The Inconstant Moon

By anyone's reckoning we've had a great evening, cruising around town in a car with good suspension and speakers, in the groove with some nice Bombay beats, eating ice-cream. Then this: "There's no murder here."
My friends are terribly disappointed. It was bad enough the other shop being out of Dairy Milk on Eid of all days, but no murder, now that's bad. Rose shrugs her shoulders and sweeps her shawl round her in a defiant gesture that makes it clear she's done with that DVD shop, like big time. That's it. No murder; you've lost my custom. Honey.
Our driver is a dashing young fellow for whom pleasure and work happily meet if, as I assume, fast cars, pretty girls and good music are his bag. But even he slows his pace to match the mood.

I'm never too sure what's being celebrated at this Eid. All that's ever mentioned is food (green custard featured large this year) and family (which is reason enough for me) but I know what a lot of lads with cars are celebrating: Independence.
Not from the British as such, that's in August, but from the stern laws of one Sir Isaac Newton, particularly that pesky number 3, threatening an equal and opposite reaction to every action. But there'll be no collisions here, we're free of all that! So let's drive towards each other really really fast so we get bigger and bigger and the horn will crescendo. Let's swerve this a-way and that a-way. Let's have a race. Acceleration? Yes please! Constant velocity? Boring! Let's swing our partners round and round, once to the left and then to the right. Dosy-doe!
Since no one seems too concerned about the punishments for breaking these laws, I can only assume they don't apply in this part of the world.
The street is a party.

***************************

These are the things that cease to be pleasant in times of uncertainty.

1. toy guns
2. deserted streets
3. men breaking into a run in public places
4. bonfires
5. fireworks

The evening before, as darkness fell, someone with good eyesight saw the first curve of light in the sky that reminds us that after a dark night, life goes on, although with more regular meals to sustain it this month. This is another reason to celebrate.
I had been invited to welcome in Eid with my headmistress, a woman of great poise. At first, this consisted of hearing her phone far-flung nieces and nephews to wish them a blessed day in four or five different languages. There seems to be some doubt every Eid whether we do, in fact, all share one sky, one moon. "How much of your moon can you see?" people ask.
"Is the moon out where you are?"
"Yes, yes, I see it, it's here - is it there?"
O, it's a capricious world.

Tea was served with hot samosas. As with everything she does or makes, they were of impeccable quality.
All of a sudden, we heard explosions. We both put our cups of tea down with a shudder.
"Fireworks," she said after a moment, managing a nervous smile. "It's Eid, it'll be fireworks," arguing away her doubts.
We regained our equilibrium with the help of tea.

As headmistress, it is her job to pronounce bans on the 'vices of the day'; three before 9:00 is not uncommon: "Children, no dirty fingernails, we'll cut them off; no home language, we are English-medium; no Dodge Ball, not everyone can dodge."
There's another thing that has to be banned and rebanned: bazaari food. Like cigarettes in other climes it comes with a health warning and it's simply not seemly. Good families eat wholesome homemade food. Bazaari food is for those that play fast and loose, those that do a bit of duckin' and a-divin', dodgin' and a-weavin'. That driver, for example, now he would be a bazaari food type. Don't tell anyone but I'm quite partial to a bit of street food myself: liver kebabs, spring-roll surprises and gol-guppe, that comedy element in a person's diet, due to it's amusing flavour and mode of consumption. It should not be found in the lunch boxes of any child.

But I have never heard her ban anything with the vehemence with which she said that night, 'Fireworks should be banned.'

So should bombs, so should guns.

We're sitting round the telly watching the news a week later wishing it was only fireworks. We wish murder was only on the movie channel. But games have exploded into destruction round the country and no one knows the death toll yet. These bombs are worse than the moon; you never know when they'll appear. We're glad the smoke we smell is only someone burning the first of the autumn leaves.

For it is nearly autumn and I have been here a year. The crops I saw being harvested when I first arrived are ripe again. I've had the freshly-prepared festival food whose stale left-overs I tasted in the first week of October last year.

