Highland Pipers Assaulting the Great Organs of the Earth

When I hear a bagpiper playing on the ridge of one of the peaks, in a mountain valley, on one of the Highlands’ mountains in Scotland, I am seized by the rising swell of sound, by its reverberations echoing among the heights. I feel at once the emotion awakened by the beauty of the moment and a kind of dread, as I wonder whether the sound spreads into the depths of the Earth, where the sinuous veins of liquefied lava move. I have the impression they might suddenly crack the Earth’s crust and awaken a few sleeping demons, far beneath the groundwater tables. I tell myself that one day the encounter with this magmatic fusion will vaporize the mineral waters, and that the crests of the mountain range will rise as majestically as the ranges of Tibet, like the breath of the rumbling pipes of Notre-Dame du Sablon. Oh, the anguish born of the summits, and that of an instrument which once led entire armies into battle. Must we abandon this humanity as one leaves the houses of the Mont-Saint-Michel counterscarp, before they splinter and slide away from the horizon line of the salt marshes? I am afraid, I confess it, intoxicated by the sounds and the severity of rocky escarpments, telluric spurs announcing the end of time. Ah, the great organs of the Earth, those of the depths, buried beneath the inner sea that holds the primal water, sealed, enclosed, and mysterious.