See the photo album at: http://flickr.com/photos/vancnyc/sets.

The guidebook says that Ardnamurchan, the almost uninhabited Scottish peninsula where we stayed for two lovely days in mid-June, means “the land above the ocean.” Eric, who took us fishing on the second day, scoffs. “Ar, they make that oop in London because it sounds fancy tae them. If ye know Gaelic, ye know ‘murchan’ is the word for ‘seals’. It joost means ‘seal cliff’.” Whate’er, it’s the utter westernmost point of the English Isle, an almost-island on the back end of Scotland. It thrills my geological senses that the knife-straight southeastern coast of Ardnamurchan is the Great Glen Fault, the San Andreas of Europe -- older, and more civilized, of course. Glacial gouging along the fault’s crush zone makes a very prominent diagonal slash from Fort William to Inverness, such that the northern Highlands sit upon the British Isles like a gay bonnet, with the Hebrides its plume and the Great Glen its hatband. The central stretch of the fault is a very deep trench, which is occupied by Loch Ness - may or may not be why there are strange beings in its depths. If you get a decent map, you will see where the glaciers have also scooped out other faults. All of the Highlands are crisscrossed with long linear depressions, which may be glens, lochs, or fiords depending on the drainage. Some have a northeast orientation parallel to the Great Glen, but there is also a second set, nearly horizontal, that intersects the first at about 45 degrees, so that the Highlands from space look like they are paved in diamond-shaped tiles. From our room at Kilcamb Lodge, we look out across a bluebell-tinted meadow to where quiet water, backed by a tall cliff, glows golden in the lingering summer sunset. This is Loch Sunart, a narrow finger of the Atlantic that pokes deep into the Ardnamurchan, along one of these cross-faults.

Not bad, this place. Award-winning menu of exquisite dishes, every single part of which from the fresh baked breads to the smoked herring is made or assembled on the premises, and we have it all to ourselves - the only guests. Service doesn’t get any better. We guess that our privilege may be due to the World Cup, which certainly shut down the traffic in London over the weekend during our visit with Elizabeth and Henrik.

It is also a place of surprising coincidences. The Lodge is at the edge of a tiny village that was originally called Stron an t’Shiean, or “beach of the fairies.” Under the English it became Strontian, tho this may be temporary as the schools are all teaching Gaelic again. “Ye’re a geologist,” said Eric on our first meeting, when he came to arrange our trip into the hills. “Does th’ name Strontian suggest anything tae ye?” Er, no. “Not even if I tell ye that lead was mined on yon ridge above town since medieval times, includin’ the musket balls that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo?” Base metals? Major producer in early 1800s, in the heroic age of chemistry? You don’t mean -- Yes, element 38 on the periodic table. Strontium. Right here. Weel, I’ll be danged.

Next coincidence: Eric is no village layabout but a retired professor of engineering and a former coach of the Scottish national fly fishing team, but most of all an ardent environmentalist and consulting ecologist. He about fell over when conversation swung around to our own story, and I mentioned my time in Kenya. “Louis Leakey? Nay, ye can’t mean -- Bob Leakey’s brother!” Such is fame - but yes, Bob is one of England’s leading marine ecologists, lives over to Yorkshire and has worked for years with Eric on projects like making salmon farming less nasty. I mentioned Louis’ laser-like intensity that would paralyze his listener (especially female listener). “Aye, that’s Bob, all right.”

Next, after our sumptuous dinner, we are having coffee by the big window in the parlor and this jacket-and-tie Brit wanders in and starts a conversation, leaning against the back of the couch by the fire. He has this big Kipling-esque whiskbroom mustache and the most extreme upper class lockjaw accent I have ever heard; his lips never move at all. He was perfectly friendly in a bashful haw-haw sort of way and we sort of think he says that he has recently bought a house on the other side of the village – he nods to the view through the window – and that he is a surgeon, who has recently been to Africa to volunteer in a local hospital. Half of his work there was to repair women who were suffering (sometimes for years) from the effects of genital mutilation. Said he was going back, too. He perked up when we mentioned we both had degrees from Cambridge. “Grew up there,” he drawled happily. “Grandfather. Biochemist.” Oh, said I, he must have been one of the first then. “M’yes. Nobel prize. Hopkins. Founded science. Invented vitamins.” Ahem, well, wow, that must have been interesting, growing up around such people. “M’yes. Aunt married another one. J. B. Priestly. Uncle Jack, y’know.” If we had been Brits we might have collapsed under the weight of this awful importance but as Americans we could handle it. Good thing he wasn’t a movie star, though.

