Today we climbed Montsegur, last bastion of the Cathars. An isolated pog, a half-hour's steep climb from the road, a breathtaking view in Sunlight when we reached the peak. I sat on thick stone ramparts alone and read my history as cloud rose up the valley and surrounded us. Later, I went down to the quarry outside the walls, and thought on stones, the cloud obscuring all but the keep's outer wall, and the beginning of the sheer drop to the valley floor, the only sound the beating of a hunt in the woods below, and the sussuration of distant traffic on the high mountain roads. Descending, exuberant, 'apes for a day, the darwinian way', a smile on my face, the prospect, anterior or otherwise, of living free as the wind blows and the stones fall, unoppressed by any outside force, and if oppressed, unwilling and Bartleby-like, preferring not to be, to do, to act. A mountain fastness is my grail, a shrouded peak, a windy plain, the silence of unending peace, willed but unsought, known but not experienced, except in few instances when the feathered weight of enlightenment shall fall, as the unexpecting traveller encounters lights and diverse fires in the sky, beacons lit on granite ridges, marking victories and new advances. In town and village from the Aude to the Awash, a beating of almighty wings brings the people from their houses, clustered around schools, taverns and workshops, to observe their shadowed land incised by flashings of an obscured sun.

I know now why grapes are such a universal and persistent symbol of fecundity. I know too, why other spirits fare less well: the whisky swirl and stench of waste water, the beery breath of the sodden wood, the clammy fog that curls over the low hills and drifts like old water in Pastis against the houses and the church facade, intoxicating the gargoyles. I am marked with the yellow lees of Muscat, and the caustic pink of Syrah and Grenache. Nick's thighs are - apparently - vivid pink and burning where they were doused in solvent, washed from the bottles which we polished. On the hill of Olargues, the schist, laid flat on seabeds millennia past, flexes and pushes itself upright, the gleam of slate and mica infiltrated by tracer lines of quartz.