Standing on the windward side of the crater I breathe deeply as one does to prevent hyperventilation or when one feels enclosed in too small a room with too many people. An prescient breath as if to defend one self against an attack. Perhaps as the people did in the subway of Tokyo, when terrorists put poisonous gas in the deep tube. The other side of the volcano crater is closed today, forbidden to climb. It is cheaper to close down a rim side than to pay well equipped rescue workers. Do you hear the sirens? Clouds of sulphur would suffocate all life, yours included. By the way, did you forget that sulphorous openings in the earth and the ocean floors are the primeval birthplace of life? That is where the archaea bacteria thrived and still seem to do. That is where we will be deadly poisoned. Strange whims of nature which disturbs one’s linear idea of evolution of life on this earth. Look how barren these slopes are. Where ever you want to stand on the leeward or the windward side, it always depends on the wind and your love for life.

A parking place next to the crater of the active volcano. A big place, a unique place for a thriller, a perfect murder in the poisonous air. It will be difficult to remember the cars, the drivers, the passengers one has seen although there are not so many cars today.
The possibilities of unsolved murder, however, are almost countless even apart from the sulphur itself and its untraceable deviling in the air. The volcano a real temptation and a challenge. A trail up the hill in the back to have a better sight on the crater is an escape of last resort. Smoke. All of a sudden the wind turns. People run back to their cars. The muderer is there, misuses the chaos? Do you smell the sulphur seeping into the lungs? Do you feel the tremble of the mountain the animals feel. There are no animals you say?

Cosy vultures, black and big from close by, on the watch in the wind still trees, near the very top of the trees. They sit together for ever, on the watch but calm and stoic as old philosophers meditating the wind, the sky and the time. Although chased away from their nest on the sandy soil just a moment ago when we climbed to their nests, hiking through long grasses on the rather steep mountain slope. Now, we watch and they negate us as if we are air though their potential enemy, they know. A picture of lamed freedom, wide view. The camera clicks and another time. No movement in the body, no turn of the narrow, weird necks. Soon they will be back on the nest. Out of sight, out of the picture. They trust nobody, maybe Marcovaldo knows more about them, perhaps he is their friend and partner of natural conversation about rain, wind, the heat and the cold, the thin air, their weight and the indispensable vigor of their wings.
 

I call you: gardens in the tree etc. No black bird, no early morning, no wind. I call you: beautiful – a variance of a Dutch verse (Jan Hanlo). I call you ghosts in the night, to continue in my way this verse, over which the wind brushes past. Slowly moving beings of the past, here present. Seen at daylight they remind me of Ireland where I have never been.

Prehistoric beings stopped developing, evolution interrupted. Desolated nests of big birds, flown away, disappeared, coming back next year or later. Too much sulphur in the air. I call you: beautiful.