There is a smell of change in the still air. The dense summer darkness is fading from the sky. The white glint of water spreads out like a slow wave. It reaches the far bank. The grey river mist rises from the hidden grass, haunts up into the shapes of trees. A moorhen calls. I hear the splash of a water vole, the muffled voice of a late owl, the distant song of a blackbird. The horns of cattle emerge from the mist. The boat moves forward into the cold and shrivelled scent of the wet hay. The smell of the morning river glides slowly back from the blades of the damp oars.
The mist shines with the silver light of the sharp-leaved willows. Between the trees there are sudden distances, spaces of air and mist, where poplars and hawthorns hover and sink down. A net of branches seems to impede the ascension of the sun’s pale circle. Sedge warblers and whitethroats sing in the riverside bushes. Reeds move harshly in the rising breeze. The sun glows, and the first faint shadows darken the glistening fields with the fallen shapes of night.
The boat ripples through the unfamiliar light of the water. Nettles and willow-herb slide past on either side. The sun has kindled the smell of meadowsweet. There is a slow growth of sound: bird-song, the splashing of fish, the rustling of poplar leaves. A yellow wagtail runs through the grass at the top of the bank. Its dazzling daffodil colour is reflected in the wet grass, and in the river beneath, as it peers over the edge.
The prismatic gleam of a kingfisher rises from the surface of the water to perch on an overhanging willow branch. The cobalt and emerald sheen of its plumage seems to fade when it withdraws from the brilliant river light. Slowly it becomes more difficult to see, merging with the green of the leaves and the mossy bark. The blades of its bill rest harmlessly in the dull orange feathers of its chest. Its closed wings reach almost to the tip of its stumpy tail, giving it a neat, compact shape, ornamental and disarming. But the restless eyes watch the dark olive river. The kingfisher is always ready to fall, to seize a fish from the sudden blue cloud of the broken water. It flies as the boat approaches, flashing silver-blue and green and red through the stripes of dusk and sunlight, glittering like the auroral dew. It hovers momentarily above the shallows, but it does not strike.
Where the kingfisher hovered, five roach are swimming very slowly against the current so that they remain stationary. They are two feet down, watching the sunlit surface. Occasionally a fish rises without haste, opening its mouth slowly and closing it quickly upon the air at the surface with a just audible smacking sound. They are catching insects. They look very long and thin, pink-lipped, with silver scales and orange fins. Their tails wave constantly from side to side as they keep their positions in the current. Suddenly they dive vertically downwards with the flurry of fins. A water vole is swimming across the river, holding a dock leaf between its teeth. Its head is held well up, so that the leaf stays dry. It lands upon mud, and runs into the rushes.
A minute later the vole reappears, and swims back to the other bank. It is a sleek brown shape, misty and long in the water. Its small eyes, close together near the top of its head, shine with reflected sunlight as they watch the boat. Its tail is a straight pale line. It moves quickly, easily, furrowing the surface. It runs into a tunnel in the overhanging bank, but emerges at once and begins to eat grass. The lower half of its body is immersed in the river. Gradually it climbs the steep slope of grass, standing up on its back legs till it is almost vertical. Its small white fore-feet pull the blades of grass towards its teeth. It nibbles and chews rapidly, nose twitching, thick white tail hanging limply down. Its long fur gleams with a soft grey bloom of moisture, a delicate light that is watery blue in the sun, as though its bulky body were enclosed in a bubble of mist. The wind-ruffled fur is dun-coloured, neutral in tone. It could be green or grey or brown, elusive as muddy water. On either side of the nose there are tawny markings, like rust. The eyes are blue-grey, filmy and bright, but feeble, like the eyes of an elderly man. When the boat goes by, the vole drops into the river and swims towards its tunnel. The sun and the air are dangerous, only water and darkness are safe.
Sand martins rise endlessly over the drying hayfields, descending occasionally to make low, brief swoops at the surface of the river. They are small, pale brown birds, curiously fish-like. Their brown colouring has a tint of sepia. The primary feathers of their wings are a darker brown, long and flexible. They fly above the fields, rising gradually to two hundred feet; then they rush wildly down to skim the rippling water. Swallows also fly low to the river. They are slower than the sand martins, but more graceful. Their dark gliding streams the green light with fading lines of purple.
The morning passes imperceptibly. The monotony of land-time is lost in the boat’s slow forward movement, in the steady rhythm of the oars, in the flowing back of the banks on either side, in the rise and fall of the fields. The time of the river has no measurable progression. It surges and slackens and sinks down with the songs of the birds and the sounds of the trees. Intention wavers, and purposes cloud. Time is the wings of the heron, the call of the unseen plover, the wind in the harp of the reeds.
