This is why they make books. He's sitting in an open air market in Bulgaria in 1934 where the canopies cover much of the sky except a thin stripe of blue in the middle. This is the third volume of a record of an eighteen year old walking across Eastern Europe.
Time for another slivo and a couple of roast paprika-pods. A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the land, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches
above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing behind, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and, at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us (p. 34). - From "The Broken Road" by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
I typed the first sentence into Google and found this:http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2014/05/patrick-leigh-fermors-broken-road-bird.html
If you are going to read them, you have to read all three
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