Going north from Glasgow to the western Highlands, guess what? Why, ye tak’ the low road on the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, that’s what. Yes, you really do, and the low road has not changed since Robbie Burns’ day -- a twisty, incredibly narrow, hour-long tunnel under overhanging gnarly holm-oaks, with Loch Lomond never more than a few feet from your right front tire. Stuck behind timorous grannies – never mind the signs warning that “The law requires that you allow overtaking” -- we had plenty of time to estimate that the lanes gave at most 18 inches on either side of the car (little did we know… but that’s later). All along the way, gentians and foxglove and bluebells and butter-yellow Scotch broom were everywhere – but most of all, we gasped at the masses of neon-purple rhododendron, in solid banks 20 feet high, that crowded under the trees for mile after mile. The first thing we did, after arriving in Strontian a couple of hours later, was to grab the camera and rush out to get a picture of the wall of rhodies next to the lodge. There did seem to be a bit of tree work going on within the forest behind – making a path, perhaps? Piles of chips everywhere. Eric the ecologist solved the mystery next morning. “Th’ forestry was clearing oot the rhododendron in there. Nasty job.” Excuse us? “Yes, it’s a hell of a problem. Invasive, ye know. Nothin’ can grow where they are. Almost as bad as the Sitka spruce the eedjits brought in for their tree farms in the 50’s.” Yes, we had seen moutainsides covered solid with same-height evergreens. “Now they can’t give ‘em away, with the pulp from Russia so cheap, and they make the streams so acid the fish are dyin’. And if ye try to burn ‘em out, the peat catches and there ye are, stompin’ on coals for three months after.” He added, “When ye bring in a foreign plant either it dies oot, or it takes over. Nothin’ in between.” I thought of the kudzu and water hyacinth on our side of the water – no kidding.

Ardnamurchan is like seriously underpopulated, with only two exits by road -- one to the north and the other being the ferry that we used to get across the long narrow bay created by the Great Glen fault. Strontian has 600 or so people, including entire Ardnamurchan police force – two bobbies on a 240-mile beat, the longest in the British Isles, and not much to do except to see the drunks safely home. A few years back, there was in fact a burglary. Neighbors saw it and called the cops. As Police Constable Robert was taking down the information, he saw the evildoer’s car go past his window. “So he jist phoned ahead tae the ferry,” Eric grinned, “and told ‘em to let the car on an’ then sit an’ wait till they saw th’ Glencoe police on the ither side. So folks asked, why didn’t he just go doon behind and get ‘em, if he knew they’d be stuck there? An’ he said, he’d rather the chaps at Glencoe got the paper work.”

Another consequence of underpopulation, we found as we set out for the tip of the peninsula the next day in Eric’s landrover, is that ye don’t need tae waste guid money on more road than necessary for a wee few cars. From Strontian westward for 40 miles, the only road is, intentionally, a single lane. Not two single lanes, for going and coming, but one lane. Period. This claustrophobic driveway to nowhere is also very sharply curved – again, nae sense tae go blastin’ an’ diggin’ like ye was in a traffic jam every mornin’. And what happens when two cars meet? Does the stronger rush upon the weaker and batter it aside? Do they simply stop and wait for the road construction crew to arrive and open up an escape route? No, they do it with politeness. There are wide spots built every so often, where two vehicles can get by if one pulls over and stops. “Driving on Scotland’s one lane roads requires that drivers become familiar with the courteous use of the lay-bys,” says the guidebook in our room. “If it should require reversing to let another past -- so be it.” Eric says he once got into a staring match “wi’ a tourist who just would nae go back, though there was a lay-by not twenty feet behind him. So there we sat, an’ finally I got out me paper an’ settled down tae read. Ye know, we don’t have a word in Gaelic for manana. That’s because there’s nothin’ that urgent. He got the idea, finally, but it took him a while. Och, he was unhappy.”

Eric does ecological consulting for a local laird – actually a mere millionaire who bought the auld place a few years back – with 30,000 acres stretching across the end of the land. In return, he is the only person aside from the laird with a key to the gates, which admitted us to the track beyond that winds up onto the high places. After admiring the view across the ocean to Eigg and Mull, and the Hebrides hiding in the clouds beyond, we set off to the first loch, a jewel of reflected sky down in a fold of the smooth green heath. From the first step, when I nearly broke my ankle, I learned that the heath was not, in fact, smooth – it’s all tussocks. Which are clumps of grass that rise up in pedestals around a foot high with the tops all spread to catch the sun. You cannot step on the tussocks because they collapse, and you cannot step between them because you can’t see where to put your foot. We lurched, staggered, flapped arms to keep from falling, and lurched again. Imagine being a knight in armor chasing a grinning clansman across this stuff – no wonder the Scots were unconquerable. Eric carried the fishing rods.

