"Recall, reader if ever in the mountains
a mist has
caught you, through which you could not
see except
as moles do through the skin
how when the moist vapours began to dissipate,
the sphere of the sun enters freely through them ,
and your imagination will quickly see how, at first
I saw the sun again, which is now at its setting"
from Purgatory X11, 1-9
by Dante translator Charles S. Singleton
One morning at the cabin I looked out so see a stream of
fog running thru a low spot where the land dips between the
ridge where the cabin sits before it rises again, slightly to form
a finger like peninsula jutting into the slough. The fog moved out
through the brush along the edge of the slough becoming a water
fall of mist pouring down the bank to the water and eventually
dancing like the narrows before burning off in the morning sun.
Fog is the stuff of magic and mystery.
"In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs
beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes
from the deep
to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures
and caves of leviathan. And later,
in still summer rains on the
steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams,
that men shall
not live without rumor of old strange secrets,
and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night.
When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in
seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from
the Elder Ones,
then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and
oceanward eyes on tile rocks
see only a mystic whiteness,
as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and
the solemn bells of buoys
tolled free in the aether of faery. "
from The Strange High House in the Mist
by H.P. Lovecraft
