Streets decked out for the festa, but eerily silent all the while.

Narrow passageways whose rock is a trademark yellow, a yellow made yellower, it seems, by the lamplight at night and the sun during the day; more yellow than the yellow rock in Malta, the flaking yellow of globigerina limestone, the flaking yellow of Twistees (and that’s when you finally figure out why it remains the national snack).

Streets that are passageways, yes, passageways that lead to even smaller nooks. Some house a pack of cats; an adorable sight for those so inclined. But this pack is skinny, mangy.

You walk past them regardless — because it’s the done thing — but the cuteness radar does not blip this time. In a Disney cartoon, this bunch is the pack of dangerous street urchins. Where anthropomorphism acts as euphemism too — were they human and in an R-rated film, they would be drug dealers and murderers.

The heat is as strong here as it is in Malta — a division, a distinction that will doubtlessly sound absurd to many outsiders — but the quiet reigns supreme. Memories of the smaller villages in the mother isle during the nineties. When you’d peek outside only to be blinded by the yellow stone of the opposite building. When (the nostalgic haze suggests) people took the siesta seriously.

But maybe the distinction is not so absurd after all. We meet foreign visitors — Italians, Germans; smiley, homey, bohemian but polished — who proudly claim to never have set foot in Malta, apart from the trip to the airport. “We’ve been coming here for 25 years,” they’d say, save for perhaps a ten-year break somewhere in between. But they’ll stick to Gozo, thank you very much. Malta is far too chaotic.

It makes you think. About how we fetishise smallness and isolation. How tourism makes us look at places as mere service providers. In this case, a glorified massage parlour for the mind and soul.

I fell under the spell at Ggantija, though. You worry about the packs of tourists filing in, at the beginning. You wonder what compels people to book trips on package tours, where any individual experience is washed away by the rank-and-file schedule of cramming in sights on deadline and budget.

But they dissipate, soon enough. They get lost somewhere between the museum, the (tasteful, non-intrusive) new passageway and the temples themselves.

Stones arranged in their precise but mysterious alignments. Pock-marked with holes (some strategic, some natural, most baffling), which make plenty of room for the vegetation to seep back in.

There’s graffiti too, some of it dating back to the 1800s, and most of it French. When we visited, it was a cloudier, windier day than most. I was filled with gratitude. To be able to see and feel that place, under those conditions. To stop time for a while, in a place that demands very little else of you.

The trip back