The fishing was wonderful – wild brown trout with jeweled sides to rival the crowns of royalty, lurking in unspoiled little tarns with never a tree or bush to catch your back-cast. The sky was cool and blue with wandering white clouds, and exhilarating little breezes puffed across the water. Some of the lochs had lily pads, an endangered species that had been cleared oot by collectors from waters closer to the road. Each loch had a different trout population, some few and large, some abundant and small, depending on the available spawning grounds. One loch called Golden Pond had a breed with brilliant yellow flanks – but it was too far, and we didn’t lurch over there. I caught eight on a Mepps spinner, after vainly whipping a fly around for a while. Eric kept hauling them in, and Enid flyfished diligently and caught nothing. We all had a marvelous time, and kept only two, which Eric would be giving to an old couple back in Strontian.

All is not ideal in Ardnamurchan, despite the paradisical scenery and the wonderful people. Wealthy outsiders like our surgeon, although few in number, are enough to drive up prices for the few available homes to the point that locals cannot afford them. Eric was grousing about a couple in the village who had been engaged for 3 years but could not marry because they could not find a place to live. But we felt better, a little, about being priced out of a wee vacation cottage in Strontian when we were sat down by the owners of the Lodge, who had just returned that week from their very first visit to the USA. They had been guests of the chancellor of Brooklyn College with full use of his limousine and a former NYPD detective as chauffer, and were simply blown away. How they envied us! How they wished somehow to live in New York! How much better their life might have turned out if they had moved there, instead of buying a hotel in the countryside, when he sold his London advertising agency! M’yes, perhaps. But then, what good is your limo if you can’t take it on a courteous single lane drive along the great loch, past the foxgloves and rhododendrons, to a quiet little trout-filled tarn high up on the green hills?

NOTE - You can see other pictures for 2004 by clicking on any  of the images in the side bar, and then click the "2004" link to see the 4-page album.  If you then click on the small pictures you'll get the full impact, with commentary.  If you start the slide show, it's less effort, but you miss all the commentary.  I apologize for the tricksiness, not my fault.

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One more time --

Hello all of you out there in Holidayland! As usual you are hearing from Enid and me after the old year has gone out with the trash, and thanks to email much of our year's doings won't be news to you anyway. Nevertheless I enjoy the opportunity for a contemplative wrap-up, and if this letter is rather long, it is only (as the French philosopher put it) that I do not have the time to write a short one.

Let's call 2004 the Year of New Jobs. In my role as great leader I went first, when the American Museum of Natural History closed down Micro Press in mid-2003 to make space for the cancerous growth of IT. They were happy to agree to my proposal to take staff, stuff, copyrights and all and set up as an independent nonprofit publisher, as this saved them the cost of hiring a dumpster. In a nod to our original WPA title in the 1930's (see "history"on www.micropress.org), we became "The Micropaleontology Project", and I accepted my kind offer of the job of President, on top of Editor in Chief. While interminable legal matters were being hashed out, the Museum made space for us (five people, and too many file cabinets) in half of a basement store room. Alas, the other half was filled with 20 skids or more of bite-size Mars Bars, Three Musketeers and Milky Ways left over from a Halloween party. I know what you're thinking! But nibble as we might we couldn't make a dent in it during the 5 months we spent there in our makeshift office, and were happy to see it carted off finally to give cavities to the poor. In February, finally, we moved to lower Fifth Avenue at 28th Street, where we have the entire 4th floor of a lovely old 1880's office building, its front covered with terra cotta scrolls and columns. According to Enid's show biz Uncle Harvey, we're on the corner of Tin Pan Alley, where such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and their agents, producers and publishers created the great Broadway shows of bygone days. Things change, and now it's all junk jewelry wholesalers and Indian restaurants. It's nice to know that you're walking through history every morning, but I am busier than ever, with more, not fewer, worries. This is retirement?

Apparently, Enid thought that economic uncertainty and a huge work load looked like fun, because effective 1/1/2005 she also handed in her notice at AMNH, giving up a cushy tenured job to become Chief Curator at the Museum for African Art. This is an enormous task because this organization, founded 20 years ago as the Center for African Art by her friend Susan Vogel, initially in lower Manhattan and now in temporary quarters in Long Island City, is making plans to grow into a 100,000-square foot facility to be built on a very well placed vacant lot at the upper end of Museum Mile, on Fifth Avenue where Harlem meets Central Park. Enid looks forward to working with top people, advising on the design of the new building, helping to acquire collections, and setting up the curatorial organization needed for full museum accreditation. Her biggest job, and fortunately the one she enjoys the most, will be creating exhibitions in coordination with guest curators and designers, and negotiating the loans to make them happen. I think I would faint from terror at the enormity of it all, but she is absolutely invigorated, and has plans afoot in a dozen different new projects. She'll be keeping an office as curator emerita at AMNH, but after spending literally half her life there she really likes the idea of doing something new while she still has "a few good years" to spend on it.

Taking kids in order of youth, we begin with two more new jobs the work of the twin graduates, whose commencements in midsummer were as momentous as one could hope for. Alicia, as we write, is being very traditional without perhaps meaning to. It's the done thing, if you listen to the stories of everyone who is anyone in the world of creative arts -- yes, even those who graduate as she did from NYU Tisch --  to start off as a mere grub in the industry, working in the mail room or at some hey-you job, until lightning strikes and there you are, rich and famous. Seen in this light she is obviously destined for success with a suitably menial and ill paid job as an assistant to the producers in a Santa Monica studio where they make clever commercials. When she can, she works to finish editing her student film. As some of you know, her first one was lost when the camera equipment was stolen. The beach is just a bike ride away, she keeps her eyes and ears open, her two bosses are nice, and all in all she rather enjoys it. Meanwhile she has discovered yet another major talent: the bosses are very serious about parties, and Alicia turns out to be one of the best party organizers ever. This is not necessarily the road to follow in life, of course, but it never hurts to have another string to your bow.

Benjamin's major in economics at Oberlin gave him a toe hold on his chosen ladder, but it was his sheer brilliance and dazzling personality (it's all in the genes) that saw him through a rigorous recruitment process to land a position -- also ridiculously ill paid -- at Morningstar security analysts in Chicago. He likes the work so much that he has already started to study for the CFA (certified financial analyst) exam, which I have to say seems like a really roundabout way to meet girls. It was fun helping him move, and we were really impressed with his new home town. Enid remembers it last from 35 years ago, and I even earlier as a teen ager visiting from California, as street after gritty street of box-like, soot-stained two story houses packed side by side and dimly seen through a pungent brown haze of coal smoke. No more! It's clean, with a magnificent downtown, and tingling with urban verve. We celebrated with a dinner at Charlie Trotter's that cost as much as Ben's first month's rent, but truly a meal to remember. They even had a special menu printed "Congratulations Benjamin!".

You could say Elizabeth has a new job lined up as well -- that of married person. She will not formally take office until this coming March, now fast approaching, but she and Huggy Bear (er, Henrik) have already moved into a wonderful 2-story flat in Basterfield House, an architecturally eminent modernist development not far from Smithfield Market, the most up and coming district in London. Henrik will continue teaching journalism and media at Roehampton University in London's West End while E completes her doctorate on internet search engines at London School of Economics, where they met. And then we'll see, I guess. He's been fascinated by the Wild West ever since he was a kid in Sweden, with a thing for Zane Grey novels, but she loves London. Hm, we can always hope for a geographic compromise when the day comes to move, and I don't mean New Jersey. Struggle, Henrik we're behind you.

Unfortunately for our theme, two of the kids did not lose their jobs this year. David continued his commute from Berkeley to Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, where he performs mysteries. He took a break in August to accompany daughter Ariel (age 4) and her adoring grampa to the annual family bash in Grants Pass, where we enjoyed seeing all available nieces, cousins, and siblings. Some of us greying ones drove on up to Roseburg to spend a very nostalgic day taking Mom's brat sister Charlotte out for lunch. In true family style it was nothing but hamburgers under an umbrella at a roadside stop, but nobody ever had a better meal as we sat there making fun of each other and falling over laughing with Aunt C, as usual, the worst of us. For drive time with Ariel I had fetched along a pile of my favorite kid books - ah, at last, a new audience! - but she had her own Krishna comics from the Indian grocery in Berkeley and was having none of Mother Goose. OK, to be truthful I found the Ramayana in cartoon form to be rather fun. So if the hero has a blue skin and wears a sarong. In my day he wore a cape and leaped over buildings with a single bound, which is even more silly. We had a fine time.

Anne also gainfully continued, doing her thing as an independent massage therapist. This year, the cute little cottage in Sag Harbor, out at the "upper end" of Long Island, took on the aspect of those old VW ads where there is no way all that stuff can be in there. Mainly it's grandson Malcolm (age 13) who has started to expand upwards and outwards, towards dimensions unknown. His home schooling is getting tougher -- Mal soaks up math like a sponge, and mom's Berkeley BA seems not to have included algebra, somehow -- but the local authorities have been whipped into line and tutors will be provided. Then there's great-niece Chelsea, on long term loan from Oregon. It's true she hasn't added any noticeable pounds at Sag Harbor High. This is no doubt due to the emaciation rays coming from the nearby Hamptons, where skeletal millionairesses make the Grim Reaper look like Porky Pig. That said, Chelsea's new sculptures are not exactly tiny, and her her departure for college in the fall may involve heavy equipment.