The moon is waxing.
There's a lot you can depend on, yesterday and today and forever.

Feasting, Fasting

My chaperone is ten. He's a boy though, so he'll keep me safe. 'Baji', he asks me as we pass our goat friends and pause to rub their foreheads with our knuckles to their consternation, 'Do you like goats?'
'Let me count the ways,' I began, but faltered. How, I wondered, do I render into Urdu 'cheeky-chap grin'; 'their all-knowing wisdom and frabjous joy'; 'the bolshie head-butting stance that turns to timidity on one's approach'? But reader, know this, that I love them.
'That's good baji, because that's what we're having for tea.'

They live at the back of a school-house. They sleep on the desks and by day, stay in the father's workplace, his tailor's shop. The only furniture is the sewing machine stand. The smell of goat stew blunts my sentiment. I am now hungry and heartless.
Everyone is expectant as the floor-cloth is spread and wiped down with tailor's scraps of georgette. A basin is brought in, we wash our hands. Rotis are thrown down, frisbee-style, and curry is ladled out. Everything changes when I get my plate. It's less of a meal than a biology lesson. Anatomy is on the menu, and such long, tubular organs smelling like, well, smelling like that can only be intestinal. I compliment the pickle.
At the end of the meal, when the children are outside, the mother whispers, 'He's only ten, he doesn't know how to buy meat yet.'
It is my professional opinion that no child, whether boy or girl, should be responsible for meat and poultry purchasing until they have been taught and tested on that diagram in the bio. textbook.

The father sets his alarm for four a.m. as tomorrow is Ramadan: Day 1. It's thoughtful of him, as he'll not hear it ringing himself, he's deaf. So he doesn't hear it ringing now, piercingly, until he turns and sees his children, wife and guest all covering their ears.
Actually, no one needs an alarm clock to wake for the pre-dawn breakfast. After an incident many years ago, when a man repeatedly beat his two wives for only waking at dawn, too late to whip up a smorgasbord, someone commissioned a sort of extra muezzin to make a call not to prayer but to breakfast. So at 3:30 I awake as electricity surges and a tannoy tells us to all get up, and eat food. 'EAT FOOD,' it said, again and again, 'EAT FOOD'. Then, an hour later, 'Right, stop eating now.' Yessir.

Silence, and then the first light is accompanied by more profound thoughts suddenly filling the sky, each man's voice from every mosque weaving together into a polyphony. Morning has broken, the fasting has begun.

Later, evening falls and the fasting is broken. Hunger makes the azan ring out louder. It is somehow more substantial, like food itself. I'm going down the lane after darkness has fallen and it is, of course, a moonless night. A rich panel of star-studded sky gleams so ostentatiously that if it were a woman's scarf, we'd all gossip about how showy it was. 'Who would use so many jewels? Such a shocking show of extravagance, don't you think? Are there no limits?'
No. Not for this designer, it would appear. He's into 'lavish'.

However, I am flanked by darkness unrelieved. For a moment I wonder where the stars went to the right and to the left of me. Then I remember that there is more overhead than sky: the firmament here comprises terra firma almost as high. Whole swathes of the universe are blocked from view because of it.

Between these two hills is my town. I make my way to my neighbours'. These are the folk who bake bread, make fresh noodles and lightly spice home-grown greens. Nigel Slater and his co-religionists would love these foodies. They feed me clotted cream and marmalade on naan, bring me steel tumblers of lassi, share rice with me off big platters. But it's more than wholesome. The kids can crack walnuts in their fists. Sparks fly in the kitchen and not just the linguistic sparkle of hot-headed TV chefs, either. While the children fiddle with the hot-plate wires, it's fireworks.
Most celebratory of all though, is the invitation to take-off my headscarf, hold it wide open and feel it grow heavy with fruit raining down as children dance in the orchard branches. My scarves haven't yet broken, but it's a distinct possibility.

