One June day last year, as I stood on a Norfolk beach looking north over the Wash, it seemed to me that on the horizon a low and narrow bank of cloud was rolling in towards the shore. When I looked again through my binoculars, I saw no cloud but rather a long pale strip of air that cleaved the sea from the sky, as clearly defined as if it had been marked out with string. Within the pale strip two black tower blocks stood, their foundations in the sea; I could make out jutting balconies at irregular intervals, and squat dark turrets on the roof. Over the course of the afternoon they grew and diminished, sometimes acquiring several new storeys before dwindling down to a bungalow; then the light changed, that curious length of pale sky faded and the towers sank into the water.
I knew what I’d seen, because for much of that summer I’d grown fascinated by natural phenomena and optical illusions that send ships sailing through the sky, or drop miles of icy cliff into the desert. It was the Fata Morgana: a form of mirage in which fronts of warm and cool air meet and create a refracting lens, so that objects just beyond the observer’s view appear nearer and higher than they really are. Often they are repeated many times over, with the effect of complex architecture – tapered windows are sometimes seen, and flying buttresses. Italian sailors on the strait of Messina were so bedevilled by these visions they named them after the fairy Morgan le Fay, suspecting her of beckoning them to their deaths. At times the Fata Morgana is little more than a dazzling strip of water raised above the horizon, as in Theodor Storm’s watery ghost story The Rider on the White Horse: “A thin layer of atmosphere must have lain above a thicker one up in the sky, for there was a high mirage and the reflection raised the sea like a glittering strip of silver.”
While I stood watching I recalled what little physics I’d learned – this was merely light obeying its laws, no more strange than an apple falling from a table. But all the same I was wonderstruck, transfixed by its strangeness: what I felt was not appreciation of beauty, and not terror of some malign supernatural force, but something in between. This sensation was described by Edmund Burke in his 1757 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Beauty (or so he says) has certain qualities arousing love and pleasure; it tends to be small, light, smooth, and does not move us beyond our reason. The sublime, on the other hand, is massive, vast and obscure, “a passion similar to terror”. A striking example of the sublime predates Burke by 17 centuries, when Pliny in his Natural History described a meeting of mountain, sky and moon that arouses a kind of ecstatic dread: “A speechless awe creeps into the hearts of those who approach it, and also a dread of the peak that soars above the clouds and reaches the neighbourhood of the moon’s orb.”
In literature the sublime often seems a stepping stone to divinity: in the Norse epic The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson, a lightning storm at sea signals the arrival of the Valkyrie, the Choosers of the Slain. When Helgi and his fleet sail into a storm, “lightnings came over them, and the flashes entered the ships. They saw that nine Valkyrie were riding in the air.” In 1643, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher received a letter from a fellow priest who’d witnessed a Fata Morgana; it had appeared on the Feast of the Assumption, and his experience of the sublime is correspondingly devout. “It seemed to me that the most holy Madonna made appear … a trace of paradise that day ... the sea that bathes Sicily swelled up and became 10 miles in length all around, like the crests of a black mountain, and the sea of Calabria flattened out and appeared in a moment the clearest crystal, transparent as a mirror.” Kircher, incidentally, was not impressed, tersely informing his swooning colleague that it had all been tricks of the light.
At about the time I saw the Fata Morgana I was working on the final draft of a novel in which optical illusions appear: bewitched and beguiled, I seemed to stumble across natural wonders in every other book I read. In The Rings of Saturn, WG Sebald walks on Dunwich Heath in Suffolk. Though it is noon, it has grown “uncommonly sultry and dark”; he finds himself oppressed by “the low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ear like the sound of the sea in the shell.” To Sebald, nature itself is phenomenal: later, he writes of “night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, that over the mountain-tops gleaming and mournful draws on”.
In The Outrun, Amy Liptrot’s memoir of alcohol addiction and healing, Orkney’s skies seem to offer intoxicating encounters that transport the writer beyond her pain, like a celestial substitute for drink: there are the Merry Dancers, the Orcadian name for the northern lights, and noctilucent cloud – “Fifty miles high, in the deep twilight, icy blue wisps hanging like lightning crossed with cotton wool.” The profound sadness that pervades the memoir is for a moment gone: “I get out of my car and hold my phone to the sky, smiling like a nutter.”
In Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the orphan heroine Emily – pursued by an evil count, imprisoned in a fortress – watches “a small and lambent flame, moving at some distance on the terrace”. The disembodied light appears, and vanishes, and reappears; it is seen flickering on the arms of a soldier, and Emily cannot tell if it signals a benign or malignant force, or whether it is natural or unnatural.
In the hands of DH Lawrence even a natural phenomenon such as a rainbow is as strange, as portentous, as that first biblical rainbow after the flood. There are few more marvellous examples of literature’s capacity to return a reader to childish wonder: “The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch at the top of heaven.”