Eldest son Tony has not just one new job but several, all of his own creation, now that he has finished the three year process of selling his domain name company to Verisign. Sometimes he is a photographer, and goes on trips to the Amazon and South Africa with this bat society. Their objectives certainly lead them to unusual and interesting places, and Tony has secured some amazing photos, including a few that have been published in the better bat magazines. At other times he is a consultant on internet matters, for example to a group in Italy who are creating an "intelligent" self-improving program for thinking up new domain names. These and other interests keep him hopping, and now that he has acquired a share in a Paris apartment to go with his new digs in downtown Manhattan, our lunch dates may be more frequent because more difficult to arrange. (It works like that.)

We continue to enjoy  our excursions abroad -- Egypt (for me) in the spring was followed by a brief but wonderful trip to China, thanks to a friend with an apartment in Shanghai. In the summer  we went to an international geological congress in Florence, which gave us an excuse to take a rather strange Montenegran holiday (see "Splashing in the Adriatic" below). In December, finally, we went as lecturers on an air safari from Casablanca to Cape Town, stopping en route to see Tuaregs in Timbuktu, mud mosques on the Niger, masked dancers in a Dogon village, voudou and water towns on stilts in Benin, pygmies and elephants in the rainforest of the Central African Republic, tropical beaches and old colonial mansions on the island of Principe, and the spectacular desert scenery of Namibia. OK, I wound up getting mugged in broad daylight on a crowded street corner in Durban,  but all it cost us was a few credit cards and our self-image as "old Africa hands". Another painful blow to self-image was the shocking confirmation, on our China trip, of the dumbass mistake described in "Treasures untold" -- alas, nobody is a bigger fool than the expert.

Wishing all a happy, prosperous, and infinitely more peaceful 2005!

John and Enid

Enid says a novel should be written about the passions that swirl in the world of geology. Our week in Florence at the International Geological Congress was a real eye opener for her. It was as if she had discovered a tribe whose members battled over dandelions or cloud formations.  I think anthropologists may be more peaceful because they don't have international rule-making bodies like we geologists do, leaving themselves with no way to attack one another.

Our rooms (found on the internet) were in the Palazzo Bombicci, built oh 500 years ago, accessed by marble staircases leading up from a two-story entrance hall no smaller than a zeppelin hangar. We entered directly from the street via a pair of 10-foot high solid oak doors, through which carriages of important people have rolled safely inside for centuries past. It may not have been the weather that was on their mind - Cosimo Medici had the great architect Vasari build him a personal, sealed corridor almost 1 km long that still runs from the ducal offices ("uffizi", in Italian - now the Uffizi Galleries) to the Pitti Palace on the other side of the river. A private hallway through the city seems like really inflated self indulgence, but apparently the Renaissance was full of people you had no interest in meeting, like assassins or typhoid carriers.

From our rooftop terrazo we sit and look out across the River Arno flowing in its canyon of pastel stucco buildings, to a hillside where mansions and monasteries peek out through the pines. Downstairs on the wall of the atrium is a marble plaque with a line engraved at about the level of my chin, noting that this was how high the Arno rose in November 4, 1844. Above this was added a second plaque, informing us that in November 6, 1966 the Arno flooded up to the "piano supra", or floor above. I hope they have boats ready when November 8, 2088 comes around.

The half-acre Piazza del Signoria, or Plaza of the Nobles, has been the center of Florence since the 12th century. The statuary in the piazza includes a marble muscle beach over in front of the town hall, accurately named Palazzo Vecchio, with a bulging "Hercules" towering over a very buff "Ajax" and a moodily flexing Michelangelo's "David". In the grand loggia, a covered platform from which city officials once read pronunziamente, stand a dozen masterworks depicting Greek and Hebrew mayhem, like Cellini's "Perseus With the Head of Medusa", Giambologna's "Rape of the Sabine Women" and "Hercules Battling the Centaur", Donatello's "Judith and Holofernes", Fedi's "Rape of Polyxena" and a copy of "Ajax and the Body of Patroclus", all at climactic moments. A police van was always stationed just below, unintentionally rounding out the impression of a major crime scene. Turning right, in three blocks one emerges at the famous Duomo, or great cathedral, of Santa Maria. This is so unimaginably huge and ornate, with rows of statues perched like white pigeons on its cliff-like façade, that it takes a minute or two to actually see any of it.

In Bari, where we went to catch the overnight ferry to Dubrovnik, we had a delightful seafood dinner once the waiter removed Enid's alarmingly undamaged octopus and brought it back safely grilled. At the ferry terminal we had plenty of time, sitting on our suitcases, for Enid (who had an Italian boyfriend long ago) to tune my ear to the singsong accent of southern Italy rising and falling all around us. Since most of the immigrants are from the south we Americans think all Italians talk like that.

