THE WEATHER STATION PILLAR
Beyond the pasture the hills
rolled on one after another, while their flat blackened peaks seemed to
be lined up lower than usual, dim and hazy below the Big Dipper in the
northern sky.
Giovanni was already deep
inside a grove of trees that were dripping with dew. He climbed
steadily up a narrow path that was like a thread illuminated by
starlight, the single clearing in a thicket of dark plants taking on
all shapes and sizes. There were tiny insects gleaming blue amid the
bushes, rendering their leaves a transparent green and reminding him of
the lanterns that all the children had been carrying.
Giovanni came out of the
pitch black pine and oak wood, and all of a sudden there was a vast sky
above him, with the Milky Way, soft and blurry white, streaming from
north to south.
He could make out the pillar
of the weather station at the top of a slope that was a carpet of
daisies and bellflowers. Their fragrance was so strong that he felt you
could smell it through a dream. A single bird passed over him, crying
above the hill.
Giovanni came to the base of
the weather station pillar at the very top of the hill and, shuddering,
plopped down into the cold grass. The lights of the town below were
burning through the darkness as if the town itself were a miniature
shrine at the bottom of the sea. He could faintly hear snatches of
children's screams and bits of whistles and songs. The wind howled far
away and all the hill's plant life rustled. His sweat-soaked shirt
started to give him a chill as he looked down on the distant
sweeping-black field from the edge of town.
The sound of a train came to
him from the field. It was a little train with a single row of tiny red
windows, and inside it all of the passengers were peeling apples,
laughing or doing one thing and another. This made Giovanni feel
immensely sad, and he once again gazed up at the sky.
But no matter how hard he
looked at the sky, he just couldn't see the cold barren place that the
teacher had described in class. On the contrary, the more deeply he
stared into it, the more he saw a field with little groves of trees and
pastures. Then he noticed the blue stars of Lyra, the Harp,
multiplying, twinkling all the while, and the Harp itself stretching
out its legs then pulling them in until it looked like a long flat
mushroom. As for the town just below, it took on the appearance of a
blurry cluster of countless stars or a single, enormous puff of
smoke....
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