashish?" and "well even so, could you spare me 20  dirham so i can buy some?" and he will not stop following me and pleading with me, so i decide to leave the city and head up the hill into the pine trees.   there there are children throwing rocks at me and i am glad when i am far above the city; looking over the twinkling lights and sleeping by a fire.

the next day the rain comes and that is when i decide to move into the abandoned building.   collecting water and buying bread i get to know the twisting streets of the concrete neighbourhood built upon the steep outskirts and from the people there start coming the warnings. "where are you going?  it is dangerous up there."   i am happy to say hello when said  hello to but to otherwise remain a distant berucksacked figure.  one day i descended to use the internet and the man there said that i had been seen coming from high up and that i shouldn't return there; very insistent in showing me the direction of the city centre.  but i found another way to wind back up the streets and there is an old woman who prevents my passage with her body and makes as if to slit her thoat to indicate the dangers that await me.  i try another route and a man coming out his door calls to me and explains in spanish that those woods are only frequented by bandits and drug mafia; even the police avoid being there, sleep in the city centre if you want, but if you havent been robbed yet then you will be tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the next day.

i realise that it would be best to leave that place. i must return however for my tent and sleeping bag and it is with certain trepidation that i follow the path through the pines, hitherto so peaceful in my eyes, now converted into a place of danger and suspence.       :geographies of the mind.

so with renewed gladness at simply being alive and healthy, i am glad to take the bus to chefchaouene, a smaller, nice looking village in the mountains.  tetouan is a dangerous place people say. a man on the bus says that even he attracts attention there, coming from the mountains; and was robbed once.

    

how to know how to be in a place, and avoid the dangerous parts, when one has only just arrived?

:by only frequenting places sanctioned by the passage of other tourists, and by seeking somewhere like a hostal to spend the night,  i answer myself.

now i am in chefchaouene, watching the rain fall heavily heavily, listening to the rolls of thunder and thinking a hostal would not be a bad thing at all.

     

mustafah's warning

in the spanish colony of ceuta i was considering spending my last few euros on a bottle of wine (would have been my last taste of alcohol for a while) when i changed my mind and gave them instead to a man standing alone on a street corner. 

he indicated to me the directions to the moroccan border and then said he would come with me for the short walk.  he said he had fifteen days off work and had nothing else to do.
he told me that i should be careful in morocco; that not everyone is a good person.  that, in fact, most people are bad.
this perturbed me.
i said i thought most people were good, or at least had the potential to be good.
this he agreed with, but he reaffirmed that most people chose not to be good.
i said that people have only one true experience of life - their own - and that perhaps when considering the life experience of other people, they take the example of their own life and project it on to others.   for example perhaps some good people (being naive) think that everyone else in the world is also good. and that some bad people, going by their own experience of themselves, believe that everyone else is bad.
mustafah (i learned his name was) said that that may be the case, but the fact is that there are bad people in the world and that you had to chose who to be with very carefully.  he said that i shouldn't even trust him.

we walked along in silence for a while

i said that i mostly enjoyed being by myself but that i was also very interested in meeting other people and discovering their way of looking at the world.
- all very well - said mustafah - but you have to be careful with who you spend your time.

after another long pause mustafah stopped and said that he was also a solitary person.
he gave me a long, unflinching, indecifirable contact of eyes and said that he had learned to be alone during his 22 years in prison.
imediately i wanted to ask him how he now regarded those 22 years but instead i asked whether he was in the cell alone and what contact he had with other inmates and he spoke about prison routines and ended up talking about other things.

i asked him if he liked reading and was glad to give him a spanish book which i had aquired and was looking for an opportunity to give to someone. he was grateful.
from his pocket he fished out a necklace made with a shell and gave it to me.
we were at the border and it was full of bustle. an officious behaving man came up and got me organised with my passport out and filling out the form.  then he asked for 10 euros in order to receive the border stamp.  i looked reluctantly to mustafah and asked if he could give back one of the euros i had so recently given him. the other man was very insistent that i give even more - at least 5 euros - he said; but i decided to go up to the border point myself and see myself through.
- a case in point - said mustafah.    it doesnt cost anything to cross the border.  - be careful of others- he warned me once again - always view other people with suspicion.  only trust in yourself and your own shadow.  as we shook hands and parted he repeated these words as if they were the most important message he had to pass on.

