Clouds

Once, it matters little in which century or in which continent, there lived a young dreamer who, like many before and since, wanted to ride on the clouds. He was tall and thin and moved with a certain awkwardness, and his fair hair was always in disarray. He would look up enviously when a bird passed overhead and seldom talked of anything but flight and clouds. He lived for his dreams and his daytime fantasies, in which he bobbed through the sky on a downy puff of white.

He had no family that anybody knew of, although no-one could remember whether he was an orphan or a foundling or had moved to the village as a boy. The villagers were condescendingly fond of him, though he was largely unaware of it, and more than one of the girls found his faraway look oddly attractive.

Every few weeks, he used to climb into the mountains above the village to try to realise his dreams. It was a long journey for a youth of no exceptional physique to undertake without food or a place to sleep along the way. He walked over the wooded hills around the village where anybody lacking a thorough knowledge of the area could easily get lost and wander in circles for days, and then up the steep stony track leading higher into the mountains. Apparently unconcerned by hunger or by the dangerous terrain in which he had to jump over deep crevasses to continue along the path, he climbed higher until he found a small area of level ground next to a precipice where he could look down on the low-lying clouds. He would wait impatiently until one brushed past the rocks below him, shrouding them in mist, and then run furiously from a few paces back and hurl himself over the edge.

He miraculously survived his falls, suffering broken ribs and limbs and once making an unexpected recovery from a fracture of the second vertebra of the neck, but above all was troubled by an intense feeling of shame and disappointment at his failure. His pride wounded when the village gossip mill discovered the ridiculous manner in which he had acquired his injuries, he would blame the cloud - it had been the wrong sort, too thin to support his weight or too heavy to stay airborne or with a hole in it.

On each occasion, he was fortuitously discovered by a passing goatherd or carter and brought back home where the people of the village nursed him back to health. Though they had a great deal of affection for him, they pitied him as they pitied the congenital idiot who ran through the fields all day long chasing sparrows. Always expecting his next plunge to be his last, they gently tried to dissuade him, but as soon as he was able to walk normally, he would set off again hiking in solitude into the mountains, his faith unshaken, to wait for a better cloud.

One day he left never to return. The journey across the hills took longer than usual as the weather was bad and he was still limping after his previous attempt. The rain increased as he went, turning the rudimentary paths into rivulets of mud. The sun had already set when he emerged from the woods onto the higher ground and objects were gradually losing their colour and distinctness. He spent the night shivering with cold in a small cave which, although it gave him shelter and was reasonably inaccessible to rats, wolves and whatever else might be outside, hardly provided a comfortable place to sleep.

He awoke in the freezing dawn. The sky was a luminous deep blue promising a fine day, with a few small white cumulus clouds which awakened a thrill of excitement in his chest. He climbed quickly despite his stiff limbs until he reached a cold remote cliff overlooking a narrow bare gorge, where he sat to wait. The sky remained clear until shortly before sunrise, when the valley quickly filled with thick white mist. He dived headfirst with his arms spread wide.

He landed on the cloud top as gently as on a pile of feathers and bobbed up and down a little before being borne along by the wind. Later that day the startled villagers, looking up in astonishment and shielding their eyes from the sun, saw him sitting astride a small buoyant cloud, joyfully waving his hat.