three times thanks

I took the drive to the volcano at dawn. I wanted to avoid the traffic that becomes impossible before nine o'clock. I wanted to see the glow of the remains of the recent eruption. And the morning light, it is something spectacular here. The mountains were blue from their western side and slowly turning to rose from where the sun was going to rise. White tufts of clouds were hanging on to the sides of their tops. Lower down in the valleys colours mixed into a dark green-red shade that contrary to the common belief is not at all brown but -green-red!

As I drove down to the south and curved along the coastline towards east, the colours changed. Each minute added saturation to the reds and the yellows whereas greens lost their reddish tinge and assumed the brilliant tropical shade that goes so well together with everything in nature here.


My heart was light. Pleasure was pouring directly from my eyes to my heart. I thanked God for my eyes. For what is beauty but the feeling of awe induced by a visual stimulus? ( did I say that?)

The sun rose over the Indian Ocean. It was so bright all detail was lost. It was like a gigantic sheet of aluminum foil where the remains of the morning clouds were mirroring themselves. The wind started to wake up bringing the parfum of the flower plantations. The smell from the earth mixed with the flowers and brought an immediate association of church-going old ladies on a Sunday morning. I giggled to myself and thanked God for the head that amused me without asking.

I got to the place where the lava had cut the Route National n°2 in Tremblet. I parked the car and continued on foot. There were a lot of gendarmes, some tourists and locals as well. The hours around dawn are for the bicyclists as the heat gets scorching before noon and the diesel fumes very hard on the lungs.

The "coulée" was, how should I put it...it was there. Now you imagine a dark brown cliff with smoking trees sticking from underneath it you pretty much get the picture. Once the people shut up, I heard it crackling silently and could quite clearly see it still glowing from the inside. All of the sudden I realized: It was moving! One can accept a cliff rattle a little and glow a little but they are definitely supposed to stand still. This one wasn't. With unhurried determination, it was making its way to the ocean.

The gendarmes were very blunt and matter-of-fact. One could easily have thought that they were there to make sure that nobody steals the "coulée" that had made such a nice appearance in TF1 news already. But that was not the case; they were there to keep stupid people from taking a walk on the brittle crust and falling into the 800-plus centigrade molten stone. No matter how clearly the facts are stated there is always someone who cannot resist the temptation. It is the Government's fault if they burn themselves. So there, no smiles, no bonjours.

I turned back and stopped for a coffee and a "pain chocolat" in a roadside café.
One could see the hardened lava stream from the year 2001 all the way from the mountainside to the sea. Two-meter bushes and trees and shrubs were pushing from the ground already. Down on the beach lava stones were rolling back and forth with the waves, slowly turning the cliff to a beach, filling it with black sand grain by grain.



I realized that the creation was still going on, that God was tinkering with this little island and probably liked what he was doing.

I thanked him for letting me watch.

He said:
"Stick by me, I'll be your guiding hand
but don't ask me what I think of you
'cos I might not give the answer that you want me to..."

(oh, well...)

and he signed here: