national prose month!

My return to the old house in the hills every night was a perpetual joy: not only to know that a new outwork of bricks or a windowframe had been laid in my absence, but also to have the excited uncertainty about whom I should find already there, sitting in the firelight, waiting for me. Sometimes it was Marie, freshly back from Paris or London, loaded with books: or Ines with her falcon's beauty strumming the guitar and singing some magical passage from flamenco; or Sir Harry gravely discoursing on chapters in Cyprus history which lay outside the dull dusty present--the severed head of Oneseilos buzzing with honeybees, or Berengaria being crowned in Limassol, or that odd King of Neo-Paphos who invented an early form of fan by anointing himself with Tyrian oil, which his doves adored, in order that their fluttering wings should keep him cool during meals.

And the Abbey itself was there, fading in the last magnetic flush from the horizon, with its quiet groups of coffee-drinkers and card-players under the Tree of Idleness. At full moon we dined there, barefooted on the dark grass, to watch the lights winking away along the fretted coast and the great bronze coin shake itself free of the sunset-mist and climb with slow, perfectly punctuated steps into the nether heaven, bubbling into the great rose-window of the eastern wall like a visitant of the Gothic world. Here in the striped darkness, dotted with pools of luminous moonlight, we walked and talked, the smell of roses and wine and cigars mingling with the humbler scent of the limes, or the whiffs of bruised sage coming to us from the face of the mountain behind where Buffavento rose slowly to meet the moon, like a mailed fist. And somewhere upon the outer silence would come the haunting liquid music of a flute perhaps, its five-tone scale like a thread spun upon the silent air between the pines.

How could such a sun-bruised world be transformed, be any different?

~ from Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons