The chipmunk from the cliff top beyond the wall seems interested in us.
Below march the blue-green spearheads of the pines up the slanted pastures that rise until the evergreens cluster in a band about the bare, gray necks of the nearest peaks, rising jagged and stony into the gathering clouds to the left.
To the right winds the switchback road down into the aptly named Sunlit Basin. The river, which winds about the unseen base of this range, hidden like a ghost from the viewer above, is there, a thing of the mind, the viewers wondering where and how it breaks into the high plain far off to the right, behind their shoulders.
Directly ahead, in the cloud-hung distance, ice-sheathed knives of stone pierce gloomy, gray mists and puffy, white cloud, except for a cluster of four peaks—these gleam in the plunging rays of the sun which bores through a blue eye in the swirling vault of cloud which roofs this jagged world.
At our feet the chipmunk emerges from a channel of eroded mortar, to stare distrustfully up at the sun-haloed giants that have invaded its world, nibbling upon the triangular tortilla the largest of them dropped so that his curiosity would surpass his sense of peril, drawing him from his hole like they have emerged from theirs, to see these momentarily sunlit giants.
A Once Great Medieval City: 2016: Impressions of Baltimore Maryland
