Words & Photographs by Louis D Hall, from his book ‘In Green’.
This extract is from a passage of time where solitude became the norm and the presence of humans unusual. I would come across strangers when I was least expecting it, in the coldest and most remote sections of the Ligurian Alps - a lesser known range between Italy and France. I remember being both vulnerable and free; alone with a horse, the mountains, the animals and the elements. By boot and hoof, we found ourselves on old partisan paths, tracing an alluring line between history and the unknown. ‘In Green’ is a book that tells a 111 day journey I made with a horse called Sasha, from Siena in Italy to Cape Finisterre, on the west coast of Spain. We began in Tuscany and finished with only the Atlantic Ocean before us, the end of the land. This extract is set near the beginning of this journey, deep in the cradle of the white mountains.
A low tolling bell pulses languidly through the afternoon air, a haunting salute. Like many of these Ligurian villages, Cabenne is all but deserted. I ride Sasha bareback past the empty church and down the main street. We are in search of a hostel or a rifugio. A person. The sound of Sasha’s hooves shudders off the walls.
A face appears from a first-storey balcony. I glance up and the stranger hurriedly withdraws. Moments later a street door swings open and an old lady emerges into the cold. Her smile wraps itself around me. Softly, her hand touches Sasha’s neck.
She leads us into a stable full of hay and straw. An ancient Arabian mare wallows in the shadows, at peace, it seems, in her isolated world. She and Sasha share the shelter and munch on hay all through the night. The woman gives me a bottle of white wine, some bread and some cheese, and I sleep in the cobwebs and cover myself in hay.
In the morning I am awoken by a man tapping at my shins with a stick. He gestures me to follow, leading me outside. The sun has not yet risen and I can’t feel my toes. We reach a tap, and, with the energy of a magician, he turns the handle and stands back in delight as the water that flows steams in the frozen morning air. I place my feet in a bucket below and stand tall, feeling my toes thaw. I do the same with my rigid boots.
This day holds the first view that completely takes my breath away. I say goodbye to Cabenne and the kind couple, and we travel back into the hills. Along the ridge of Monte Larnaia there is a steep rock face that projects out into the open air like a pier to the sky. It is too dangerous for Sasha to climb, so I leave him grazing and then clamber up to see what I can find at the top. The expanse below is an illusion of waves; white-peaked breakers blurring the lines between sky and earth. Monte Caucaso stands tall ahead of me, a portal into the Rapallo and Genoa shores that roam somewhere beyond, the far-off ocean now a shadow to these mountainous rollers. Sasha climbs up to meet me, curious to see where I have gone.
We stand together and breathe in the interchanging shapes of the terrain. For a moment, this makes me feel as at home as I imagine the wolves to be; just as the trees and the rocks. I feel close to Sasha, my fellow traveller, trying to decipher the house where we are.
I acknowledge how violently this unending landscape can turn from a wintry dream to an iron-faced nightmare. But the hellish moments have their own beauty too. They become coordinates in memory, proving that we are moving forward.
Configuring where I am or what I am doing has been replaced with the mantra of step by step. Scree now resembles shattered bones, just as the fossils in Tuscany had replaced the roots of vines. The trails worsen. The handsaw in my rucksack is used daily. Mudslides have charred the routes and even the astral red-and-white Alta Via signs have morphed into signifiers of suspicion. The shoulders and jaws of mountains are walls. The ceilinged sky remains low and metallic. I am in the season of dead spring, a season that bears dead skin on the bottom of my feet. Amongst it all, however, my exhaustion has produced something of an indelible determination. A steely myopia in the hoary light. I believe this applies to Sasha too. We have entered an unshakeable state. All we have to do is to keep climbing, keep going. Dream or nightmare, we have to get out of these mountains. Wherever that might be. The horizons are a sackcloth wall. Exit-less. It’s strange how we can be so confined in so much space. This is a new form of vertigo. The only thing that breaks the monochrome is the silverware of bells and the glugging of cold black rivers that Sasha drinks from. There are no birds in the sky. There are no stars in Liguria. The cuts on Sasha’s leg have begun to mend.
I am steadily losing weight but am growing fast in muscle and strength. Whenever I see my reflection, my eyes appear like someone else’s. I have succumbed to coffee. The tea here doesn’t work. I begin to associate coffee with river water, like a fish might do. The villages I pass are solemn and mostly empty, fading away, but the people - when we are lucky to find them - have warm hearts and are full of a charged life. At times it feels it is only their work and their nature that keep the mountains standing and the rivers flowing.