Enid had never been in Dubrovnik, but it was just as I remembered from when our van of Van C's passed by 35 years earlier, on our way to Samos. Maybe better than I remembered, since the world has responded with torrents of money to rebuild this amazing place after Milosevic & Co spent a year trying to shell it into smithereens. We walked down the hill from our hotel to the Stare Grad, or old city, and spent a wonderful morning under a brilliant blue sky in 14th century Croatia. Then we had a leisurely lunch in the middle of the street. Dubrovnik, you see, does not allowed wheeled vehicles inside the walls. One unexpected effect of a century of shoe-shuffling is that the surface of the great central promenade, built of marble blocks what else, is polished to where it glimmers like wet ice.

Croatia and Montenegro are wrapped around Bosnia like an old dirty bandage, as if to keep it from contact with the Adriatic, and Dubrovnik is where the ragged ends are tied. The Croatian-Montegran border is only 25 km down the coast, and our final destination at Sveti Stefan was about 40 km further along as the crow flies. Lucky crow -- it took us over three hours. The slowest part was the trudge, dragging suitcases, along a mountain road between the border posts. At least we had rollie bags. At least they weren't shooting at each other.  The hottest part of the trip, by far, was the Montenegran bus, a tightly sealed solar incinerator that would have been towed off the road anywhere else. Not only did Serbia-Montenegro lose the war for a "Greater Serbia" (in which every inch of land ever occupied by any Serb-speaking entity in history was to be cleansed of subsequent Croatian or Bosnian or Greek or Albanian trespassers), but even afterwards when they got over it and just wanted to shoot some of their own private Albanians in Kossovo, the outside world kept them under a nearly total international embargo. This made new buses hard to get. Things are now on the mend, but they could start with some spelling books. We passed one RASTARAN and TORIST APARTMAN after another, a place to buy SOVENERS, and finally a DRAGSTORE. The last might have been worth a look but the bus chugged on, trailing clouds of sweaty steam from the cracks in our windows.

Our route was complicated by the fact that Montenegro is basically a cliff. Not being equipped with pontoons thank god we had no choice but to follow the water line all around Kotor Bay, where a huddle of 3,000-foot mountains stand hip deep in the Adriatic. The villages through which we passed were single rows of stone buildings glued to the seacliff above the docks, with just enough room at their front doors for donkey carts to get past. On two occasions therefore we had stop to wait while a file of rusty Fiats and Ladas backed up all the way to the edge of town to let us by, and once we met another bus and in our turn backed up to the edge of town. The cheerful old-fashioned courtesy of this was very pleasant. Eventually we reached the open coast at Budva, a mini-Dubrovnik founded on a Roman naval base, and got a cab to take us on to Sveti Stefan. The view, as we emerged from a grove of precipice-hugging pines, was like a fairy tale. Sveti Stefan is a combination Hopi village and Legoland, with buildings of limestone blocks and red tile roofs piled one atop another all over a tiny offshore island, connected to shore by a long causeway. Where was the hotel? We were looking at it -- thanks to Marshal Tito, who ordered the entire village to be emptied of its inhabitants in order to launch a tourist industry for Yugoslavia. Guests sleep in the fishermen's cottages and dine on a clifftop terrace under the stars where you can flick your cherry pits over the rail and into the sea far below.

In what way does Montenegro differ from its soon to be ex-partner Serbia? Aha, said our guide. We were on a (much nicer) bus two days later, for the “English tour” to the former capital of Cetinje (say-TIN-yeh) up in the Dinaric Alps, the formal name for these little hills. Before they joined the Kaiser's side in World War I, the Othmanli Turks, or what we call Ottomans, had ruled Serbia and everything else between the Danube and the Indian Ocean for 400 years -- except, aha, for tiny Montenegro, on its mile high pile of barren limestone with fewer than 600,000 people and “only stones to eat.” Their main export in Victorian times seems to have been royal princesses. As our guide put it, “The Montenegro Kink is called the father in law of Europe.” To house the courting princes Centinje acquired an amazing collection of grand and ornate embassies. They now serve as schools, libraries and museums, due to the government relocating to level ground after the Turks went away. The historic paintings in the museums suggest that the Montenegran self-image is pride and defiance. Everyday wear for the gentleman included two enormous pistolas jutting left and right from the sash, and feminine allure consisted of glaring like a tigress. Even the Serbian language lends itself to this up-yours image, with rows of tightly-wedged consonants interspersed with machine gun bursts of rolling r’s. Mothers call affectionately after the kids with something like “Hrrdny zhak prrprrstrska czskrrty prrzhekly, OK?” Understandably, with tongues this muscular, they find English a bit fluffy. Our guide, in speaking of current problems, told us that Montenegro has a “large international death.”