Slowly the river widens, the banks recede and dip down. There is more land, more water. A lake appears in the distance ahead, glowing with fiery light. But soon I can see that it is not a lake. It is a larger river, alarming in its huge, disdainful breadth, its cold depth and expansiveness of air. I turn the boat into this new, indifferent world, and row upstream, keeping close to the southern bank. Large white clouds shine upon the water. They seem to sink, and change their shape completely, before they drift beneath the fields. Looking up, I am almost surprised to see them still moving northward through the burning heat of the sky.
The musical trill of a little grebe ascends from the sheltering reeds. There is a yellow gleam of irises among the pink blossoms of the flowering rush. The south wind is languished by the warm smell of the white clover, stronger now than the fume of the hay. The black crest of a heron rises from the tall grass of the towpath. The kinked white neck appears. The heron stalks stiffly to the water’s edge, settles the dark spiders of its feet into the mud, stands with negligent bill and gold-ringed eye intent. I pass other herons, spaced out in gaps of reed, like human fishermen. The rusting spears of their reflections lie deep in the shining water.
Where the current is slow, behind a fallen tree, a green and amber pike is lurking. His mottled skin seems to ripple with the striped yellow sunlight of the water. Above him, near the surface, bleak scurry and flash like submerged silver swallows. The beaked pike is a Silurian god, down there in the lowest stratum of the river. When he rises to attack, he dredges darkness up into the light. Within a daggered black sun of pain a bleak is seized. Fish scatter outwards like a corona of bright rays.
The water is warm now; the midday heat is like a mist upon the land. Emperor dragonflies twitch and turn above the reeds, darting in pursuit of their prey. The hawthorns that grow along the bank are shadowed by swarms of insects. From the slope of the distant wood, a hobby rises slowly and circles down wind. It swoops to the river, and dashes low across the surface. The tips of its sharp wings raise a brief flicker of shining spray. It jerks wildly from side to side, swerving, leaping, rebounding. It is trying to catch dragonflies, but I cannot see if it succeeds. The hobby wheels, and slashes the air with an outstretched leg and clutching foot; the dragonflies shine and flash in the sun. Presumably they are trying to escape, watching for the plunge of the falcon, their turreted heads swivelling and gleaming. The hobby is incredibly agile, but it cannot turn quickly enough. It relies on the fast direct rush and slash, wings vibrating in a seizure of speed. Suddenly it rises, and flies back to the wood, moving with leisured wing-beats and long glides. The dragonflies resume their hunting.
The boat moves slowly through the clouded summer heat. The river bends to the south, and the hillside wood is closer. It rises to a dark, serrated crest of pines. The oaks and chestnuts of the lower slopes are now recognisable as individual trees, but the pines do not come any nearer. They keep their sombre remoteness, their suggestion of a different country, of secrets, of some hidden death that will not be revealed. I tether the boat to an overhanging hawthorn, and clamber up on to the bank. The land seems to be tilted and infirm after the buoyant solidity of the water life.
The path to the wood is circuitous, skirting large fields of wheat and barley. The wheat is brownish-yellow, glowing with a rich russet light. The barley is whiter, blonde, with strands of green at the base of the stalks. Each stalk sways over at a different angle as the breeze moves them apart, so that the whole field breathes open and seals again with an endless ocean swell. A goldfinch flies above the fields, and the yellow colour of its wingbars seems to change suddenly to match the varying colours of the corn.
The path is covered with the white floss of the seeding willows and the fallen blossom of the elder. The leaves of the hawthorn hedge look arid and autumnal. A corn bunting sings from a dead oak. I stop beneath, but he does not fly. His tail is bent under and forward into a grotesque shape as he balances in the breeze. His bill opens very wide, but closes abruptly as the first brief stutter of the song comes out. Then it opens wider still, and stays open, with the red gape shining in the sun, while the final emphatic jingle of notes dries away into the heavy air. His wings droop and quiver as he sings. He has an intense, dedicated look as he repeats his song at frequent and regular intervals, turning his head constantly from side to side. It is a demanding ritual, to which he gives all his strength and power of concentration. A singing bird seems to be possessed by an irresistible force. The sound emitted can – to our ears – be joyful, sad, or merely dull and irritating. But to the bird the sound may be of little importance. It may be the place of utterance, and the power and frequency of the song, which matter more to him.
