Wild Camp 1

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It had taken me 8 hours to get up and down Carlit and round to the north end of the reservoir. It was 79 metres short of 3000m high, the refuge was at 2005m so while I'd only climbed the height of Snowdon today, I'd done it with 15 kilos on my back at an altitude 2000m higher than Snowdon! I thought that was worth a pat on the back, and would have given myself one had not all muscles around my shoulders started seizing up.
I sought some altitude and cover for my camp and found it with the view above thrown in.  The tent went up easily and the re-sculpted coke-can stove threw up a homely spume of flame with a soft ghostly quality, ideal to try and put life into the Vulcan dust that masqueraded as dehydrated spag-bol.
The quiet of the early evening gave no clue to what was to come.  I finished off the meal with a vanilla tea care of some hotel or other and squeezed into my bag at about 9.30 that I might wake up early and put some miles behind me in the morning cool.
When a katabatic wind gets up, or rather down (it's from the Greek katabatikos meaning 'going downhill') it doesn't do it teasingly, no, it's high density air coming down a slope under the force of gravity, yes, like an avalanche.  Lying peacefully in my green fabric coffin above ground and thinking of my joy at seeing eight Egyptian vultures circling overhead while ambling by the lake earlier, I suddenly heard an enveloping noise like a plane crashing nearby as the block of wind entered the pine forest around me like a wooden comb into afroed hair!I lay there waiting for it to subside which eventually it did.  By now though it was after midnight and as my mind wandered in and out of sleep a new unrest approached.  The beauty and irritation of life is that it is foundered on patterns.  Camping wild in a foreign country, in strange terrain in the exhausting pursuit of bagging a few peaks leaves no time to understand or, perhaps more importantly, become a part of the patterns around you.
The soft discordant jangling must have entered my mind amid discomfort from the wind and latched on to some insecurity so that it manifest itself like some spread of spectral apparitions sweeping through the valley in the wake of the tsunami wind, like so many ghosts of Christmas past looking to drag me into eternal flames.  The jangling as it got nearer moved backwards and forwards so erratically against the now background drone of the wind that I awoke brim full of, let's say, curiosity.  You've no doubt guessed it was merely a herd of cattle moving on to pastures new, and now that the patterns of bovine eating habits and Greek winds had made them selves known to my subconscious I looked forward to cosier nights sleep.