A distant dream
The winter snow still cloaked the mountain tops of Crete. A trimmed white blanket lay draped over their pinnacles, such that a perfect line formed around their midriffs, as if a horizon were frozen into the mountainside.
And below that horizon – emerging shrubs dappled the slopes like the waves do the sea. To see through the eyes of the golden eagle searching above, those mountains would be like looking down at a limpet shell on the beach. The shell’s sun-bleached top and rugged sides were miniature mountains themselves.
On the closer, more had zigzagged upwind into the protected bay the day before. It had been an irksome undertaking, beating along the northern Crete coastline, which, for all its beauty, had not been of a charitable nature. This was not so much the Greek island’s fault, as the Mediterranean’s in general.