A yellowhammer sings from an oak a hundred yards away. The two bunting songs, so parched and dry, seem to be perfectly expressive of the heat, the glare, the dusty sunlight. Here, it is July; in the middle distance there is a September haze; at the horizon a dim November mist.
The wood trembles in the heat. All is ripe and silent. A skylark sings above, but it seems to be on the far side of a silence that is clear and solid in the heat of the sun. A cool breath comes from the trees. Lakes of rosebay willow-herb float on green light. The creamy meadowsweet smells thick and stifling. Swallows swoop down to sip from the still water of a pond. Linnets and goldfinches drink at the water’s edge.
Inside the wood, the heat is muted and withdrawn. The shade of the trees is like dark, airless sunlight. I go uphill, forcing a pathway through bracken and willow-herb. Calm foxgloves rise in serenity above the dusty nettles. The spired blossom of the Spanish chestnuts smells like meadowsweet, like the sour sweetness of new bread. To describe a wood in detail is to obscure its identity. It is essentially a field of light overgrown by trees. It is not the trees themselves that make a wood, but the shape and disposition of the remaining light, of the sky that descends between the trees. This wood seems to have no dimension. Its boundaries recede to an infinite distance, moving out into the heat of the sun, drifting away with the drowsy cooing of woodpigeons and the clouded voices of turtle doves. A chiffchaff sings, high and remote in the pines. Nothing is close, or clear. At the foot of a pine I see the wings of a swift and a swallow, the kills of a hobby. But of the hawks themselves there is no sign. I cannot find their nest. I go down through the wood, out into the heat again, and back to the river.
The jarring hardness of the land is left behind. The boat moves smoothly over the water’s cooling sky. The oars splash, and the spray glitters. The shining dace melt down into darkness. Between the tall rain of the leaf-shimmering Lombardy poplars I can smell the warm hay. It is the smell of summer, a harvest of fallen sunlight. The morning clouds have passed to the north, and the afternoon is a silent haze of heat.
Suddenly I hear the harsh grating call of a common tern. A deep and graceful white waving of wings is following the course of the river. The tern flies closer, becomes a warmth of shining white. Black head, red bill, point downwards, looking alert and menacing. Dark eyes watch the water moving back beneath them. The gentle wing-beat hastens, and becomes a hover, a quicker, more incisive fanning. The forked tail spreads out into a thin white membrane. Against the sun, the wings look almost transparent, like shapes of canvas made taut and expressive by the wind. The wings beat faster, blurring to grey. Then they close abruptly, and slide down towards the water. I see a sharp sliver of red pointing below white. The tern plunges, slicing the water with a great gulping splash. I half-expect to see a cloud of steam hiss upward from the white-hot blade. A spun-glass web of foam shatters into spray and spatters down upon the surface that has already healed beneath it. The tern flies high, swallowing his fish.
The boat passes under a dark red bridge where many house martins are flying to and from their hanging nests. Their blue backs are invisible in the gloom; their white rumps rise and fall upon the flowing air like tiny flecks of foam. The arch of the bridge is a cave of hollow sound, a twittering coldness carved from the heat of the day. The sun strikes down with renewed strength as the boat emerges.
The air is very still now, but the sailing swans give the impression of a breeze. A sedge warbler sings in a motionless aspen. It is the only sound. The purple loosestrife smoulders in the heat. High above, where immense white clouds are forming, the dark fang of a hobby falls and rises in pursuit of a house martin. It is all so far off, so remote in the glare of the sky, that I have no feeling of excitement, no sense of wonder at the power and speed of the hawk’s flight as it disappears into the haze.
I turn the boat into a narrow backwater that leads to a weir. Four swifts fly low overhead, one behind the other, screaming as they whip past, their curved wings lashing and jerking. Their shrill calls tingle through the nerves. The sun makes them look brown, shows up their white throats. Their bent shapes seem to whang away from the resistance of the air, as though they were tensile and springy, like crescents of thin black metal.
The quiet stream is heavy with sleeping grebes, moorhens, and duck. It is as though the stillness of night had been suddenly lifted into the hot pallor of the day. A grass snake parts the water into a long ripple as it swims across from the other bank. Its head is held rigidly up above the surface, but the whole length of its body is submerged, waving from side to side with a sinuous, horizontal undulation. It seems always to be sinking but it does not sink. It comes quickly towards the boat, breathing at regular intervals, with its forked tongue flicking in and out for several seconds at a time, like barbs of small dull flame. I move the oars, and it stops at once, hanging motionless in the water, trailing down into the deep green and yellow light. It stays like that for at least a minute, with its head protruding and its eyes watching me, while its body floats down below the surface as though it were already dead. Then it turns, and swims back to the bank, waving easily away into the shadows. Watching the grass snake moving so smoothly through the water, I had felt cooler, I had sloughed off the hot skin of the mottled sunlight. Now the sun resumes its power.
