28 April 1985

It is 5:55 a. m as I start this Sunday morning entry—rather shakily. (I feel nauseated and stricken with deja vu at the same time. Here I am at almost the end of my spring Wroxton tour of duty in something of the same sort of shape in which I began my days here in January: sick and using my journal as an invalid's therapy.)
     I have been awake most of the night listening to my innards imitate the noises of wounded beasts, mating owls, and startled rooks. Every fold in my gut trembling beneath my distended abdomen squirms in protest against the Indian dinner I had last night with two students, Betsy Kase and Karla Rosenfeld. (In pleased mockery of my earnest but inept volleyball playing with them and their classmates, they have begun to call me "Spike." At the moment, the term denotes something lodged in the spastic folds of my bowel.)
     As I start writing, I'm looking back with a kind of horrified amusement upon the unconsciously metaphorical threat residing in the question one of them asked me as she held an extra portion of the entree—“Spiced Biryani," I think it was called—on a ladle above my plate: "Have some more, Spike?" It was around 2:00 a. m that I first recognized the ominous ambiguity of the nickname in the dinner hour context.
     I don't feel especially bad or really tired—having just returned from a purgative trip to the bathroom, but I have another ground for grievance against the Plas Bowman: it has no regard for a sick guest's desire for inconspicuousness while creeping from bedroom to bath and back between midnight and morning. The squeaky door hinges, upon which I commented in an earlier entry, actually shrieked when I tried to ease my way out of my chamber and into the hall, and then back again. And the toilet thundered and burbled endlessly after I flushed it.
     I will therefore have some breakfast and join the students' tour of Portmeirion and Llechwedd Slate Caverns. If I felt less reason to worry about pinching back nausea with tightened lips, I might try to achieve a Welsh pronunciation of that last place name in keeping with my new Welsh dictionary's instructions for articulating the doubled l sound: "It is best pronounced by placing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth near the front teeth as if you were going to pronounce l but instead of doing so, blow hard.”
     After having climbed Mt. Snowdon yesterday, I don't want to miss the chance to see as much more of Wales as possible. Like Vermont and much of Appalachia, it is a poor country. That makes some kinds of purchases cheap—I got a shepherd's pie lunch and coffee for £1.35, and three drinks I bought for myself and two students in an admittedly shabby discotheque cost £1.40—and the countryside attractive: poor people haven't the capital to develop and "improve" their environment the way "rich Americans," for instance, can.
     From Snowdon we had spectacular views of several villages, of high valleys sloping to deeper ones, of talus scattering slate cliffs shining in the sun, of a tarn below a cirque in the upper slope of Snowdon, of ridge after ridge covered only with short grasses and lichen, some of it bright chartreuse splashes on dark gray boulders. We could also see what Housman called (in "Bredon Hill" I found out when we got back to the Abbey and I could check) "the coloured counties." And everywhere we saw sheep. They were as numerous on the highest ledges as they were in the roads, footpaths, and gardens in Llanbergis at Snowdon's foot. Our coach trip from Wroxton, which began at 8:30 a.m. and ended at Caernarfon at 1:30 p.m., was slowed, in fact stopped dead, twice by flocks of free ranging sheep in the middle of the road from Llangallen to Caernarfon.
     For a number of reasons, I stopped just below the highest peak of the mountain, after having climbed upward for approximately two and a half hours. I had turned an ankle and felt discomfort whenever my foot slipped on the shaly debris of the trail. I had also begun to feel a slight pain in my chest and a little dizziness, especially when I looked over the edge of the trail, not much more than six feet wide in some of the higher stretches. Furthermore, David Lalin, beginning to suffer an attack of acrophobia, was showing signs of mild panic. I told him I was turning back and that he could make the descent with me. He jumped at the chance, and both he and I were happy with our decision soon after we started downward.
     While we were still many hundreds of feet above the "Halfway House," at a point roughly 1850 feet above sea level, we encountered a rain and hail storm, whipped into our faces by a strong gale. Within two or three minutes our clothes were soaked and our cheeks burned. The storm ended quickly, however, and, standing in the sudden sunlight, we looked back upward and saw the summit of Snowdon en¬veloped in the dark, thick gray cloud through which we had passed. Although I was concerned about the party of 7 that we had left, they made the top safely and joined the rest of us in a cafe in Llanbergis well before the 4:30 deadline set for our departure in the coach. We had Welsh rarebit and dry draught cider and then pretended to shop in the Arts and Crafts Center, the only place we found on or near Snowdon that had a public loo.
     We got back to Caernarfon shortly after 5:00. I took a bath, read, had a gin and tonic (sans ice, of course) in my room, and then headed—like a lamb trotting toward the butcher—for the Gandhi Tandoori Restaurant. (If it were a Mexican establishment, the proper name for it would probably be “Fuego en las Tripas,” which, a Spanish-speaking friend has told me, means “fire in the bowels.”) May its chef live a thousand years, in the circle Dante provided for the likes of the Borgias, and purgatorially dine only upon dishes of his own corrupt and degenerate devising.