Tonight, though, it's offal curry. I get two kidneys and an intestine.

There can be great joy in fasting.

Hill-station-upon-sea

"All aboard?" Poop poop! "We're off, hold on tight!"

Well what the fat-controller actually said was "Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem" but with such jovial spirit that he might well have said the above, as he revved up his bus, giving extra gas for the hill.

For me the summer holiday began with the bus trip up the hill to the foothills. It was the bus man's holiday too, he took such joy in his work. 'No one will thirst on my bus,' he declared, brandishing two bottles of water. Nor did we. Thereafter he greeted every toll collector and every vendor at traffic lights with arms outstretched, lowered from the window, blessing them, asking obliquely after the health of those at home, inviting them to join him for a cup of tea when he next passed by. (Pity the passengers on that trip) He tooted his horn and waved to all the school boys we passed, who beamed back at the spherical face of Driver Uncle, bobbing above the steering wheel.
Eventually, high above the plains he pulled up outside an old cinema. He took up his position at the door and mine host personally conveyed his very best wishes for our holidays, calling all alike 'beta', except me, whom he called 'son', proud that he could distinguish between Urdu and English speakers, even if subtle gender distinctions elude him.

It is while walking from there up the hill to the hostel I am booked into that I have a horrible thought. While I napped on the bus, did uncle take a sneaky left to bring us all to the English seaside? For while the sea that laps at the banks of the promenade is monsoon mist and the fish'n'chip shops do samosas instead, the stag-do style, kiss-me-quick kitch and roaring trade in sweetmeats is Blackpool is Scarborough is Brighton.
You take a family, any family, and put it in a street lined with livid snacks and lurid hats, add donkeys beats and lights, and it changes. Men for whom romance is roti from their wives in a tiffin-box leer. Boys who study accountancy hard so as to provide for their parents in old-age get a pogo-stick in their pants and walk funny. Girls with good grades who wish for world peace let down their hair and loosen their tongues. Their mothers, short of breath as they walk, giggle and squander household budgets on toffees and topis.
What sea air does there, the cool mist does here: it makes you want to cruise, to whizz round really really fast on a ferris wheel and eat fried things. My holiday here has a soundtrack. I sit and study and hints of dizzy beats or lusty love songs build to a crescendo, steal my heart for a second then fade out round the corner, leaving me feeling suddenly stranded. The fog and the forest it seems, is conspiring to keep me from this party.

For here, where I am staying is more convent than Comfort Inn. At the end of the lawn (keep off the tennis court) rises a building (To the Glory of God, 1920) built to house white-faced deaconesses. And it's as if they've never left. The napkins are still numbered and placed in embroidered pockets on side plates. Above one of the mantelpieces is one of their tea-towel maps of Scotland and above the other is a watercolour of a Fenland parish church. While I'm meant to be here studying Urdu, it's the coats of arms of Ayr and Dunoon I can't help memorising over mash and peas. Oh, and simply none of the features we have come to expect from A Passage to India is missing. Each room is one with a view. There are porticoes and verandas, gables and balconies, a godown (but don't ask me which one's which) kitchen quarters and ceilings lost in shadows. Employees whose forefathers served before them testify to the Raj tradition of swearing a covenant with their servants of steadfast patronage for steadfast service from one generation to the next, even unto the end. These boys were born with a knowledge of butter knives and marmalade spoons and they look at me sternly if I muddle them up. One simply cannot get the memsahibs these days. 'Mango pickle. She asked for mango pickle!' What would the good deaconesses have thought?

