All the colours are being leeched out of the earth. Where there was vibrant green, there's now hazy gold. Some fields are already reaped and ploughed, and the dust is getting serious. The flowers have all but finished except for the giant purple thistles, and hungry herds are munching their way through drying grass.
There's nothing lovelier than the sound of sheep and goat bells clocking gently - unless it's the indescribable sound of 50 munching mouths. Or perhaps the monotoned 00-oo-oo of the fanciful hoopoe who's too clever and acrobatic to remain still while I take his photo.
Mrs Sandra dear
ReplyDeleteI have already commented on this panoply of photographs but I see an overzealous functionaire of His Majesty's Government has taken my comments down.
Discouraged somewhat but in principal resilient I offer a summary ...
Is the mauve/purple/violet flower a baby artichoke?
As a blogger I feel it is my duty to offer my opinion: an overestimated vegetable but in those parts of the world perhaps any vegetable ...
Are fences blue for some ethno-cultural reason?
The town in the distance is a splendid shot as is the slight v of the landscape in the other landscape study.
What is the crop Mrs Sandra - sorghum (whatever that is), barley to sell to the Scots for their vegetable pottage, millet for the world's canary breeders and those further south who mix it with the blood of their long horned cattle to make a perhaps nutritious (except when the cattle have rabies) porridge?
Are the sheep angora? How bored they appear. But well fed one is relieved to observe. I feel they are longing for education.
Once, in Epidavros,I was attacked by a herd of goats with bells (well one of them had a bell) while I was escaping a tourist group at the amphitheatre. I will never forget it, I had just scambled down the crumbling hill on the other side of the amphitheatrre and suddenly they were all around me, ringing their bell and regarding me with - oh the terror, the terror - ravenous curiosity. Honestly Mrs Sandra, if Pallas Athena had not intervened personally ... They seemed young, headstrong goats. Very dangerous types.
I feel you will need no other warning.
I regret using 'principal' instead of 'principle' and my other solecisms.
ReplyDeleteSandra, the point of the clocking of goat bells is that it is a warning: do not be deceived.
Although perhaps your goats are not possessed by the Furies as the Epidavrian ones so obviously were. Perhaps yours are possessed by the Eumenides (though I doubt they stray far from the Mediterranean). in any case the one is merely the obverse of the Other.
And then again perhaps they are of a different kind altogether. Goats are so often so very, very inscrutable - at least I find them so.
....
You will be relieved to hear Lost ended last night.
In a maelstrom of mysticism.