Aether Nomad

Standing at the entrance of Fingal's Cave, the waves wrapped in the salty wind rushed towards the hexagonal stone pillars, like hitting an ancient harp. The edges and corners of the rock wall are so regular that it makes people feel as if a giant deliberately cast the lava into a geometric mold - until the fingers touch the cold and rough basalt, they are sure that this is really the handiwork of nature 60 million years ago.

Going deep into the cave at low tide, the roar of the waves crashing under the arch is thicker than the reverberation of any symphony hall. Suddenly I understand why Mendelssohn insisted on writing a prelude here: some sounds should not be domesticated into notes, but can only be wrapped in the fishy smell of seaweed and volcanic ash, and grow wild among the rugged rocks.

The return ship bypassed Staffa Island and caught a glimpse of the puffins perched on the rock wall. The guide said that these black and white guys have been hovering here since the Viking Age, watching poets come and go, weathering legends and rocks into new legends. I clutched the sea-wet basalt fragment in my pocket—it probably understood time better than all human epics.

Standing on the roof of an off-road vehicle by the Mara River, the herd of wildebeests in the telescope looked like a restless gray-brown tide, washing back and forth on the high ground. They pushed and tested, and occasionally a few were squeezed to the riverbank. As soon as their hooves touched the muddy water mixed with the smell of crocodiles, they retreated in panic - this prelude to crossing the river is often more nerve-wracking than the actual migration.

When the first wildebeest finally jumped into the muddy waves, the whole grassland was shaking. The muffled sound of tens of thousands of bodies smashing into the river, mixed with the urging neighs of their companions on the other side, made the air tense like a bowstring that was about to break. We held our breath and watched the crocodile's back looming between the wildebeest's legs. Suddenly, a gray shadow sank in the water. The guide sighed softly, "The fifth one," as if announcing a cruel natural drama.

The most heartbreaking thing was the female wildebeest that turned back. It had already stepped onto the slope on the other side, but turned around and rushed back to the center of the river where the death rate was the highest - it turned out that a cub was washed downstream. Two gray dots rose and fell in the whirlpool surrounded by crocodiles, and the German old lady in the car broke the strap of the telescope. Until they hit the reefs on the shore, the shutter sounds of more than a dozen cameras exploded before the cheers.

On the way back to the camp, two white-bellied ducks were still leisurely at the ferry. The guide smiled and said, "You see, smart animals live an easy life." The sunset dyed the newly stepped migration path of the wildebeest herd blood red, and the vultures in the sky finally dispersed, like a handful of black confetti.

Deep in the primeval forest of Central America, I walked towards the ruins of the pyramid buried by vines and time, as if I had stepped into a crack in time to touch the echo of the lost Mayan civilization. The sun shone through the treetops onto the stone steps, and the air was filled with the scent of moist grass and ancient limestone. Every step is a dialogue with thousands of years of history. Standing in front of this silent and solemn site, I couldn't help but wonder if the kings of the past also watched the sunrise and sunset here, and if the priests read the celestial phenomena on this high platform. No matter how advanced contemporary technology is, it is difficult to replicate this shock from the depths of civilization.

"The Seventh Night of Dialogue with Mud Building"

When I got lost for the seventh time, I bumped into the door carved with a crescent and figs.

The smoky smell of camel dung seeping out of the crack of the door mixed with the salty smell brought by the sea breeze in the 16th century - yes, although this place is 300 kilometers away from the sea, the merchants in the Hadramawt Valley insist on kneading Red Sea shell powder into mud bricks. They say that when the rainstorm comes, the whole city will sound the ancient waves.

Abdul's pulley basket got stuck at the top of the five-story building, and the sack filled with wheat grains swayed in the twilight like a hanged sundial. The eighth-generation mud building guardian threw me half a piece of naan: "Be careful of the corner of Lane No. 3, the wall there will cry at sunset." Later I realized that the "crying" he said was the sound of the mud bricks shrinking due to the temperature difference, but at that moment, I did hear the muffled sound of a craftsman's sweat falling into the clay five hundred years ago.

