As we stood there watching, the long yellow light on the eastern horizon suddenly changed in color—first to a roseate flush, then to a warm crimson; the scenes round us, sky, sea, and land, brightened as if by magic.

[H]e disappeared into his house much as a startled weazel makes for its hole.

Others are newer, such as the ethnocentric narrative of today’s Macedonian nation as a symbolic continuation of Alexander the Great’s empire (minimising any Albanian past within Macedonian national history) which Nikola Gruevski’s government made to pervade the built environment of Skopje through a grandiose programme of monument-building and ‘antiquitization’.

So rare as to be considered almost legendary, the couatl is one of the most beautiful creatures in existence.