the cheese from santos lugares

i have just left seville and taken a walk through the santos lugares of the mountains before descending to algeciras on the coast.   now i am soon to cross to morocco and am having to keep an eye on my rucksack in this port city internet station.  i am straining my ears to make any sense of the arabic voices i hear - unrecognisible from the careful recitation of my teach-yourself-arabic notes while following a mountain path

i love that place in the mountains.

one night i decided to sleep on a meadow higher up, where there were no trees and the starscape was wider.

soon after waking the next day i met two mushroom-pickers and told them about my star gazing.
the older one said:   ahh you can almost touch the stars from up here

first of all i thought that he was referring to elevation of that meadow - a few hundred metres closer to the stars i suppose.
then i thought that he might have also been referring to the sensation of elation of being in such a place.

it was quite a remote place.  maybe only a 45 minute run from the village of Benaocaz , but when it was raining you had to run down a slippery muddy path
it was the muddy path that made it feel cut off.

for a few days it rained quite a lot
there were also gusty winds and i thought:  winter is also coming to andalusia.
sometimes i feel wary of the advances of modernity
but those nights all i could do was marvel at the plastic sheet which was tied up over the moorish ruins
flapping frenetically, occassionally flecking my warm abode with cold droplets of rain
but generally as warm and as comfortable as larry by the fire,
reading books by torchlight, marvelling.
i grew to love those plastic sheets

(personal comfort over and above concerns about the vast and offensive hydrocarbon industry, i note)


i marvelled at the battery-operated torchlight too.
one night the fog was very thick.  the torch batteries were running very low.
i thought:  by now i should know these parts well enough to find my way. 
it was not so.  i crouched down to bring the torch closer in order to see if the smudges in the mud were cattles hoofs or genuine human shoe prints.  there was a lot of crouching and shuffling along dead end stone walls, feeling quite lost.
very glad that night to stumble across the water fountain and know exactly the route back to my home in the stones among the trees.

andrea came up from seville almost every weekend with his flatmate maribel. also bringing wine and one time his guitar and always bringing me back to his flat in seville for a jolly good scrub (essential when one is in the city, more specifically among the people of the city) and for to change library books. mil gracias andrea

one night we left the nazari bar in benaocaz when the barman called after me..
and held out a thick polar fleece to me


what a good thing to do
- to give warmth to someone who is cold
or to give food to someone who is hungry.



first i thought: i don't need such a garment - every item's worth must be weighed carefully before accepting it in a rucksack.

but the barman insisted and i accepted thinking: what will i do with such a polar fleece?

in time it has proven its usefullness,
especially the night i arrived back at the encampment after a few days in seville and found my sleeping bag very wet, an almighty cold had descended that night and i became very appreciative of the friendly polar fleece gesture.


one day i descended from the mountain and met shephard Cristoban- actaully an estate worker who was herding sheep at that moment.  he seemed surprised by my wandering in such a way (without even a mobile phone) and when i said: each person chooses their own path to follow through life, he replied that many people have work commitments and family responsibilities.  i wanted to respond and underline the importance of every person's free and resplendent will in the decisions they make, but i saw that he was partly right.
i said: i would love to taste the cheese that comes from the goats around santos lugares and he invited me to pass by his house one day for a tasting.

trip to la Sierra de Castril

5 hours from seville, the cars began to slip on the icy track.

headtorches on, a couple of hours walk up the icy valley, we camped by a ruin.
a muted gathering, everyone got into their sleeping bag early
it was too cold to look up at the cold stars
instead i huddled close to the smokey fire
normally the smoke of a fire is to be avoided
but that night the smoke was equated with warm air
and i smoked myself for quite a while
before getting into my sleeping bag.

the next day we climbed high to the top of the valley
covered in snow
and descended to a place where two huge rocks leaned together
looking like they might give protection.
we collected wood.
andrea and i played chess.
after dark we cooked up a large wok of bubbling beans.

next day, with many things wet from the rain, we found a large cave
whose floor was covered in goat droppings, but it was commodiously large.
we decided to stay and dry things.

andrea had prepared a coffee
and when he went to sit down
- Crack!    the hollow sound resounded throughout the cave.
andrea became small and crouched, holding his head
we looked on worried
eventually he looked up and said:  you don't make a sound when it really hurts.

the wound was two centimetres long
and we decided to all go back to the car.

awesome places

i said to andrea: "perhaps God is the name we give to the immense joy and goodness of being alive"

he replied (with words to the effect) that "God has rather been seen by a lot of people over the course of history as the Great Hope in which all wrongs will be righted at the end of this sorrowful life on earth"

Yes - i surmised - everyone does see the world through their own eyes.


there is a whisper in the wind which becomes a vibrating whooosh! and i lift my eyes to see the suspended body of a Griffon vulture, only a few metres above me and already gliding towards the other side of the valley.

contact with rock - scrambling up elegantly sculpted (eroded) limestone towers.  they feels smooth and cool to the touch of my hands


i spoke to an old man in the village and found out that Santos Lugares - the place where i have been staying these past weeks - was an old moorish settlement dating from the moorish occupation of andalusia. 
it was lived in a long time ago - said the old man - much further back than i can remember.   it made me wonder if it was the moors who gave the place its name - santos lugares (holy places) - and why they might have done so.   it made me think: what makes a place holy?   does the holiness of a place reside in the mind of the beholder?
i think to regard a place as holy is to behave with reverence towards it, to be aware of its immense specialness and that there is a vast spirit astir which overwhelms you and causes you to say: wow  

perhaps if the planet earth in its entirety were considered a holy place...everyone would tread more lightly.  

Report on this part of the Sierra

The Griffon vultures spent the morning wheeling in circles next to the cliff.

It clouded over around midday and a sweater and wooly hat were donned in order to maintain an average body temperature of 37°.

In the evening the clouds were suffused with a rosy colour.  After that it got dark.

Used up the last of the pasta, accompanied simply by garlic and olive oil.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

la gloria de Dios

 "tu gloria esta aqui" - words from one the songs on delirious' spanish album, utmost song in my mind upon arrival at El Mar Mediterraneo. "tu gloria esta aqui" - your glory is here.  that is to say: here-and-now.  the glory of God is only to be experienced in the present moment,  which keeps scurrying forward.   
now.
no, now!
now, now, now!
interminably updated.

"to know God is to have joy - God is in every part of life which brings joy", i wrote jubilantly in front of the sparkling sea,
the sun sinking into the sea,
and me so happy to be
there.
the first step of this mon petit voyage was very sun-orientated. follow the sun! i cried, southwards!  there was fresh snow at the side of the road on the day that i left my friend lavanya's house in the massif central in france (quite far south in france, but at over a thousand metres altitude, a lot chillier than one would expect) i felt it necessary to purchase fresh gloves and a wooly hat that morning, but since then i have done nothing but roll south and foresee them staying at the bottom of my rucksack for some time now.
the friendly french motorists who assisted my passage: patrick, who gives me a very natural - almost lazy -smile when i enter his car and soon says "why don't we go back to my place in the mountains, you can help me with some repairs in the outhouse, we can cook up some food, you spend the night and tomorrow you continue your route", but after some thought he says that maybe better not... he is not sure what his girlfriend would say.  he stops at a roadside supermarket and while he is inside, i hop round the back and find lots of yoghurts and cheese and chocolate moose. i say "you never know what you will find in the supermarket bins". patrick is delighted and says he will start looking in the bins. 
françois takes me an hour or so further down the road. he is an older guy, i can sense that he is joyful about something inside. he is interested in other people. he says "each part of the world has their own cultural habits and ways of doing things". i muse and say something like "i would like to not limit myself to the subjective aspect of our experience, but instead to apprehend things that are universally so". françois gives a chuckle and says, "now you are entering the spiritual realm" i give a little chuckle too but i am not sure exactly what he means.  is that what spirituality means: apprehending eternal truths?
maybe so.
i tarry awhile before getting out at a service station where i should take another road to continue south. françois says, "well, i have a house. you can come home with me if you like and continue your route tomorrow"  i am tempted, especially because it is cold and a little rainy outside the car, but i still have a few hours of daylight  and decide to keep travelling.  waiting by the road, jumping up and down to keep warm, a labourer takes me a little bit further at the end of the day and then, as often happens when hitchhiking, i am just about to retire to the woods in the enveloping gloom when two young morrocans stop, going all the way to Beziers, two hours further along the road.  instant friendliness "have a can of coke, have a croissant". when they ask if i am religious i give the response, "well, my parents are christians, and i grew up going to church"   (what sort of response is that?) = it is a clue as to what my religious experience may be.  what exactly is a religion? i ask myself.  i tell them that i am very interested in the origins of religion, and the variety of religious experiences (thinking about my deep interest upon reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation)  the driver looks at me via the little mirror above the windscreen - a very direct honest look in his eyes - which becomes ever darker as the journey goes on and the smouldering remnants of the sunset darken and become night. he says that they are muslims and follow the sacred words of the prophet Muhammad.  when i say i know very little about the life of the prophet, the driver (whose name i forget) embarks upon a resumé: he says that Muhammad grew up without his parents and without ever learning to read or write.  one day the angel Gabriel appeared to him and revealed, over successive visitations, a message from God to humanity. Muhammad memorises this and by recitation it is written down and becomes the Quaran.  "this is the perfect word of God" my lift giver is very sincere and insistent. "nothing can be written by a human hand that could compare with the beauty and poetry of any one of the passages or even a single line of the quaran.  it contains all truths, all the truths which science is purported to have discovered over the years were already contained in the quaran"   he also mentions that bible has been added to over the years whereas the quaran is the pure word of God (at this i give an appreciative hum). i tell him of my interest in learning some arabic and this leads him to say, "the beautiful passages of the quaran can only be fully appreciated in the poetry of the arabic.  reading the french translation would be like understanding 30 or 40% of the arabic."
i sat in his car absorbing all his enthusiasm as we enter the centre of Beziers.  i explain to my lift-giver that i normally look for a place to put my tent up where i will not disturb anybody, and he takes me to an office which he is helping to construct, tells me to put the padlock back on in the morning.
one wall is occupied by a big mirror, in which i contemplate myself with a smile. i am also left rather reflexive, and with a new interest in dipping into the quaran. clearly a special book for so many, which i have not but opened a page of till now.

lift obtention is slow the next day. i am happy simply to be in the warm sun but the thought cannot help crossing my mind: how crazy it is to hitchhike. who would chose to spend hours at the side of the road - potentially fruitless hours - with all the noisy cars?  with time one will always arrive but how one spends one's time is of the utmost importance.   with the noisy cars...it is a beguiling game because there is the very real chance of meeting some of the friendly people of the world and sharing part of their journey.
beguiling.
it has its ups and downs.
i have become accustomed to the fact that most single woman are reluctant to pick up hitchhikers, and so it is lilly who has to wind down her window and ask where i am going, on her own accord (without any suggestion from my thumb).  she says she travels that road every week and constantly picks up hitchhikers going or coming from spain. she takes me beyond Perpignon, and i am happy at the last minute to decide to leave the motorway with her and embark on a smaller road which follows the rocky coast to the spanish border.  next it is bruno who says he know a great beach where he can drop me off. he spends most of the time texting on his mobile and at one point says "can i take a photo of you?" his seventeen year old daughter doesn't believe that he has picked up a hitchhiker from scotland and at the beach car park, with the waves crashing, he even gives her a call and passes the phone to me. "bonjour..." what can i say to his daughter? "oui, c'est vrai que j'ai voyage d'Ecosse en autostop.  ton père m'a amené jusqu'à la plage de Argeles. maintenant je pense me baigner et puis marcher en espagne"
"Ahh..."

Ah oui, c'est vrai. the friendly french.  i am happy just be by the sea now.  it is warm enough at night with only a t-shirt and a little bit of a sleeping bag.  the sun in spain is a travelling companion, a very warm friend. it is because without a house, a body needs a warm welcoming environment in which to be. the environment around cap de creus is beguilingly bonito. i spend a day walking along the coastal path, frequently swimming in the sea. it is always enthralling to be beside a body of water, and even more so to have one's body suspended in it.  H20: a pure transparent element, perfectly slippery and perfectly changeable of form.  i hitchhike a little, and a gravestone engraver takes me to the next village. he says "people who seen many beautiful parts of the world say that this is the most beautiful"
i think about my travelling purpose and question the worth of it. there is such a delicious sensation of having a wide open future that i have never experienced so completely before. there has always been some sort of structure to the future which is necessarily tied to the present moment.
to be in the world, to admire the views...am i content for that to be my sole purpose?  why is purpose such a great human desire?  i have the notion that the very simple act of being is a precious thing, and most worthy in its own right.
breathing, perceiving, reflecting, possessing sensations. 
= precious.
behold the animals who have no other concern beyond that of being themselves. that is to say: surviving. perhaps being joyful in the process?   perhaps being a human is precisely to think about what it means to be a human.  a bird preening her feathers and a human being sitting and cavilating share something in common: they are both instances of beings being what they are.
life can be so philosophical at times.
i found myself saying: "just as that rock was created to be that rock, i was created to appreciate that rock. to sit here smiling gleefully in the sun...for that reason i was created"
it is nice to feel that one is what one is meant to be. that one does what one is meant to do.  that one is one with oneself.
that feeling of oneness is precious, but what is it dependent upon? why is it very manifest one moment, but cast into doubt the next?  how to explain it to the man who looks at the stone and asks "what is so joyful about looking at a stone?"
i tried to define what happiness was.  i said, "it is the apprehension of the Good"
but words like good (positive), precious, valuable and concepts like happiness and love and the Good are all essentially the same thing and all define each other.  one follows a circular definition.
is there any way at all to define these things or can they only be experienced?
that is why everyone says that God is ineffable. the word exists but cannot be defined.
that is why all these words are pretty clumsy and ineffectual. it is what is called "giving it a go"
a little bit of cogitation.

