Australia: an end of the world warehouse of nature’s experiments.

Willi Ley

A weekend away in the Blue Mountains.

Every day trivial bits of local gossip increased her disgust and lowered her opinion of mankind. The Couillards’ daughter had just had a child and was going to be married shortly ; the Martins’ maid, an orphan, was pregnant, so was a neighbour’s daughter of fifteen, and a widow too, a poor lame dirty old thing, known as Ma Mudlark from her filthy unwashed condition. One heard every day of some new pregnancy or of the misconduct of some girl or married woman with children of her own or of some wealthy respected farmer. The warm spring seemed to be stirring up the sap in mankind as violently as in the plants. Jeanne’s sensual impulses were dead and no longer worried her ; her broken heart and romantic soul were only soothed by the warm fertilising breath of spring and she lived in a world of fancy, excited but without passion, day-dreaming, dead to all the lusts of the flesh. With a feeling of revulsion, which amounted almost to hatred, she could not understand the foul bestiality of the world.

A Woman’s Life
Guy de Maupassant
Translated by H N P Sloman

Pictures taken in and around Le Mas d’Azil, Arriège region of France, in July 2011.

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot
Four Quartets

Pictures taken in and around Le Mas d’Azil, Arriège region of France, in July 2011.

The inside of Husain’s house was cold and dark. We climbed three flights of steep stone stairs to a bare little sitting-room furnished with a single rug and a few cushions. Puffing my way up, I thought how odd it was that every detail of the architecture of the place seemed totally out of proportion to the people who lived in it. Each stair was a good eighteen inches high – above knee-height for the average Yemeni man. Had they built these houses in the expectation that they were going to grow into giants? Was the scale of the city supposed forcibly to elevate the inhabitants? Husain and Abdurabu had gone at the stairs like mountain goats, skipping up from peak to peak. I lumbered behind, a gangling heavyweight with the sound of seagulls crying in my chest.

Arabia
Jonathan Rabat

Eileen Margaret Shaw (née Collins)
Born November 1902, died May 1983

Hospitality has always been enumerated among the Eastern virtues. It still subsists in Syria, but prevails most in villages and small towns; among the Bidoween Arabs, and the inhabitants of the Castravan mountains. The hospitable reception that European travellers experience on the road, the officiousness of persons who offer their houses, and services, have been unjustly suspected of always being mercenary. The traveller would oftener find himself at a loss, was his sole dependence for lodging, placed in the covetousness of his host, the value of the present, or bakhsheesh, would hardly induce a person at his ease, to derange the economy of his family, and incur an action in itself deemed honourable, and which, if neglected, would subject him to the contempt of his fellow villagers.

Alexander & Patrick Russell
The Natural History of Aleppo (1794)
Syria: through writers’ eyes

Photographs taken in northern Syria, April 2007.

The water was bad – so bad that few could drink it without disgust – but one drank no water aboard ship as long as the beer held out. The water was generally river water. We note that the river water ‘about London’ was reckoned especially good. It was carried to sea, not in iron tanks, as it is carried nowadays, but in wooden casks, not over clean. Sometimes the casks were found to be old oil casks. The water invariably became putrid after standing in cask for a few days. It then grew sweet again, and fit to drink, but after standing and working for several weeks in the hold it became thick and slimy, full of ‘green grassy things’, besides being stagnant and flat. At this stage in its development it was generally tapped for the ship’s company.

Sea Life in Nelson’s Time
John Masefield, 1905

Anti-sectarian rally
Beirut
27th February 2011

From A Chinese-English Dictionary, 1982.