I moor the boat, and walk along the bank till I come to the white roar of the weir. The stream is smooth and still above the fall. The green banks, overhung with grass, darken the water with a brown reflection. Bands of light are crossed by the reflected boles of the cricket-bat willows. There is no premonition of change in this serene and glossy surface. The still reflections break suddenly where the fall begins. It is a transformation; another element supervenes, contiguous but unrelated. The dark water plunges twenty feet to become the white foam beneath. It has the sculptured solidity of endless movement. The weir rages with the translated rain of spring. There is a cold, iron smell, sinister and thrilling, of water exultant. The fall glares whiter when the sun sinks beneath the pensive water-lily clouds. The crystalline ropes of foam pour down over dim green stone into a white darkness that rushes away to the east to gradually become slow and sunlit again before it rejoins the river. The curved hieroglyphs of the thrown foam clash and curl away, luminous and evanescent, like paintings seen by fading light on the wall of a cave.
The river is deep with cumulus as I row slowly east again. Cattle are sleeping in water meadows where redshanks call. A turtle dove drinks from a cattle-trough. Nothing shines here, but the trees to the south are sharp against white thunder-heads of cloud. A dark bird swoops low over dark-shaded water. It is a black tern in summer plumage. It comes closer, and I can see the deep narcotic black of its head and breast and the heavy grey of its back. Flying fast, undulating over the shadowed water, swinging its wings with a relaxed and even rhythm, it sweeps down to meet its dark reflection rising and gathers insects from the unbroken smoothness of the surface. Poising, idling upon air, then darting down, it curves away from me and goes steadily upstream. Dark head, dark bill, dark eye; the eye alone is bright, glittering like a gem of coal. The black tern draws a cooling line through the dry metallic heat. It passes like the first cool flake of a breeze, and the heat can no longer be the same.
The birds are silent. There is no movement in the trees. The oars dip noisily into the still water. The seeds of distant rain spill down from dissolving blooms of cloud, and the sky to the south is grey and withered. The castellated brilliance, which had seemed perpetual, has suddenly gone. A little owl flies from a riverside willow to perch on a post in the field. Swallows swoop at it immediately, diving straight down at its head and forcing it to duck. They slash down with amazing hawk-like venom and persistence. Blackbirds and thrushes fly out from the trees to join in the mobbing. They beat their wings wildly about that squat and hated head, hovering and fluttering as though they intend to alight upon it. The owl ducks repeatedly to avoid these spiteful rushes, sinking and rising, bending at the knees with comical suddenness. At last it flies down into the grass, where it is harder to see. One blackbird goes down with it; the other birds disperse. The blackbird utters its monotonous scolding note unceasingly, but soon it begins to feed. Gradually its scolding falters and fades. It has apparently forgotten the little owl, which is only a yard away. The owl sleeps. When the sky darkens with storm-clouds, the owl wakes, and flies back to the willow. Blackbirds and thrushes fly into the hawthorns to roost, behaving as though it were dusk.
Dazzling white thunderheads are growing rapidly from the grey ridges of cloud to the south. They swirl up into huge mountains of intense marble whiteness, like frozen white foam. These clouds are so bright, and the rest of the sky so darkened over, that their vivid glare seems to pluck at my eyes. The thunder is closer now, echoing and profound, suggesting vast depths. Swifts circle high beneath the great cloud-boulders. They fall dizzily, with wings vibrating, the sky lifting beyond them like white fountains. A hobby falls with the swifts, but is suddenly hidden as the storm-clouds descend towards the river and move across the water-meadows. The distance slowly ebbs away to nothing. Tendrils of grey mist come snaking through, seething like smoke above the waving grass. Lariats of rain curl forward from the smoke, hissing and stinging. The whole sky becomes a dome of shining white that crashes open into spray with a crackling roar of thunder. The storm-clouds sweep low and unbroken across the river valley. The rain clings to the horizon like a mist, and the wide swallow-coloured river is a calm waveless hissing. It is a world sunk beneath the surface of the clouds and risen above the surface of the water, an element in which there is no real light or air but only a faint luminosity and a fragmentation of flying water. A kingfisher flashes in front of me and slants away across the meadow. I see the sudden spurt of turquoise flame and hear the high piping call. The blue kingfisher colour seems to diffuse into the wet air. It flows out into the clouded grass, then flares above it, like a fish breaking the surface of a stream. The air throbs with the whirling black shapes of the sharp-pointed swifts. Many swallows and martins are resting along the wires of a fence, their feathers matted and drab with rain. They rise abruptly with a roar of fluttering wings. A hobby flies past, dim in the driving storm, pursuing a swift. Both birds seem to move slowly forward with erratic spurts and jerks, as in a blurred and crackling silent film. They are soon hidden by the lightning and the rain.