i decided that the simple action of being in the world was good
but that beyond that i wanted to learn and learn. i wanted to meet people and behold their manner of being. 
reading novels is a great way of meeting people and beholding their manner of being. every word that the author proffers is a clue as to their underlying list of important things in life and what meaning they behold therein.  narrative is meaning.
(i dont actually know what meaning is but i just wanted to read books)
and also to learn languages and plunge into the fascinating welter of meanings which we attach to sound and symbol.  language for communication but also language for language's sake.  because even thought cannot exist without language (i'm not certain about that, but surely) what we call thought is nothing other than a conversation with oneself (?).
and so my plan was to go to seville, and make use of my membership of the public library there, borrow a lot of books and read them in the mountains (which i have began doing this last week)

i began very content to make the journey from the north of spain to south little by little, meeting people on the way and seeing what sort o things were there (slow travel).  in Cadaques i offered some bread to an older man in faded denim jacket begging outside the supermarket. we talked for a while and i found out his name was Carlos (Karel in his native cheque republic). i said that i sometimes called myself carlos in spain, and a connection was established.  as day turned to night, he gave me back my bread, went in to buy some of his own and invited me back to his house - actually an abandoned house in a quiet part of town,  he lit a candle in his room and prepared some coffee over a stove. our communication was basic; he spoke no english, french or german and said "tu un poco espanyol, yo un poco espanyol...no problema" it was a communication with lots of gestures and mutual understandings where precise words were shown to be unneccessary.  anything that was good or advisable he indicated with "no problema".  by contrast, anything that presented difficulty or uncertainty was referred to as "problema"  travelling by train in france, for example, was problema, whereas train travel sans ticket here in spain was no problema.   staying in cadaques was becoming problema now that the tourists had left, and soon he was to travel to france.  he gave me a pile of british coins which he had accumulated.  although i couldn´t myself needing such coins for a long time, i gladly took them from him and thought about it later: sometimes accepting a gift from another is a form of gift.  what you are giving is the opportunity for the other to give.  Karel indicated a space on the floor where i could roll out my sleeping mat, but i preferred to head out into the night and sleep out under some trees, by the whispering waves - delightful to sleep in the open air after being so used to always seeking protection from the rain in scotland.

the next day i hitchhiked to figueiras ( i was going to enter the salvador dali museum there but i saw they wanted 11 euros for entry, i saw the long queue and thought: many beautiful things can i see in this world for free)  lots of waiting in the spanish sun by the spanish motorway.  sleeping by the river under a big tree in girona, entering into conversation with a man officiating a 10k race and learning about the first races to inhabit the iberian peninsula, the roman occupation and the subsequent latinization of the indiginous languages resulting in all these more or less similar tongues (french, spanish, catalan, etc). i got most of the way to barcelona and began asking lorry drivers and motorists if they could take me but became aware that probably not everyone loved my presence there - scruffy guy with a rucksack saying "perhaps you want to give me a lift?" so i retired to the nearby countryside and slept under some trees and the next day caught a train into barcelona. my purpose there was to buy a book for the road, to look for some internet, to just dig being in barcelona, have a swim at the beach and a good wash in the public showers (essential), reminiscent of my previous visits to barcelona and contemplative of the passage of time. a beautiful city.  the parque guell on a hill in the outskirts, with some very fluid, organic steps and walkways and monuments designed by Antonio Gaudi. a beautiful architectural visionary.  and from the hill with the cross the city lights spread all the way to the dark sea, glistening all night long, interrupted by the groping spires of the temple of the sagrada familia.  few cities allow their visitors such a privileged view.

