The Mountain.

On my travels, I had the good fortune to pass through some of the Welsh countryside, and even spend a little time exploring. But I want to talk about one specific feature of the landscape that really struck me.

The land is pockmarked place of great trenches and greater peaks. Huge swathes of earth seem to have been torn out of the land by giants, and piled on top of each other in a heap. However, this all seems to have happened aeons ago, as the land has warped and changed around these natural monuments to incorporate them into itself, like a living creature.

For all this frenzied activity, it's deafeningly quiet there. The sky is almost blank, as if all features had been washed away by the rain. All that's left is rolling green hill, stretching on into the imagination.

The best way to describe it would be 'a kind bleakness'. There's an abscence of life and animation, but it seems tranquil and benign, rather than lonely. You can be the sole figure in a barren, unpopulated landscape, and the nothingness doesn't bother you. You can't miss anything, as there is no need for it. It's a void in reality where nothing is enough. Nothingness seems to fill the very abscence it implies. It's the kind of place I wouldn't mind being alone, forever. Being cut off wouldn't seem so bad. I could smile peacefully as I lost my mind, believing myself to be a politician, debating key issues with the scrub.

The place has the scope of an effortlessly epic and endless landscape that I've only before seen in fiction. As I walked, I kept expecting to walk into an invisible boundry, placed there by a deific designer because he hadn't made the rest of the level. Being there made me begin to see how people can take the beauty of the world as proof of the existence of god. It all seemed exceptional, like a feat of engineering or craftsmanship. I wouldn't hesistate to say it was a work of art, an antiquity concocted by an old Italian master. Probably bearded. Possibly gay. All the best artists were.

It was so unlike the city, the worst of which can be an uncomfortable juxtaposition btween a demented grey dystopia and a neon explosion. You can be bored to tears by a sea of dull housing rectangles one moment, and be stabbed in the retina by primary colours the next. A playground of squalor.

...

It was wonderful.