After a day of study and a constitutional round the hill it's time for cocoa. I'm reading my bedtime book in a pool of lamplight in the lounge. I'd like you to imagine it's gas light for atmosphere. The rest is cozily dim. The silence is disturbed by the watchman coming in from the cold. I suspect this ancient servitor may have himself stood to attention to the last of the Sahibs who ruled India. But now as he dodders in to fill his tin mug with tea, he seems to bring with him a song, a sort of lovers' lullaby, I realise as I listen. Faint violins bow out a harmony of heart-ache and the voices pipe their yearning quietly round the room. 'Ji?' I ask, 'where is the music coming from?' He finishes stirring in sugar before he lays down his spoon. Then he gestures reverently to his heart.
'Hmmm,' I say, having no other words to show appreciation for his deep understanding of the true source of music. He mistakes my monosyllable for a matronly note of disapproval and fishes under layers of shawl for the off button on his shirt-pocket radio.
It is silent again.

I tiptoe upstairs and lift the latch on the laundry door trying not to wake the women in their wooden-walled cells with the clatter of zinc jugs and tin tubs. I brush my teeth on the balcony, staring into the dark of the forest below. The quiet pays off, for from the funfair in the distance wafts another song, this time, to the moon, asking that if it should grant the singer any favour, it would be to see her again, Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah! This last vocative, originally intended as thanksgiving for some particularly fair filmi maiden, it seems to work well as thanksgiving for all this forested loveliness too.
The burden is taken up again several hours later, at dawn.
Allah hu akbar. Allah hu akbar. Allah hu akbar.
It too clicks off abruptly, before the azan is over and after that, as the first light of dawn creeps through the branches across the the range of hills, birds tune up and a thousand flute-like voices echo this truth over and over.

Out of the Eater

My flight back to the mountains didn't quite make it. The pilot tilted a wing and swung round back to Islamabad. He took one look at the clouds and wanted to go home. He announced their height in numbers meaningless in their magnitude but when I saw, I sympathised. Up there the the line between mountains and meteorology is blurred where solids are etherial, and out of the ether, walls block the way. The other suspension that makes flight possible is that of disbelief. I am willing, it'll get me home.

So I am holed up in a hotel with a carpet on the wall and a doorway in the shower. I could do with company and although there's a talkative type, from the part-of-the-furniture school of service, I'm wanting to hear more than his litany of 'hello-please-thank-you-ma'am-welcome-please', repeated often, with pride, in person and telephonically. He hopes I'll tip as Dickens was paid, by the word, but I'm no philanthropist and I leave him empty handed and strangely lost for words. Not me: 'Thank-you, Uriah, good-bye, good night, allah hafiz and inshallah never again.'

The plane makes it on day two. I arrive to sand dunes glistening in the light on the one hand and flora and fauna being fruitful and multiplying, each according to its kind, on the other. But once I've swept and bleached, the house is inhabitable again and I'm able to venture outside and enjoy the last of the lilies, just blossoming when I left, and the first of the figs. I eat them standing on the chair I pick them on, as the race to get them before the birds gives the operation a sense of urgency. I step into the school and a schoolful of children turns its collective head and hurtles towards me. Balls are left to bounce to a standstill, 'it' gives up the chase, climbers descend from apricot trees; buckets and spades, once so highly sought are abandoned; a hundred hands are outstretched. I must shake them all. A hundred good mornings later and I am hoarse. I am happy, home at last.

WALCOME BACK MISS!!! it says on the blackboard, making me glad I am their maths, not spelling, teacher. I've been led back to the year 5 classroom in my break, after fervent whispering through division. This class, who I harangue and detain, are throwing me a party. On a grubby desk 15 tiny lunch boxes are offered as oblations. I have a chip, a crisp, a bite of sandwich, of samosa, of kebab. I take namkeen and tear a bit off a fried egg. There's a biscuit and some cake. My cup runneth over.
Men are hunting and girls are gathering. By neighbours I'm given apricots and their kernels, mangoes, plums and roses. One lodges a lump of venison in my fridge, as he has none, and invites me to enjoy some. I've had lentils for lunch and tea so one hungry night I hack a piece off, pound ginger, fry it up and cure my anaemia.
The crown prince of a nearby valley is coming to dine with some dear friends. In his honour, rare 'blue sheep' is served - no woolly pastoral breed here but a hardy beast of the mountains. It's so dark it looks like it's burnt to a cinder but it is as much like blueberries as it's possible for meat to be, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
I am warmly welcomed back into the ecosystem: out of the eater, something to eat. My knees are nibbled, my ankles are attacked and my scalp is someone succour. I am being poured out. They make their home on my head, but there's no WALCOME here, just NIDAX! (something from the chemist.) I scour and scrub, beat bedding and sun it, burn smoke offensive to the six-legged and comb with aggression. We all groan together, as was promised for the time being.