the next day, the train down the coast to the sea resort of sitges.  a beautiful beach with waves, which has also become a centre for homosexual encounters.  something i discovered when i slept - tried to sleep - on the beach on my travels after my first year at uni - a sleepless night. an unnerving experience for young me, curled in my sleeping bag wondering how i could possess so much interest for men taking night walks along the beach.  my only encounter this time was when trying to hitch out of town with a cardboard sign printed with the words MAS AL SUR (further south) when a grisly man called out to me from a purring automobile "hola guapo" and suggested what we could do together...all i could do was politely decline and decide instead to follow the rocky coastal path till the next town and get the train.  it got me thinking: how to respond to the fact that we are sexual creatures?  it got me thinking:  our sexuality is a crazy component to our experience in whatever form it takes.

an email from my friend andrea  in seville saying a group were heading to the hills that weekend and would i arrive in time? provided the stimulus i needed to abandon the hitchhiking (which was becoming less good fun in spain) and start boarding trains.  two days train travel separated by a beautiful night's sleep under a group of majestic palm trees in the botanic gardens in valencia, and i found myself walking a little incredulously around the streets of seville in the morning sun, after the last leg on the night bus from granada.   someone in catalunya,  upon hearing that i planned to travel to seville, said, "se vive bien en sevilla" (one lives well in seville): "the sun, the good food, the lively streets, the old buildings, the flamenco, the beautiful women". 
also very attractive in my mind was an area of rocky limestone hills an hour and a half to the south: la sierra de grazalema.   the next day andrea drives there along with his german flatmate maribel, and we meet up 6 other friends to spend the weekend camping.  i was pleased to say that not a drop of rain had fallen since i had been in spain but things took a turn for the wet with a big area of low pressure predicted to sweep across andalusia saturday night.  i was curious that this didn't seem to put anybody off the planned camping trip.  an hours walk from the road we began chopping up a big dead tree as night fell, and as the fire began to roar and our big pot of vegetable chick peas to bubble the first rains began to fall.  it doesnt rain so often in andalusia but when it does, it is often intense.  soon we were all huddled underneath a big plastic sheet tied between two trees.   we sat around for a while but as the storm became more intense, each one entered their sleeping bag and lay in a tight formation, silently contemplating the fury of nature.  i spent a long time waiting fairly confidently for the plastic sheet - roaring furiously in the ceaseless gusts of wind - to fly off into the night and force us to return to the cars through the rain and the night, something which some members of the group were very nearly in favour of during several huddled discussions by torchlight.
my thoughts were: "how crazy for us all to come up here out of our own free will.  it would make much more sense to seek protection from the elements in such a night" but i was also delighted by witnessing the violence of nature unleashed.  it made me feel very small and overawed. 
and it makes you appreciate all the more the benign rays of the sun when they do shine again.  in the light of morning it was still gusty and raining and after eating a little food, most of the group descended to the cars.  although my sleeping bag was wet and i was a little daunted at the thought of another night of rain i was glad that andrea and maribel decided to stay another night.  we spent the day drying things out by the fire, cooking food going for a little exploration up one of the nearby hills.  that night there was only a little breezy allowing us to sleep like lambs.  the next day andrea and maribel returned to seville leaving me with a great amount of food that had been left by all the others, and some books i had taken out the library.

the next day commenced a period of intensely stable weather - a cloudless blue sky and radient sun by day, giving way to stars and stars by night.
the next day the sun rose into the same cloudless blue sky and ceded to stars and stars at night
the same happened the next day: sun by day, stars by night
and the next: sun by day, stars by night.
a largely undisturbed natural environment is a place where i love to be. the place is called santos lugares which means "holy places".  the encampment is at the foot of a craggy limestone peak - nothing is large about the landscape, no big mountains or big valleys but rather rambling rocky prominences, wandering meadows amid scattered oak woodland.  you descend to an open area of grassland and there find a water spring and a wide view down the valley to the villages and hills beyond.  every evening there is a glowing golden band stretched across the horizon which gradually cedes under the weight of the big dark blue space studded with stars.  how do these colours hang there in the air? is it an optical illusion? how does the air seem to end up there in blueness during the day, when at night you can see that there is actaully space and space and space and stars?   when you contemplate the limitless vastness of the universe, it gives a great perspective on all the concerns and little thoughts of little you, and instead feel privileged to be a little conscious flicker amidst the vastness.