Air
- Sa gitna ng hanging halos gumagalaw
- Nakalapat ang hangin sa siwang ng bintana
Calm
- And how still, how incredibly withdrawn and tranquil.
Cliff
- held tight back against the precipice
Cloud/Fog/Mist
- It was horrible to stand and stare into that pot of whiteness.
- Or the wet may be more delicate, condensing in droplets on eyebrows and hair and woollen clothing, as has happened by morning with the dew after a night outside.
- Or the cloud may be hardly more than a sensation on the skin, clammy, or merely chill.
- Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever. From within it, it was neither tangible nor visible, though as it approached it had looked thick and threatening.
- To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation.
- A sea of mist invading the heart of the land, but sucked up by the sun as the hot day went on.
Landscape
- As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles
Light
- we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure clear sun poured into each recess. But looking south, we caught our breath. For the world had vanished. There was nothing there but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and washed the high hills as the sea washes rock. And came to an end, as most seas do somewhere
- the last tendril has dissolved into the air and there is nothing in all the sky but light. I can see to the ends of the earth and far up into the sky.
Mountain
- It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip, but only height hides it.
River
- It lies like a broad leaf veined with watercourses, that converge on the lip of the precipice to drop down in a cataract for 500 feet.
- The immense leaf that it drains is bare, surfaced with stones, gravel, sometimes sand, and in places moss and grass grow on it. Here and there in the moss a few white stones have been piled together. I go to them, and water is welling up, strong and copious, pure cold water that flows away in rivulets and drops over the rock.
Rock
- Black scatter of rock, pieces large as a house, pieces edged like a grater.
- but they are black by place and not by nature, shadowed heavily by rock.
Sky
- Balat-itlog ang kinis ng langit
Sound
Tree
- ancient fallen trunks visible at its bottom through the clear water.
Water
- ==I let my eyes travel from shore to shore very slowly and was amazed at the width of the water.
- And a second time I let my eyes travel over the surface, slowly, from shore to shore, beginning at my feet and ending against the precipice. There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface.
- ==The clear water was at our knees, then at our thighs. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal.
- What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air.
- We waded on into the brightness, and the width of the water increased, as it always does when one is on or in it
- As I stand there in the silence, I become aware that the silence is not complete. Water is speaking.
- ==Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.
- It is not only in this narrow defile that the fallen and scattered boulders cover the watercourses.
- I have sat among boulders on an outer face of the hill, with two low sounds in my ears, and failed to locate either. One was the churr of ptarmigan, the other the running of water. After a long time, I saw the ptarmigan when he rose with a movement of white wings from among the grey stones he so closely resembles, but the water I never saw. In other places a bottle-neck gurgle catches my ear and where I thought there were only stones, I can see below them the glint of water.
- When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water.
- The greenness of the water varies according to the light, now aquamarine, now verdigris, but it is always pure green, metallic rather than vegetable.
- This water from the granite is cold. To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch. Yet there are midsummer days when even on the plateau the streams are warm enough to bathe in. In other years on the same date the same streams surge out from caves
- I have been aware of no sensation at all, not even of the pressure of the current against my legs, but cold.
- The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes—the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.
- When the snows melt, when a cloud bursts, or rain teems out of the sky for days on end without intermission, then the burns come down in spate. The narrow channels cannot contain the water, which streams down the hillsides, tears deep grooves in the soil, rolls the boulders about, brawls, obliterates paths, floods burrows, swamps nests, uproots trees, and finally reaching the more level ground, becomes a moving sea.
- For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it—water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power.
- The water is too much for me. I only know that man can’t live without it. He must see it and hear it, touch and taste it, and, no, not smell it, if he is to be in health.
Waterfall
- I listened to the waterfall until I no longer heard it.
- But where it falls into the narrow defile of the Lairig, its life seems already over. It disappears. A little further down a tiny pool is seen, and still further down two others, sizable pools, crystal clear and deep. They have no visible means of support, no stream is seen to enter them, none to leave; but their suppressed sparkle tells that they are living water.
- Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth. The pools beneath these waterfalls are clear and deep. I have played myself often by pitching into them the tiniest white stones I can find, and watching through the appreciable time they take to sway downwards to the bottom.