The storm lasts for another hour. Then the clouds rise slowly, and shrink up into a dark coil above the northern skyline. The sun shines again. Birds glow in the wet trees. The air smarts with the smell of rain. The soaked hay lies in long wind-rows of fallen white cloud. The grass steams in the warm evening sun. The scent of honeysuckle moves out from the hedge, sharp and far-reaching. The fanged blossom smells no stronger than the roving fragrance. The air is cool, embalmed with hay and flowers. Blackbirds and thrushes sing. The hobby flies steadily towards the distant wood, carrying a dark and broken swift in its talons. This is now a different place from what it was two hours ago. There is no mysterious essence we can call a ‘place’. Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.
The poplars are still. The raindrops glitter in the dishevelled flowers of the briar rose. Lapwings call from the subsiding hayfield, a remote and lonely sound. A mallard drake descends from the sky, coming down in a great whistling curve of wings, his outstretched head and neck piercing the air. At first he is a black speck; then a duck-shape; then colour begins, and I can see the primary feathers of the outstretched wings separating and the wings curving forward, cupping the air, while the red legs and feet fall away from the body and reach forward and down. The green of the head shines suddenly from black, and the purple specula bloom. The bird seems to check his swift descent, swaying as he slows into a steeper curve. It looks slow, but he is still falling very fast, still coming forward into more and more dazzling colour, as though ultimately he will crumple down into a spectrum of soft feathers at my feet. Steeper and steeper he falls, and yet more slowly. Till suddenly the river is there beneath him, shining, rising with a flash of silver light. A splash of spray is flung up as the mallard lands. The circling ripples spread endlessly outward from the still centre where the placid duck is now floating, so folded and composed, as though it had never risen into flight, had never been separated from the smooth surface of the water.
The glow of sunset fades. The shining pike of the green and yellow river-light sinks slowly down into its dusk of reeds. The long shadow of the waiting heron ebbs away. I hear the questioning whistle of an otter, and the distant wing-breath of a drumming snipe. The smell of the wet land is now as pungent and rich as the night-smell of the darkening river. A skylark flutters from the soaking grass of the field. Mist rises in every hollow and hangs in the air like an uplifted dew. It rises in the hillside woods, and flows out of them in glistening streams. The lark sings softly, and then sinks to rest. Dusk breathes from the drowned hair of the severed grass.
Smoke drifts above a line of oaks near the river. It rises from the black trees, and becomes grey against the yellowing sky. When I move nearer, I see that it is not smoke but insects, gnats, the small hand-flourishers, millions of them dancing together in dense, dark ectoplasm. They are wafted higher by the slightest breeze, undulating upwards in long grey drifting plumes. Swallows and swifts are feeding upon the thicker swarms, close to the leaves. The grey clouds of insects thin out to a fine rain. They spiral and twist apart, forming small whirlwinds. Sometimes they sail very high, as though released, loosened completely from the tethering trees. The sky is constellated with them. It is a receding universe of gnats.
The strange dance of the gnats has ended, and the sky darkens to a deep hypnotic blue. A barn owl floats silently from a hollow tree, fanning the air with soft, angelic wings. It beats slowly forward over the shine of the still river, pausing, almost hovering, its whiteness increasing, its reflection gaining depth and darkness in the shine beneath. Suddenly it folds small on to a post of grey stone, where it becomes grey, mottled with golden-brown, with the same gold lichen as the wet stone. The eyes look red-rimmed, the face curiously hard. The owl preens, then gazes around. It moves away, gleaming big and white between the pollarded willows of the field, threading between their slender crowns in the cool, damp, river dusk. There is a sudden swish upward of mallard that have been softly quacking in alarm. They spread out like the fingers of a hand, imprinted on the starred twilight.