heaven's breath

Anyone else remember Lyall Watson's wonderful book Heaven's Breath, about the winds? It enchanted me as a teenager; more recently a friend tracked it down for me. It's a treasure. And if you have read The English Patient you might remember how Ondaatje makes use of Watson's material in his magical and poetic descriptions.

So, now: the courtyard in a still summer dusk. The blues and mauves are incandescent – there's a word for that in flowers, isn't there? Do I mean inflorescence?

Anyway, the winds: all three of them.  There's the high dreamy cirrus clouds, snagged on a northwesterly, so slow the long mares' tails are barely moving; the westerly, lower, new, is piling up cumulus like dirty mounds of escaping goosedown; and then close above me little tags of thin ghost-clouds, almost not-there, are gliding over from the south.