The most beautiful cloud I ever saw was high in the mountains just to the east of the snow-covered ridge I was travelling; we were right next to each other, an immense dome of pure white silence that bubbled up from its centre to spill over itself like a waterfall that disappeared into the ocean of clouds below. It flowed quickly in a cyclical motion, feeding itself as it billowed down like a fountain, like a secret, like something you would never believe unless you saw it with your own eyes. A cloudfall, tinged yellow in the soft glow of the afternoon sun. The most magical of sights 20 storeys high, yet if you were to stand just a metre from its cascades and turn your back, you would never know it was there for it made not a sound, not a whisper, it moved as if it didn’t exist.
I pinch myself that I didn’t capture a video of this rare cloud formation because, trawling the internet, I’ve never found an image quite like it. Unlike cloudfalls that spill over mountains and ridgelines, this one stood alone, erupting like a gentle rounded volcano perched in the slopes below the ridgeline that curves from Mount Hotham to Mount Loch. Behind it, poking above the clouds was the snow-white peak of Mount Feathertop.
It is amazing how the atmosphere can sculpt such creations. It’s probable that a warm current travelling below the low-lying cloud was pushing upward at the valley’s headwall, bursting through like a giant bubble only to be met with cooler air flowing over the ridge, forcing it back down as if it were a tumbling cascade.
The atmosphere loves to play in the mountains. On days like today when it is wet outside, the damp air rises out of the gullies and curvatures that shape the mountains. About half-way up the range outside my window is a gully that runs horizontally as far as the eye can see. It’s almost imperceptible on a clear day, camouflaged in shades of blue and green, but so intimately defined when it gives birth to the clouds. Frequently in the cooler months, a long thick cloud I call the ‘snake’ forms in this pocket. It returns time and time again. Once, in the midst of a cool wet winter, an outsider confused the rising whisps of this cloud in its early stages of formation for a bushfire, prompting six fire trucks to turn up at my house.
My cloud does look like a snake, but it’s a name I stole many years ago from a movie called Clouds of Sils Maria staring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. The story takes place high in the Swiss Alps near the Maloja Pass where the mountains channel the winds to form an unusual cloud formation known as the Maloja Snake, a long serpentine cloud that moves through the Engadin valley like a river. You can sit high in the mountains and watch the snake pass beneath you, like the characters in the film. The Maloja Snake is a real phenomenon. It is both beautiful and ominous, and in the film, it is central to its story as a metaphor for the passing of time, for ambiguity in human relationships, and for cyclical patterns and inevitability. It represents both strength and vulnerability, the weather patterns must be just right. And then over Lake Sils, it dissipates, like the ending of the film. What interpretation of events will our protagonists make? What ending will they choose for themselves? What ending will we choose?
The snake in my valley doesn’t move like the Maloja Snake. It sleeps in the shadows of the mountain and burns off in the sun. But it inevitably returns. It is beautiful, though softly melancholy. And on days like today, between showers of rain, when the mad world has found its way into our small mountain community—for someone here has done the most terrible thing—and our phones ping with reminders to stay inside and lock the doors, I lock my door and stare out the window in search of beautiful things. The snake hasn’t come today. Not yet. Instead, the cloud reaches down from above and cloaks us with a fine mist. Through the glass it seems wildly gentle and comforting, and so I watch it. It barely moves, I cannot discern it, and yet somehow the world outside grows mistier, magical, like time itself has slowed with the cloud’s own ephemeral breath. In this calm that I see life. It’s in this calm that we can choose what happens next.
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