Far out along a flag line, movement. If it’s a bird, it’d be the first of the spring.  Couldn’t be our crew–all inside except me. The arrival of a polar bear is highly unlikely, however disturbing. Then what? I squat down, eyes still on the flag line, and watch in disbelief as the flag line itself warps and bends like liquid.  The fairy queen.

I should have expected her return on this cold, clear morning–perfectly calm. Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress, the fairy queen of legend. She was seen by Sicilian sailors to raise an image of her floating castle above distant shores.  And as the Italian shaper of mirages, as Fata Morgana, her legend lives on at Summit.

As I continue my walk, familiar objects around ripple and distort.  When ducking or craning, the Big House reaches high on its stilt legs, or is brought low to the surface.  The seismometer flag line, neatly draped with a bundle of cables, appears bizarre: lumpy, haphazard and blurred.  And the bamboo forest is yet stranger.  The forest appears in a crisp horizontal band.  Stretched tall, it’s easy to see, through a kilometer away: a scrying window to the grid of bamboo.

The bottom two photos show the same visibility marker–a black sheet of plywood on four-by-four posts–from slightly different perspectives. In one it is seen to stretch wildly, a double image appearing overhead, in the other it stands high atop stilt legs but the panel all but disappears.