In the heat of the day, we went swimming in the unearthly Adriatic. The water was so icy clear and calm that it was like flying, suspended over white limestone boulders that were 40 feet down but looked close enough to stand on. Enid wanted to know why it was so clear and I said it must be that there are no nutrients and thus no microbes clouding the water. Consequently, no food chain. This caused her to inquire, rather rudely I thought, where they got that thing with fins we had at lunch. I was standing in the shallows framing a believable reply when I felt a distinct pinch on my calf, and then another and another. Apparently there was a food chain, after all, beginning with tourist legs. Eek, went Enid, what’s biting me? “Get out,” I cried. “We’re being attacked by man-nibbling fish! ” She flopped to shore and got safely under an umbrella while I stayed to distract them. Peering into the water I could barely make out ocean-going guppies circling around and occasionally darting in for another futile nab. When it became clear that it would take at least three years for these hopeful characters to bring me down, I left them to their dreams of glory and sploshed out to my own beach chair.

Our final excursion was a day trip to Lake Skadar, which turned out to be a fairly weird place. This is the largest lake in the Balkans, around 200 square miles, but only 15 feet above the nearby sea and most of it waist deep. The exceptions are huge holes in the bottom, some going down 200 feet, out of which gushes most of the rainfall in Montenegro. The underwater fountains are actually the bottom ends of a vast and mostly unmapped network of cracks and caverns in the rain-rotted limestone of the high plateau. Crossing the high country en route, you get a view of the upper end of this drainage system: a madhouse landscape without any direction for the eye to follow, just a maze of sinkholes and collapsed caverns in the white bony rock wiith bushy eyebrows of wild pomegranate, wild fig, and scrub oak. How wonderful to behold the reality of the "karst" terrain of geology textbooks -- ah, memory lane! -- but you had to pity any Turks trying to catch Montenegrans in there.

The lake itself was completely charming.  Skadar is probably the most important wildlife refuge in Europe, in the sense that it preserves an otherwise almost extinguished Mediterranean wetlands ecology. We climbed on a nice fat shady excursion boat far up in an arm of the lake, where cliffs of deeply dissolved limestone rose straight up out of the mud and lily pads, and set off down a narrow open channel. There was not a house, a road, or any sign of human activity for mile after mile, as the valley slowly widened and water plants stretched away in glistening green acres. Everywhere were water birds - white egrets, tall blue herons, short yellow herons, hunched-up mournful storks, black-striped geese, and speedy little black bandits that turned out to be pigmy cormorants. My favorites were tiny fluffy diving ducks, minnow eaters, about the size and shape of tennis balls, which skittered like a ricochet across the water as we approached and then vanished without a ripple. The bird we didn't see was the European brown pelican, which survives only here. After about two hours of this entirely pleasant activity, we came to dock below some buildings on a bluff.  Here were signs of former glory in an abandoned hydroplane, a sort of jet fighter with pontoons, hauled up on the bank in a state of graffiti-decorated decay. Things were more lively at the lakeside restaurant where we trooped into an outdoor garden for a big lunch with wandering accordion accompaniment. The bill of fare was semi-Italian, but featured really huge hunks of fish whose pervasive bones proclaimed them as carp. Sure enough, a man carrying a plastic tub came puffing up as we lounged picking our teeth, and plopped down two of the largest carp I have ever seen, with mouths the size of toilet bowls and scales as big as saucers. No wonder those little ducks were such good skitterers.

Next day was our last, and after one more luxurious swim and another round with the ferocious man-nibblers, which made me laugh harder than ever, we switchbacked one last time up the cliff and headed for the airport in Podgorica. One final gape at the karst, one last listen to rat-a-tat Serbian in the coffee lounge, and we settled back for the sleepy transition to familiarity. The things that stay in  my mind are the amazing blue sky and amazing blue ocean, the sense of life in a quiet corner of Europe during days gone by, and the palm trees shading white marble walls and red tile roofs.

Xinjiang, October 1 2000

You should have seen my eyes bug out. I had become bored with the endless decision making going on in the rug merchant’s emporium behind the mosque in the Kashgar bazaar, and was wandering aimlessly up and down the covered aisles of raisins, dates and apricots, fox and lynx furs, sheepskins, sheep carcasses, tinware, rock salt, batteries, men’s suits, silk fabrics, shoes, hats, watermelon slices, hot noodle tables, flat bread, coils of dried snakes, children’s clothes, spices, and tie-dyed dresses, looking for something to take a picture of, when Enid found me. Having sated her rug urge she was hunting for a shop, reputed to be nearby, where the local Uighur farmers brought their old junk. No use asking the Uighurs, whose second language is Chinese, but we found a Chinese fabric seller who knew enough English to send us to the little state-run antique store, a kind of official flea market, just downstairs from the rug merchant.

So, there I was, sort of poking around among tables laden with not very antique and not very local porcelain bowls and jade buddhas, when I stopped dead. Towering up above a heap of beads was the most magnificent cluster of amethyst I had ever seen! Unlike most amethyst masses,  encrustations on the walls of geodes or veins, this was a free-standing cylinder almost a foot tall, composed of gleaming lavender pyramids like a glittering rocket ship, with two shorter cylinders, sort of boosters, on the side. “How much, how much,” I gibbered to the (Chinese) salesgirl. “One thousand yuan,” she replied, adding quickly, “but you can bargain!” One hundred and twenty dollars for a piece easily worth 10 to 50 times as much! I had my mouth open to tell her to wrap it up when Enid hit me with a body block. “Just shut up!” she hissed. “Go over there and look at bowls, for heaven’s sake, and stop drooling!” It took her only a few ritual scoffs to bring the price down to 500. Then the girl said, “Would you like see nother? We have.” Reaching under the counter, she hauled forth a specimen that made the first look like a tinkertoy. “Cost more,” she said. “More heavy.” I nearly died. This one was completely unlike the first, consisting of a huge solid mass of deep purple crystal, twinned and intergrown with the same facets glinting simultaneously from all corners of the mass, topped by four huge crystals sort of tipped into one another. “Both, both, both,” I gasped in Enid’s ear. “You sure?” she said. “Could they have carved them? They must weigh 30 pounds, have you thought about that?” “Both, both, both,” was all I could say.

So, we bought them both, for $140. At the end, I had the wit to ask where they were from, and was informed they came from Lake Karakury (she said “Kalikuli”), in the desert mountains up near the Tibetan border. Back at our hotel – the former Russian consulate, built in 1880 -- where I showed off the prizes to our group, the experienced travellers and collectors were unanimous that I dared not entrust such specimens as these to mailmen or baggage handlers. This was early in our trip, so from that point on, from bus to hotel to bus again, and eventually into overhead baggage racks and down endless airport corridors, I lugged those rocks -- lovingly wrapped in our sweatshirts despite the cold and packed round with socks and scarves and whatnot – in our big overnight bag, switching from shoulder to shoulder every few steps.

After a final, sweating traverse across city streets to get it to the Museum, looking out for robbers who might descend to strip me of my treasures, I triumphantly set the specimens down on a table in front of my friend George, the mineralogy curator. “My gosh,” he murmured. “I never saw amtheyst like that.” And three heartbeats later, "John, I don't suppose you noticed that these hexagonal amethyst crystals are square, did you?” Consternation!

Well, you simply cannot imagine how stupid I felt. Amethyst is just a tinted form of quartz, and quartz crystals are in your first tray of specimens in Mineralogy 101. Quartz makes up half of the mineral grains in granite, and every blasted crystal fetched to you by eager students is quartz. Quartz is ALWAYS instantly recognizable by its invariably six-sided outline.  I have even collected amethyst in California, Colorado, and Namibia. For a geologist to mistake a lavender  tetragonal mineral for amethyst quartz is roughly comparable to mistaking a head of broccoli for a string bean, just because they are both green.

“Hmm,” said George, turning the rocket specimen this way and that. “Hmm,” and he licked its base. “Aha.” “Aha what?” “Aha, it's alum." I never subjected a mineral to a taste test before, but always a first time. Sure enough, a whisper of salty flavor that puckered me right up. “Never saw purple alum before,” George mused. “Leave it here and we'll put a bit in the X-ray diffractometer.” The results came back yesterday - hydrous ammonium aluminum sulfate. “It’s not common alum,” George told me on the phone. “That has potassium, not ammonium. The X-ray pattern matches, fairly closely, to stuff sold by Baker Chemicals for Little Scientist crystal growing kits.” I died further. “On the other hand -- in fact there is a mineral with this composition in nature. Tschermigite. But it’s only known as efflorescences in brown-coal mines.” Not, I asked faintly, in Tibetan lakes? Could there be tschermigite hot springs? “Well, I suppose it's always possible,” he agreed reluctantly (geologists always speak as if overcoming grave reservations). “But it's more possible that you were suckered. Of course, it would take somebody a lot of work and trouble to grow crystals that big, and they said it came from a lake, and you say you didn't see any more of it around on the souvenir stands. I wouldn't throw them out.”

Well, is my face lavender! Yet, I can always dream. New occurrences of minerals in unheard-of environments are regularly reported, and until I return to Xinjiang – a fine idea, actually - and seek out the purple-encrusted shores of Karakury Lake itself, there's always a chance! Meanwhile – any crystal that you can lick is not going to last through many seasons of humid New York summers, so I will have to buy bell jars like the ones the Victorians put their stuffed birds in, to house my naughty but mysterious beauties.

John