The night breeze on the rooftop terrace revealed Shibam's trump card. When the flashlight beam slid along the uneven wall, the reliefs that had been polished by the Sinai sandstorm for four centuries suddenly came alive: a turbaned merchant led a dromedary out of Chapter 18 of the Koran, and the diamond-shaped light spots cast by the window lattice were the silver coins they had left behind. The mechanical miracle that modern architectural textbooks could not explain was trembling under my feet at this moment - the 8-story building without steel bars relied on the souls sealed in each mud brick. The rammed earth ballads they sang repeatedly during their lifetime are still undergoing molecular-level self-repair between the brick joints.

Before dawn, Abdul's great-grandmother woke me up with a broken pottery jar. The old woman's dark fingers slid across the cracks in the wall, revealing a few stems of dead grass deep in the cracks: "This is the flood control layer added during the drought in 1601. The grass stems facing west represent repentance to Mecca." She suddenly crushed a weathered brick corner and pressed it into my palm with saliva: "Take it away. You can't grow such annual rings in your steel forest."

Now this pulverizing mud block lies in the constant temperature box of my Berlin apartment. Whenever the elevator cable groans, I open the box and touch the broken grass stems. The concrete jungle is growing wildly outside the window, and my fingerprints are conspiring with the palm prints of four hundred years ago in the time difference - about how to use perishable things to fight eternity, about imprinting the altitude of civilization in vertical survival.

"Apennine Folds: Or How to Negotiate with Time"

Amid the high tide alarm in St. Mark's Square in Venice, I crushed the sixth iris pendant blown by a glass island craftsman.

When the Adriatic blue burst under my feet, I was trying to avoid the gaze of a gondola driver - ten minutes ago, I rejected his invitation to "exchange a Turandot for a 30-minute canal private cruise". At this moment, he leaned on the bridge and wiped his eyes with the cotton cloth used to polish the oars, as if my panic was an improvisation carefully choreographed by this water city.

Later, in the old glass workshop on Murano Island, I witnessed a craftsman using pliers to pinch out a ball of crimson from the 1200℃ molten slurry. He twisted the glass like a tamed octopus until it solidified into a perfect replica of a broken pendant. "Every Venetian has 0.3% glass shards in his blood," he pried open my palm and put the finished product in, "Pain is the moisture barrier of memory."

Under the broken wall of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, an old woman wrapped in a Max Mara coat poked my calf with the tip of her umbrella. "Get out of the way, you're blocking the sunlight of 212 AD." She took off her sunglasses, revealing the fragments of Byzantine mosaic swimming in her irises. We shared the last rain-soaked fig, and she told me that Emperor Hadrian's love letter was engraved on the marble heating pipe here until the Vandals pried off the slab to pad the battering ram in the fifth century.

The night rain in Florence wet the graffiti of "Divine Comedy" on the corner of Dante's former residence. The bar owner handed me a glass of Vin Santo mixed with ice: "Be careful of those guys selling plaster David statues in Piazza della Signoria. The 'ancient replicas' they sell are spit out by Chinese 3D printers." He pointed to his left chest, "The original is here - every drop of Chianti red wine is Michelangelo's hammer mark."

The real time defection happened in Pompeii. When I checked the Lonely Planet commentary in front of the pornographic paintings on the walls of the brothel, a black cat passed by my feet with volcanic glass fragments in its mouth. It stopped in front of a plaster remains - the body in 79 AD was curled up, and the cat gently placed the fragments in the plaster palm, as if completing a signing that was two thousand years late.

Perhaps what Italy taught me is the art of dealing with time: betting with shadows and sundials in Siena's Piazza del Concha, bribing the gatekeepers of Baroque churches with a piece of cold pizza in the back alleys of Naples, and salvaging the coordinates of Dante's lost ninth heaven on the clothesline on the cliffs of Cinque Terre.

On the return flight, I opened the copy of the Book of the Dead that I bought at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. A fragment of Roman mosaic from the first century AD slipped from the pages of the book - it was secretly stuffed into my pocket by an archaeological intern in a fluorescent vest at the ruins of the ancient city of Ostia. "Let it see the coffee stains of the 21st century." He blinked, and the excavator behind him was swallowing up the fragments of Nero's gilded bathroom.

At this moment, a crack appeared in the clouds outside the porthole, and the folds of the Apennine Mountains flickered in the twilight. I suddenly realized: the whole of Italy is an apocryphal book pickled by the Mediterranean, and we, the intruders, are just the second hand used to calibrate the eternal time difference.