Light Pollution
Blood in the atmosphere, and how the clouds bled
I dreamt once of clouds in the Arabian desert that take the sunlight with them, one thousand djinn suns roving the desert, disorienting or blinding unfortunate travellers.
Similar clouds roamed over Europe one night on eastern winds, absorbing from the cities they passed the ambient light and dirt and noise of a modern concrete desert-in-kind.
I was staying at my parents’ home, looking after the house during a holiday. They live in a village that was once open country, but its proximity to a largening town threatens to engulf it in a wave of endless cheap low-quality building materials and throngs of men from the suburbs and across the sea.
Onto the remaining fields I went for a walk with the dogs. We have handsome hounds with good hearts, two pointers with sharp senses and great focus.
On this night they were more subdued than normal: they met the promise of a walk with the usual enthusiasm, but when I opened the door and began putting on my boots they retreated inside and looked at me quietly from their bed.
It was an over-warm winter night, tepid air trapped in by a thick layer of knotted nimbostratus clouds, stifled despite the roar of a strong high wind pushing the clouds at pace.
Onto the open fields, a panel from some ill-funded building project tumbled into a hedge, thrown by the wind, and away from artificial lights I was able to take in the full breadth of the sky—twisted and strange. The clouds glowed with a ruddy pale light, brightening in patches as if from within themselves, crossed by chaotic swirling dark textures heaving onwards in the wind. The whole body of it rolled westerly, blotting out the full night’s sky, like the calloused underbelly of some dread leviathan.
It illuminated the ground with a uniform lilac tone, like a constant twilight without a moon. A poisoned darkness silhouetted the trees against the mass of clouds, the bare branches of old elms and ash trees stiff and still despite the howling of gales, due to the direction of the wind and the stiffening of age.
As the whole thing rolled by it spat dirty, occasional drops of rain, like a spray of soot. All the air felt grainy and thick and cloying, and the smell was of dirt and dust.
On the far side of the fields the winds began carrying far-off tunes of strange gypsy songs, sharp high notes like some old music box echoing amongst the twisted winds. It was accompanied by foreign shouts and exclamations stripped bare of texture or intent. No one in this village that I knew was the sort to revel with such weird noise at 9pm in the middle of January. I still do not know what to think of these sounds.
It is difficult to truly convey the weird malevolence at the middle of the scene; always that patchy unnatural light spilled out from no one point in particular, radiating over the trees and grass and mud and earth, and far-off sounds and sporadic dirty raindrops cut through the pressure of the atmosphere with intent.
The dogs were tense, frequently not wanting to continue, needing to be cajoled along. Near the end of the walk they found a single white leather glove on the ground, supine and pristine atop the mud.
We did not see anyone on the walk home.
The morning after’s walk was quiet and still, under a blue and pink windswept sky, with the sun rising warmly in the east and opposite a perfect half-moon in the west.
The glove and the hedge-panel were gone, and the only sounds were of songbirds, dogs, and at the far west of the field, at the highest point—the constant distant rushing of a recently constructed motorway bypass several miles away.