One summer, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I spent two weeks in the Alps with my mother and her friends, a married couple from the capital. This otherwise uneventful vacation remains in my memory mainly because I saw eagles there for the first time in my life.

We made a long hike one day, and after many pauses imposed by the exhausted urbanites, who always pretended that they had to stop in order to enjoy the beauty of flowers and mushrooms, we arrived at a high plane, extremely green after the shadows of the woods. All the time we were hiking we did not meet a living soul. And then we first heard and afterwards saw the eagles. There were three or four of them high up between the sparse clouds. They made large circles around us, emitting high-pitched cries every so often. The complete desolation, punctuated by the martial birds, filled me with a previously unknown apprehension. Recently, some eighteen or nineteen years hence, I realized that I was not alone in my fear. The urbanites decided that it would not make any sense to go further up, above the tree line, as we had planned, and that we had better return to our hotel in the misty valley below, since it would soon become dark and we might get lost in the woods. After approximately half an hour with the eagles we practically ran back to the hotel, where we had to wait more than an hour for the dinner to be served. From the dining room we quietly watched the green valley darken and disappear. Then the gray rocks above turned pink, darkened, and finally disappeared as well.