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every morning after that. Dan was always first out of our tent, immediately packing up his sleeping bag and mattress, making ready his day pack; and then performing a set of calisthenics—sits-ups and push-ups, all adding up to five hundred repetitions. That first morning when I saw him stretching and twisting, it looked like such a good idea I decided to join him the next day. In the days to come my enthusiasm waxed, waned, and disappeared altogether in that order, and that quickly.
    It was already hot at six o’clock in the morning. We had a delicious breakfast of omelet, oatmeal porridge with hot milk, and pancakes. The morning was beautiful, the sky was blue, not the impersonal blue of the sky that I was used to, but as if it was specially tinted that way; and even though it was a wide open sky, very big, it felt confined, as if it was more like a ceiling than a sky. And this confusing notion—sky or ceiling—only grew more so; for a sky is a part of the earth, it is the thing to which you might be exposed, the unfeeling elements raining down on you come from the sky; a ceiling, on the other hand, is the structure that protects you from the sky.
    At exactly half past seven in the morning we left camp. We walked through the town of Tumlingtar, the very way we had been the afternoon before where we had met the schoolteacher and the health-care worker, but I didn’t see either of them. I didn’t see anyone from the evening before and I left the place with a feeling of theoretical sadness, for it was sad that I might never, would never, see any of these people again, or see this place again, and a final parting is a time to feel sad. And so I walked out of the village, up my first official incline. It wasn’t at all a very big one, but since I had never just walked up a hill as an everyday thing, I usually drove up a hill as an everyday occurrence, I felt challenged by it. Also, I was influenced by people’s warnings about heights and sudden exertion and Himalayan heat. I walked up the incline and thought how good to get that over with and saw that there was another incline and another incline, but then there was a leveling off, but then there were more inclines and then the heat got hot. The path we were walking on was the size of a narrow road, gouged out of the red clay. We walked up a gradual incline, the sun getting a hot I had never known. Up, up we walked, each plateau the beginning of a new, gradual ascent. By midmorning we had gained some height—I could see that—I could look back and see where we had been. But I was used to going somewhere and arriving quickly, and so had to clamp down on feeling impatient. And, there was nothing to collect, certainly nothing I could grow from this climate in the one in which I actually live. I could see Ricinus , marigold, and Datura, Cosmos, sunflowers growing in people’s gardens, and also plots of corn. Below us was the broad, flowing Arun, winding its way down to the Ganges. We passed people who seemed native to India, other people who seemed native to Nepal, and other people who seemed from somewhere in between.
    I cannot tell now exactly when in those first few hours of the morning on my journey that my understanding of distances collapsed. I walked through the town of Tumlingtar and the way out led to a sharp incline and then to a set of houses surrounded by cultivated plots that seemed to be resting on a plateau, level ground, but the ground was never level for long, and suddenly, or eventually, I was climbing again, going up and up, and the going up seemed sudden, surprisingly new, for I had not expected it. For those first few hours, I was expecting the landscape to conform to the landscape with which I was familiar, gentle incline after gentle incline, culminating in a resolution of a spectacular arrangement of the final resting place of some geographical catastrophe. But this was not so. I walked up toward a ridge, and I