Outside the shops dressed for Christmas, movement everywhere - a confusion of coats, shoes, bags; of “don’t-you-run-away” holding hands, and here-and-there a bustling urgency pushing past gawpers and dawdlers outside the shops.
On the street beneath angels and candles strung overhead, thick traffic moving jerkily through the town by the river in that far-off valley.

The road I’m cycling on is climbing still, its steep inclines forcing from my lungs a harsh, gasping rhythm and filling my legs with aches until flattening out somewhat it brings me to the top, and here I stop, my eyes, in long slow drafts, drinking all they see.
On the moorland beside the road are sheep, tough as the grasses they chew upon and seeming to be set in this landscape as though they were outcrops of rocks left exposed by eons of erosion.
The Solstice sun paints pale greens and patches of dark browns, all spread across the rise and fall of these billowing hills, and way down there, where leafless woods cloak a curving slope, a sudden lake reflects the sky - a gleaming, flawless jewel.

There is another side.

A sun that’s low casts but half of what you see in a certain light; turn around and face that sun to see the world transformed, and so it was when now I gazed and was entranced by what I saw on that high and silent place.
I looked towards a massive shape, its details in that light no more than dimly hinted at; a lump of land dropped from the sky and spreading out like dough, or, if whimsy took my fancy, a giant lying asleep on that dark horizon.
Threadbare clouds half hid the sun whose light, escaping through some holes, shone in pearly beams, and where they fell upon the Earth there was illumination; a pool of colour, and rising from a lonely house, a smear of rising smoke - all else mystery and gloom.

These images imprinted on my mind and, I felt, enriching me, I rode towards the town.
Ahead, a crowd of crows had gathered round some dead thing in the road, their flapping flight as I approached heavy with resentment .
What, I wondered, had they found?

Had I died on that hill, and was I now reborn?