I suppose these are versions of the pathetic fallacy, a device I recall being roundly condemned in the seminars of my student days. “Oh: is it raining because she is sad?” we’d say, wondering how any writer could be so crass. But fiction has no more duty to be “real” than a painted apple does to be edible: it may seem convenient that, say, a clerical devil arrives on the threshold of a presbytery in “a bluish wild darkness”, as in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd – but I find the novel altogether more seductive because he does.
I have another memory, from 20 years ago or more, of travelling with my father to some chapel in Prittlewell or Steeple in Essex on a Sunday morning. It was winter, and the heavy fog which had enclosed the whole county overnight had frozen, so that every branch of the oaks we passed was white against a white sky. Particles of frozen mist made the air dense and pale, and it was possible to look directly at the sun; on its surface, I could make out three black marks. I knew what sunspots were – I’d been taught to use a telescope in reverse, and see the little black storms raging in the disc of light cast on a sheet of paper. When I told my disbelieving father what I saw he stopped the car, and we stood for a long while looking the sun dead in the eye in a white world. My father is a scientist, and has forgotten more about astronomy and optics than I will ever know. He is also a creationist; in those days, so was I. But I don’t think either faith or science played the largest part in what we felt – it was something more elusive, and more numinous.
You might well think it’s the spiritually inclined who are most susceptible to sublime encounters with nature’s phenomena. But consider Richard Dawkins, in his overview of science The Magic of Reality: “We gaze up at the stars on a dark night with no moon and no city lights and, breathless with joy, we say the sight is pure magic.” Edmond Halley, meanwhile, whose comet I saw pass over my parents’ back garden in 1986, wrote an ode to Newton’s Principia that typifies the rational religion that powered the Enlightenment: “Here ponder too the Laws which God/ Framing the Universe, set not aside/ But made the fixed foundations of his work.”
Scouring the internet, I hunted out phenomena from Cornwall to the borders of Kazakhstan. There was a time when Twitter seemed to consist of nothing but sightings of nacreous cloud – a curious pearly cavity in a cloud layer that looks like nothing so much as an upturned oyster shell – and I grew outraged that I’d never seen it. I developed a deep and unfeigned terror of Morning Glory clouds – white, cylindrical, many hundreds of miles long – that roll across the plains of Queensland in October, as if sent by God to grind sinners into dust. Late last year in Russia, hexagonal ice-crystals formed in the air causing three suns to set at once, in a phenomenon known as a parhelion; only a month before, in China’s Guangdong province, a city of skyscrapers was seen riding on a cloudbank (I’ve seen the footage several times; each time, my heart contracts with dread). Aliens are blamed, or the government, and frequently both. In the small hours of an autumn morning, I saw reports of the aurora being visible as far south as East Anglia. Waking my husband, I demanded he drive me out of town and into the dark – just as I began to give up hope I saw a dim glow on the horizon, is if there was a great city out there, and all its lights were green (I discovered then that my husband’s idea of sublime is not mine: he stood with his back to those pale searchlights in the Norfolk sky, trying to count the Pleiades).
When I travelled to Switzerland in winter, and saw for the first time what I considered a true mountain range, I had in mind the Brocken spectre, an optical illusion in which walkers encounter a vast spectre glimpsed through mist, as their own shadow is cast against the haze and ringed in bands of light. In The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg’s gothic satire on Calvinism, George Colwan sees the Brocken spectre: “He beheld, to his astonishment, a bright halo in a cloud of haze, that rose in a semi-circle over his head.” The brief scene crystallises the novel’s uncanny nature: throughout, Colwan has encountered a being we take to be Satan, but we can never be quite sure whether it represents his own wickedness made flesh, crouching behind a hedge and beckoning him on to sin.
In 1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge climbed the Brocken peak in the Harz mountains hoping to find the spectre. Later, in his Aids to Reflection, he wondered whether that mountain wraith has such power because the observer “sees himself, without knowing that he sees himself”: the sight is both familiar and unfamiliar. All these phenomena – the noctilucent cloud shining blue over Orkney, the cities in the sky, Sebald’s eerie wanderings on Dunwich Heath – are both strange, and not strange; both natural, and supernatural. It is a version of the uncanny, the sensation identified by Freud which derives from the German unheimlich, or “unhomely”: that creeping, elusive feeling that what we’ve seen is completely ordinary but in some way changed.
I came closest to the unhomely when standing on the balcony of my Hackney flat, looking up into a clear sky bisected by a vast black plume. An unnatural phenomena, this time: a recycling centre in Dagenham was on fire, and the smoke was visible across east London. Standing in familiar surroundings wholly unconducive to sublime terror – fairy lights in my neighbours’ garden, my badly watered hanging baskets – I found myself in the Last Times, and in the sky, a black carpet laid out for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
I think of the marvels I’ve seen, and wonder if I should be content – but I’m greedy by nature, and long for more. I still hope one day to see the Brocken Spectre, though there’s no hope at all of catching sight of her in the flatlands where I live. It amuses me to think she’s waiting for me somewhere on an Alpine peak – myself, but not myself: vast, immortal, immune to sickness and sorrow, and wreathed, like an avenging angel, in a double rainbow.
• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry is published by Profile.