But I've decided not going to fight this battle alone. I enlist help. I'll take care of the home front - kitchen and carpets, floors and furnishings - but the battle of the bedding and endless fabric that makes up our clothing someone else has to handle.
The first dhobi I approach doesn't do women's clothes, so to speak. I don't blame him, neither do I as of now. But I finally find my comrade standing at the window wielding his iron, so big it might explain the the occasional power outages we have as a city. His shop is more library than laundry, men's drab kameezes neatly referenced according to the dewy decimal system of washermen. You check them out to wear and return them for a wash. I know my clothes will be safe with him, but the bugs won't stand a chance. A powerful smell of clean billows from behind the back curtain. 'Will you help me...?' I begin.
A week later and trousers I'd begun to hope were meant to be crinkled are knife-edged. Kameezes stand to attention, dupattas unfold into a neat square pattern that makes teaching 3-D shapes a pleasure.

Battle-weary, I get the news. My phone rings just as a school parent stops his car and winds down his window to inform me, and tell me to go home. 'Pakistan has won'.
'What?' I should have known. The World Cup. Cricket.
I do a u-turn and join the throng of children who've also been dismissed as a national holiday is declared. I just check, for the record, that they know why, after a school girl in a neighbouring country thought she was off on Good Friday because it was someone's (not too sure whose) birthday, 'kisi ka happy burday hoga' as she put it, bored of the births of so many great men and gods. Although some know, many others simply pump the air and cry 'Happy Birthday!' in celebration of such a display of, this time sportsmanlike, strength.
And out of the strong, something sweet: Happy Rest Day.

A quietish morning

It's a quietish morning at the airport, but then it always is. The only chap expending any energy in the sunshine is a sweeper raising billows of dust on the runway. The lone woman on security is delighted to have someone to talk to. She looks like some of the mothers of my neighbourhood but in standard-issue blue and lipstick. So I greet her as such, calling her baji, sister. She sits me down and tells me about her children. You would not believe the hassles with school buses, you simply would not. And fees! Oh dear me, no. What a lot they do charge these days.
It's unseemly to frisk a friend so she doesn't and she doesn't have time to inspect my bags, what with sisters-in-law to discuss.
"Cup of tea? - Of course", she answers the question herself, "you're a teacher."
What a lot she knows about schools. Tea for two is brought by a tea-boy (Shouldn't he be at school?) moments before two embassy women stride through flashing their ID. That's the other way of avoiding her hands, but it won't buy you a brew. Next a grandma bundles in with such general bagginess of both luggage and person the light ruffling of garmenture by my bosom buddy is not, I am guessing, effectual.
Some sort of superintendent of security drops his specs and then his safety standards. He kicks the shards of glass under a carpet. Don't tell the embassy women.
Outside, in the Aviation Authority's own Chelsea Flower Show, the men I saw lighting cigarettes eight months ago when I arrived seem only just to be drawing the last drags now. They stub them out, wander up to the cabin crew and exchange hearty greetings and manly hugs. They are ushered on. It seems almost a shame to break up the party by boarding the plane.

The mountains between that place and now are so silent, still and large they make me wonder whether that green cherry orchard of a place behind them was all a dream.

Party Time

Though green is grey and grey is black, what the night lacks in colour, it makes up for in heady scents. Somewhere, something big is blooming.

