Gates of Knidos

6 pm. The nothingness, blank zero eraser-board emptiness void cracked, splintered and shifted.  Finally.  Behind the veil?  Palest of pale blues, then powdered shades of cobalt and turquoise. Then: freed from watery chains, flustered from the tempest-of-minutes-before – the sun burst forth from the gray gauze in a rush of yellows to oranges to crimson.

I pulled the handbrake and inched towards the edge of the bluff.  The Fiat stopped at the Gates of Knidos. Knidos, the once-upon-a-time Carian city, impregnable on its lofty perch amid white-chalk cliffs, guardian of trade winds that carried spices from Persian and copper from Greece.. Knidos, now keeper of broken pillars and abandoned sarcophagi and marbled rubble.. a palace of thistle and weeds for silly frightened goats.

"Do you wanna go in?" I said.

"Not really," she said.

The gatekeeper looked at us. We looked at him. Strange Japanese tourists, he must have thought -- driving over 250 km to the edge of nowhere.. and they won't even go in.

Yellows then oranges then crimson.  The last of the rays caressed the sea below us into submission when it was black and brooding moments before.. into the magico-realismo calmness of dusk...

Sunset over the blue Mediterranean: a perfect ending to any day.  If it was so, then there have been many perfect endings along the sun-drenched shores of the Datca and Loryma peninsulas in Southern Turkey...