The wind, unyielding and wild, had swept the clifftop evergreen from seedling to sapling, and treeling to contorted tree. The unlikely survivor's twisted trunk was punctuated with half-branches, snapped in the gales. Its foliage—blooming, sparsely, on three healthy but sagging branches—was hardly verdant, instead it was determined and dark. Routed by the westerlies and drenched by the monsoons, the rugged tree gripped the rocky cliff with exposed roots. Born on the edge of death, the sun beckoned it upwards, into the midday blue. While, at the other end, its roots grew into the ground and across the face of the cliff.

Alone, each of the tree's features might seem ugly. But, together, they combine to active human hearts; aesthetics, strange.