Inside, under buzzing tube lights, balloons are bursting and it will stomachs next; there ought to be laws against this many helpings. It's party season and fizz is flowing, the rice is spiced and there's a cherry on top of every cake. I pity the boys and girls born in winter when living is low-key and to party is to stoke the fire, when the bread is wholemeal and the only things cracked open are walnuts. Still, their cheeks glow red with alternate hot and cold and they know they're loved as they huddle with families around stoves.

These spring time babies are a different breed. They lick cream with their tongues, wear foamy dresses, cry for pepsi and jiggle to film songs, aunties adoring. I am tested, teacher though I may be, to the limits by the constant prodding in the rib cage by unnumbered pointy ends of party hats. I try to sit and grow oblivious and plump like the mothers of this poking horde. At such a moment a man -a man? where did he come from? - whispers over my shoulder, "Sister, will you take a drink?" I am concerned that my face is displaying signs of being driven to drink by kids, for he does not mean pepsi. No, but it is white, I am one of Those Girls.
"No thank-you"
"But...it's the local brand." He is shocked.
"Even so."
The room has gone silent.
He leaves. Is his tail between his legs? I can't quite see. The women breathe a sigh of relief. Not, after all, one of Those Girls.
"Paani pass kijiye please?" I ask, and a cheer goes up. Someone obliges by passing not only the water jug, but seconds of cake.

I miss a boy's birthday and am treated to the video of it instead, when I go round later. I watch the children's mouths go orange with fanta, the women adjust their dupattas for the camera and for ease of eating, the cake being cut. An unflattering camera angle shows hefty women having a go at 'Happy Birthday'. They realise after the first line that they're not too confident with the rest so they let it linger on a surprising note mid-scale. At last the smiles and double chins also come to an end, disappearing with the camera man's own party spirit as the room sways and finally fades to black and I can leave.

I prayed for the gift of hospitality and now the party's swinging at Hannaz Place. It started with sharing breakfast with ants and birds. They nibbled and pecked respectively while I, greedier, grabbed whole handfuls of cherries, happy that the porridge season had passed. I begrudged the the insects theirs and wished a community liaison type would help us dialogue about them taking the higher branches and leave me the ones I could reach below. While Dr Dolittle did not appear, more cherries did. Like the Israelites stumbling from their tents to see what was laid out for breakfast, I woke and went outside and found provisions weighing down the branches, new every morning. The red was alarming. I picked, I ate, I fed them to my friends at playtime.
Seeing the bounty ripening higher up, I was glad now that I had not signed away my rights to the upper branches. Bravely I erected a ladder and began to climb. The mountains got ever so slightly nearer and the neighbourhood appeared over the wall. I appeared, meanwhile, to the neighbourhood. Soon, there was a bang on the gate. Children came brandishing plastic bags. More nimble than I, they were soon aloft in the higher branches. Brothers followed and mothers. I lost count of cherries and of children. They were on my roof, in my kitchen, climbing the walls they were driving me up.
Bring back the ants.
Bring back the birds.
Bring back the cane.

At last, the fruit and the families left.
That evening, I made cherry jam.

A week has passed. Silently, the unripe cherries left untouched in the carnage have blackened. "Baji, my blood pressure is low, the doctor says I need cherries."
I cannot refuse a friend who has herself fed me so many times so I give her a bag and she calls her sisters who come with her brothers too. Among them is the sullen teenager I have never seen away from a computer screen. I guess the doctor would prescribe him some 'cherria' too, pasty as he is, but he only needs to look at them to be transformed. He is all of a sudden a magical-mystical-trapezing-troubadour. He shouts us all down, for no one must cramp his style. He scales the ladder to the top and I mean the top. Two feet touch the single-pointed prong of one side, his usually lanky self now taut as he touches the very tip of the tree. A lean mean harvesting service, he fills two tubs suspended I know not how. Safety is touch and go. I might be the tenant of the house, but he is king of the castle. We his subjects look up in awe. He descends and grunts his teenage thanks when I say shabash, well done.

