KATHERINE NEVILLE’S
4/4 Newsletter
April 4, 2024
Birthday at Baie des Singes
One day, long ago, I was having a birthday lunch with a group of friends at Baie des Singes (Bay of the Monkeys), along the coast of Tunisia, when a group of chattering monkeys came down from the cliffs to the port for a visit. It had just rained, and an enormous rainbow appeared in the clouds.
The restaurateur told us that the monkeys always knew when it was going to rain, and would come down for a visit, because they knew it would be cool down the rocky shore and bring fresh water. At the time, I didn’t have my Nikon F camera with me. But the rainbow and the visitation of monkey guests seemed like a special birthday gift, just for me. So I wrote the description of the event in my ever-present notebook, which I filed away somewhere, to be retrieved sometime in future.
More than twenty years after, I was having lunch at another seaside restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, high on the cliffs of Tunisia, when a great water-bearing cloud came in from the sea and dumped buckets on the port beneath.
This time I did have my camera on hand! I raced down the steps and snapped photos of the rainbow above the port. Then I recalled my notebook with my long-ago birthday memory!
Collecting Rainbows
Even today, I still “collect” rainbows: Sir Isaac Newton’s prism (acquired from the Natural History Museum) sits in my eastern bedroom window, and casts its rainbow on my wall each morning. The octagonal crystals that readers have given me, over the years, hang in my western window and cast prisms of color across the papers on my desk. One of my favorite rainbows was painted on the trees of the sacred Basque Celtic forest of Oma, in northern Spain, by the famous artist, Agustin Ibarrola. My Secret Spain
Let’s follow our own Quest to wherever our Rainbow leads!
