Free Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin

white stones seemed to be airborne.
    These irises were the only blue flowers in the valley. Otherwise, the vegetation consisted of white willows, white-margined aralias, silver whitebeams and the tansy-leaved thorn. Among the flowers were a white eremurus, Moutan peonies, the Mount Omei rose and the waxy pagodas of the giant Himalayan lily. Or else the plants were black, black trilliums, black-stemmed bamboos and the Black Knight Fritillary from Kamchatka. The spathes of the Cretan Dragon Arum peopled a grove of willows with funereal shades.
    Mr Tod’s house—for that was the name of the proprietor—was an airy pavilion built on a knoll about one hundred yards from the water. It was thirty-five feet square, aligned to the cardinal points, and had five sash windows on each face except for the north. The walls were of battened vertical planks painted the colour of pewter. The glazing bars were a warm ivory.
    No structure could be simpler. It owed its severity and perfect proportions to the utopian projects of Ledoux and the houses of Shaker communities in New York State. The only attempt at decoration lay in two thin strips of beading round the window frames, one painted a dark lapis, the other a dry red.
    Yet the architect had avoided the absolute regularity of the Western tradition. The roof was slightly hipped in the Chinese manner; none of the walls were precisely the same length; all were fractionally inclined inwards; and these marginal assymetries gave the building an air of movement in repose.
    The doorstep was a slab of grey schist, chamfered at the comers and embedded with balas rubies. A bed of rue had been planted to conceal the foundations and the glaucous foliage seemed to lift the house above the ground.
    At the foot of the knoll was a wooden pillar, ten feet high and lacquered cinnabar red. Hitched to it with a green rein was a light bay Turkoman stallion. The saddle was of the Mongolian type, of yellow leather, with base silver stirrups.
    A boy came out of the house with a peregrine falcon on his gauntlet. He wore a collarless shirt of grey silk, snuff-brown breeches and red leather boots crinkled like a concertina. His grey eyes looked only into the eyes of the bird. He mounted and cantered off westwards towards a cleft in the mountain wall.
    A second path led over a cloud-blue bridge that arched over the stream into a pasture. A range of buildings showed up indistinctly from behind a smokescreen of white poplars. Nearby was the black neo-classical pigeon house where Mr Tod was in the habit of training his favourite birds to imitate the dances of Sufi dervishes in trance.
    On such occasions he would wear boots of canvas and rawhide elk and a hubertusmantel of light grey loden cloth. He was an athletic man of about fifty-five ... but it is not my intention to describe his appearance in this memoir.
    All the interior walls of his house were painted an ivory-coloured tempera.
    The shutters were grey: there were no curtains.
    The hall was lit by a Swedish chandelier with amber instead of crystal drops. The floor was a pebble mosaic of jasper and chalcedony from the screes of the volcano. Laid out on a trestle table were two Purdey shotguns and a pair of Napoleonic green morocco dispatch boxes, one now used for cartridges, the other for trout flies. Around the walls was an arrangement en trophée of split cane rods, gaffs and Mr Tod’s archery equipment: a yew-wood bow made for the Chevalier de Monville in 1788, a Mongolian double-reflex bow, and a Japanese samurai target of the Muromachi.
    A pair of Austrian ice-axes were crossed about the lightest imaginable rucksack, stitched from strips of seal bladder and lashed to a frame of laminated birch.
    The kitchen and bathroom were purely functional, the only evidence of luxury being a set of silver-lidded toilet pots made of imperial porphyry. Apart from some built-in cupboards, the rest of the house was a single room, heated by a Rostrand stove of