Out comes the astrolabe, a land sextant for locating and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, Planets, Stars, and Me.
Geography equates to time.
Knowing approximately the latitude, one kilometre north of the château, i can determine château time without recourse to a shlottin’ caesium atom.
Near Mount Wilders summit is the lonely (and some say holy) Scot’s pine. To get an astrolabe reading, i simply align the instrument sights with the tree when the sun is high and casts no shadow. Then i can calculate how much time i have before returning to the château.
Habitually i take a former drovers’ trail, which corkscrews through a forest of sweet chestnuts. Their branches, laden with glossy fruit, overhang the path. And when in full leaf the trees provide a most welcome shade.
There is a steep incline but i walk with the rhythmic ease of youth, carelessly dislodging flinty stones and fragments of granite. Halfway to the summit the gradient lessens. The trees thin out and you find yourself agreeably among a meadow of wild flowers and neglected vines. Once upon a time there grew olive trees, another species undone by climate change.
Seven lizards cross my path. Their legs a blur of movement. Animals of the mountain i salute you. From dung beetles and glow worms to the great golden eagle spiralling on thermals. Mountain ridges recede into the distance. To the south there are Gyphon vultures afloat in the limpid air. Birds that Martha says were the inspiration behindthe creation of dementalisers, the creatures that prey on the child wizards of Harmonia.
The Bastel Wipers…
… is about the adventures of a girl wizard called Harmony; the first in the Harmonia series and the first book i read unaided. For a while the general reading public laboured under the misapprehension that Harmony, owing to her retiring nature, was a minor character. A boy wizard named Harold having bewitched the nation with (word) spells. But his magic, being of the hackneyed sort, wore off in time. And the books got reissued with more apposite titles such as Harmony & the Sea of Serpents.
Europa’s southern states are yet to officiate on lakes, such as what is to constitute their minimum size. But i would say that the body of water (aka Lake Wilders) near to the mountain’s summit is best described as a large pond. i am assailed by a sudden and delicious thought of plunging my transpiring body into it. But by the time i get there, the prospect of a ‘refreshing’ swim has lost its appeal. The wind has got up, the day’s heat fast dissipating. A fog encircles the mountain, and i have difficulty spotting the château, which is like an island swamped in sea mist. Then it occurs to me that i have never actually seen the sea for real.