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and the air glittered yesterday
Dec. 7th, 2010 11:00 pmIt was icy cold when I got off the train and walked round to the local office yesterday. So much so that as I walked along a path past a beam of sunlight, I saw tiny motes glittering in the beam. Not like ordinary dust motes, but a sudden bright flare of sunlight, refracted through clear crystal. I thought at first that it was very fine snow, even though the sky was a clear blue. Although I also thought of the Vashta Nerada, having watched the Doctor Who story Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead on Friday. And then I wondered if it was not snow, but direct precipitation from the air around me, some freak of the cold weather crystallising out a little moisture in an ice haze too thin to see except where a crystal caught the sunlight at just the right angle.
I was wrong about the snow, and right about the ice haze, as I discovered when I left work yesterday evening. A mist had risen, making the pedestrian avenue I walked along a strange and wondrous place. The mist was thin enough to be able to see for some distance, but thick enough to make everything more than a metre or two away soft and dimmed. The trees and the path underneath them were already white with new frost. The tiny glittering crystals I had seen dancing in a beam of sunlight were now thick in the air, flashing into visibility as I approached each street lamp, filling the air with sparkles of light for a second or two, and then fading from sight as I walked on towards the lamp and the angle between my eye and the light source changed.
And this morning, the mist had cleared and there was a low sun shining out of a clear blue sky -- but the mist had left its sign behind it. Every tree and every lamppost was crusted with a thick layer of those crystals, the trees a tracery of pure white, the verticals of the lampposts showing black with white highlighting every corner and edge. The old-fashioned lampposts were many, not one, but even so I kept feeling as if I'd just stepped through the back of a wardrobe.
I made sure to have my camera with me this morning. There will, I hope, be photos worth posting later.
[Edit on Sunday: the photos of the frost are now on Flickr.]
I was wrong about the snow, and right about the ice haze, as I discovered when I left work yesterday evening. A mist had risen, making the pedestrian avenue I walked along a strange and wondrous place. The mist was thin enough to be able to see for some distance, but thick enough to make everything more than a metre or two away soft and dimmed. The trees and the path underneath them were already white with new frost. The tiny glittering crystals I had seen dancing in a beam of sunlight were now thick in the air, flashing into visibility as I approached each street lamp, filling the air with sparkles of light for a second or two, and then fading from sight as I walked on towards the lamp and the angle between my eye and the light source changed.
And this morning, the mist had cleared and there was a low sun shining out of a clear blue sky -- but the mist had left its sign behind it. Every tree and every lamppost was crusted with a thick layer of those crystals, the trees a tracery of pure white, the verticals of the lampposts showing black with white highlighting every corner and edge. The old-fashioned lampposts were many, not one, but even so I kept feeling as if I'd just stepped through the back of a wardrobe.
I made sure to have my camera with me this morning. There will, I hope, be photos worth posting later.
[Edit on Sunday: the photos of the frost are now on Flickr.]
