Writers 3-2: J.M.G. Le Clézio: The Vortex of Circumstances

The pine covered mountain disappeared in a flighty cloud of thick mist, enclosing the surrounding bushes and schist rocks wildly in an apparently chaotic curling and drifting wind within seconds. Eye sight became impossible beyond a few meters, disintegrating the basic notion of direction, even when walking down the hardened channel of the asphalt road I had walked down a hundred times. The wind started singing and dancing around the house, knocking on the doors, trembling the glass panes in the window frames, slamming them out of their places, rattling the shutters and hinges, breaking off every obstacle on the house. The mountain spirit remained silent during this engorging prelude, but once hidden by the full cover of its breath, the air started to rumble and grumble like a ravenous lion. At ever increasing intervals, the lethargic drumming rhythm of loud bangs could be heard in the sky, falling down like meteores, as if the wind picked up the schist rocks that had broken off the mountain skeleton, and threw at the concrete boxes that caused it to itch, immediately dying out while lingering in the air all around, absorbed by the mist again, diluted in its void, the intestines of the mountain that had turned inside out. No lightning, the sky itself had been swallowed, imploded, vanished, never existed but in the fata morgana of a temporary breach, like a gap in the weather, a glitch of lucidness that allowed for only a day a view of the coastline and the horizon.

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