Day 25; Göynük Yaylasi

Today promises to be shorter at 5 and a half hours with about 300 metres of elevation gain and loss; after yesterday's amazing walk I want the day to be bigger, though tomorrow will provide that. It was chilly last night as we were at around 900 metres and tonight will be the same temperature and elevation so I am hoping for accommodation as camping will be cold with the kit I have. In checking my guidebook I see a wonderful photo of a single cedar growing out of a rock cliff face; all good until I see the white and red flashes that mark the cedar as being on the trail and it is section 13.02 which I tackle the day after tomorrow. Tonight's accommodation is described simply as "White House with fenced garden" which in villages with no street names is typical. 

I tried not to - honest - but I can't resist sharing this poem by Roy Campbell as I have been surrounded by straight tall masts for many days and I feel all at sea. Taken as a forest of masts on a rolling, swelling landscape it is like watching an armada on a turbulent sea. The poem is long so I've put it below¹. 

Castle at Gedelme.

Water and snacks, I usually pack enough water for the day but topped up at this spring, a respectable water source, as the day wore on.

There is plenty of evidence of landslides and boulders shattering, in fact the whole landscape appears to crumble under its own weight; a feeling I know all too well. 

This house is giving in to the dual forces of gravity and the weather.

Be careful what you wish for as today's modest day didn't finish until 5.30pm so an 8 hour day without much slacking. Tonight's planned accommodation is not open and the young woman who walked with me today kindly called for a lift to save us a one-hour walk. The car that arrives is clearly driven by an ex professional rally driver.

Index

1. Choosing a Mast by Roy Campbell 

The mast, new-shaved, through whom I rive the ropes,
Says she was once an oread of the slopes,
Graceful and tall upon the rocky highlands,
A slender tree, as vertical as noon,
And her low voice was lovely as the silence
Through which a fountain whistles to the moon,
Who now of the white spray must take the veil
And, for her songs, the thunder of the sail.

I chose her for her fragrance, when the spring

With sweetest resins swelled her fourteenth ring

And with live amber welded her young thews:

I chose her for the glory of the Muse,

Smoother of forms, that her hard-knotted grain,

Grazed by the chisel, shaven by the plane,

Might from the steel as cool a burnish take

As from the bladed moon a windless lake.

I chose her for her eagerness of flight

Where she stood tiptoe on the rocky height

Lifted by her own perfume to the sun,

While through her rustling plumes with eager sound

Her eagle spirit, with the gale at one,

Spreading wide pinions, would have spurned the ground

and her own sleeping shadow, had they not

with thymy fragrance charmed her to the spot.

Lover of song, I chose this mountain pine

Not only for the straightness of her spine

But for her songs: for there she loved to sing

Through a long noon’s repose of wave and wing–

The fluvial swirling of her scented hair

Sole rill of song in all that windless air

And her slim form the naiad of the stream

Afloat upon the languor of its theme;

And for the soldier’s fare on which she fed–

Her wine the azure, and the snow her bread;

And for her stormy watches on the height–

For only out of solitude or strife

Are born the sons of valour and delight;

And lastly for her rich exulting life

That with the wind stopped not its singing breath

But carolled on, the louder for its death.

Under a pine, when summer days were deep,

We loved the most to lie in love or sleep:

And when in long hexameters the west

Rolled his grey surge, the forest for his lyre,

It was the pines that sang us to our rest

Loud in the wind and fragrant in the fire,

With legioned voices swelling all night long,

From Pelion to Provence, their storm of song.

It was the pines that fanned us in the heat,

The pines, that cheered us in the time of sleet,

For which sweet gifts I set one dryad free–

No longer to the wind a rooted foe,

This nymph shall wander where she longs to be

And with the blue north wind arise and go,

A silver huntress with the moon to run

And fly through rainbows with the rising sun;

And when to pasture in the glittering shoals

The guardian mistral drives his thundering foals,

And when like Tartar horsemen racing free

We ride the snorting fillies of the sea,

My pine shall be the archer of the gale

While on the bending willow curves the sail

From whose great bow the long keel shooting home

Shall fly, the feathered arrow of the foam.