We had a party with cake and cream and a conjurer. But he got the cherry on the top.

Winning the Day

"Slaughtered, ma'am?"
"Please."

Dead or alive. That's your choice here. Not free-range or buy-one-get-one-free; not RSPCA monitored or corn-fed. Fresh, at least, is a given.
So my poultry man does his dreadful deed and wipes up afterwards with a wodge of wing. I hand over cash and make a mental note: next time bring exact money. The bloodied change puts me off my tea.
Cooking time is shorter here: the bird's still warm as it hits the pot.

Guestz meanz meat so in this season of new life I have been responsible for the killing of two broilers. But life seems to be winning the day. The gauze of thin green over the grey has given way to a plush carpet of leaf and grass. Trees are no longer blushing pink but fully fledged and growing fruit. Mammals abound. A man, embracing a baby goat, a baby girl and a lit cigarette, greets me on my way to school. Something tells me he is happy. Indeed there are cries of the young of both the species he holds emanating from the homes and gardens all along my track.

We celebrate spring with a jolted drive through the mountains processing up the highway - the aisle through our colossal Easter cathedral - built mainly by men from China believing Blake that, 'great things are done when men and mountains meet,' but extrapolating, 'and greater things where machines and mountains meet.' So they set their faces as flint and their feet apart and hold huge drills poked into the sides of mountains so solid, so steep and towering I tremble just to look at them. The trembling of these men with plastic hats and audacity has a more tangible cause. Then, they simply scoop up the rubble to which the the rock-face is reduced and tip it down the hill. At other places they employ brick layers to build walls to separate road from mountain and I wonder what they'd say if asked as Job was,

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...
Who determined its measurements - surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together...?

Job 38:4-7

It was no man who built this monumental mountain range, neither in a Great Chinese Leap Forward, nor in a cathedral-building Middle Age. My school infants don't know this. I watch them take inspiration and have a go themselves at attaining to the lofty heights in the sandpit. They share out sand and shovel undeterred even by their brethren with a different game, the looting and pillaging of said sand. They pile up bucketfuls higher than their heads. I fear for the day they will attend sir's science class and hear just how many geological ages it takes to make a mountain and just how many years it takes to make a geological age. They will lay down their little tools and lament the brevity of life - oh, how like grass we are, which is here today and is tomorrow thrown into the fire - and the brevity of playtime in particular.

We live in the place that the Earth's crust was freed from the underworld, where it pushed its way up and out so its strata of many colours could fill the sky with its earthy rainbows. Here rocks, redeemed, seem to rejoice in their roller coaster lines, folds of tectonic plate forced into looping the loop. There are crazy patterns: zebra stripes, zig-zag cracks and jagged edges. A generous jeweller has set slabs of silvered stone one on top of the other and decorated chunks with rust-red ribbon and fine white filament. Ten thousand purple tinged fingers point out of one cliff face, another is jigsawed into cubes and cuboids, fractured but perfectly stacked to the sky. Truly the earth has felt the breeze on its brow and enjoyed the rain and river on its back but the elements have aged it. It is cracked, chapped and gnarled.

"We squeeze the earth," boasts the SCO advert painted on one rock. Adequate though your phone and net services may be, SCO, I'm thinking its not you that's done all this.

I prefer the reverence in the word emblazoned on every vehicle, 'Mashallah', praise God for beauty. It prints what's in our hearts and on our lips, its long letters in the middle, Alifs and Lam, seeming to raise it upwards, even as it pushes on ahead, on the windscreen.

Like the architecture of minsters where many will have gathered that day, everything - even the sand left by glaciers, bearing aloft boulders - stretches through the skies, straining for the celestial.

Night falls and plunges us into solid-state formlessness and void. We creep round towers of blackness and avoid the abyss below. Then we turn round the corner of a mountain. The stone is rolled away and there is the moon, full, like a piercing through to a brighter place, like light at the end of a tunnel.

There's been a resurrection. There is light at the end of the tunnel.