Let it be Sardinia.

“Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia.”

— D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia

Right after my flatmate Claire and I first booked our flights to Sardinia, I typed something, who knows what, into Google, and whatever it was led me to a travel book Lawrence once wrote titled, Sea and Sardinia. I ordered it immediately.

I’d never known him to be a travel writer, but apparently Lawrence and his German wife Frieda (whom he affectionately refers to as “the q-b” throughout the book—short for the queen bee) traveled extensively and spent a significant amount of time in Italy, specifically on Sicily, in the 1920s.

This book, however, follows their 1921 journey to Sardinia—both their voyage from Palmero to the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, and then their many train and bus travels around the island.

Maybe it was because he and Frieda were traveling across Sardinia in January—just like Claire and myself—or maybe it was the beautiful lines almost like poetry—“Give me room,” he writes, “Give me room for my spirit”—but I pulled the book out every spare moment I could. It didn’t matter where we were throughout the weekend, whether standing in line to board our flight, lying in bed for our daily siesta, or sitting at a sun-soaked outdoor café on our final afternoon, Lawrence was there.

As Clare and I shivered ourselves to sleep on our first night, I recounted Lawrence’s own experience with the not-exactly-pleasant temperatures—“The room—in fact the whole of Sardinia—was stone cold, stone stone cold”—and drew comfort from the fact that we weren’t just babies who couldn’t handle a little chill in the air.

But on the plane ride to Alghero, there was one passage in particular that caught my attention:

“The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape. Looking across from the verandah at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house, we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it…”

Ever since my time on the Tahitian pearl farm, I’ve found I’m a bit partial to any metaphors involving oysters (drilling a hole in 200 of them a day can do that to you), but this description struck me even more than usual—I’d never heard the horizon compared to the hinge of an oyster shell before. The image stuck with me.

And then that night, our first night in Sardinia, as we ran almost giddily down the cobblestoned streets of old town Alghero to the harbor, I nearly fell over at the sight of the sky: it was exactly—exactly—like Lawrence’s description. The heavy, heavy cloud cover breaking just inches above the darkened sea, exposing a narrow strip of fiery sky.

It was as if Lawrence himself was right there beside me, pointing out where the red light shone forth between the dark halves of the oyster.

It was as if Claire wasn’t my only travel companion, but D.H. Lawrence, too.