I walked towards the rising sun because the sky ahead was magnificent. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and I loved watching the day unfold. I set out at a relaxed, unhurried pace, which I’d be able to keep up for a long time. I took my bearings from the landscape and began the trek which I intended to continue as long as I lived, even if I didn’t know what I expected from it. I walked up the long, gentle slope towards the east, and turned round when I reached the top. I gazed at the ten houses in the village which I’d so enjoyed building. Behind the biggest one was the cemetery where I’d buried Anthea. Only now, I tell myself that what I’d felt for her, the trust that slowly built up, the constant preference for her company and the joy each time I was reunited with her after an expedition were probably what the women called love. Now, I had nobody left to love.

From the start, I counted my steps. My heartbeats had been my unit of time, my steps would be my unit of length. I’d been told that an average step was seventy centimetres, and that there were a hundred centimetres in a metre. When the women spoke of lengths or distances, it was always in metres or kilometres, so I tended to use the same concepts. I soon realised that was completely ridiculous—those terms had meaning for them, but not for me, and I no longer needed to use a shared language. An hour’s walk—that meant something to me. I didn’t need to go to the trouble of converting my steps to kilometres. I would evaluate distances in hours’ walking. I always relied on my confidence in my inner clock and, during that first day, I decided to count the number of steps I took in one hour and to choose a unit that would be my equivalent of the kilometre. So I had to walk at a very regular pace. The ground wasn’t very hilly, alternating between gentle descents and moderate inclines which probably made little difference to my speed. My first stop was after five hours. I’d counted thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-two steps. I embarked on a division operation that I now found less difficult since Anthea had shown me how to do it by writing the numbers in the dirt, but all the same it required an enormous effort of concentration. That came out at seven thousand, one hundred and fifty steps an hour. I decided to check by counting hour by hour, and then by fractions of ten minutes, and ended up, by the evening, with the discovery that I walked regularly at a pace of a hundred and nineteen to a hundred and twenty-two steps a minute.

At the same time, I tried to evaluate in advance how far it was to a particular point, so as to give myself a sense of distance. The monotonous landscape didn’t help, and I had to be content with a bush, a small rock or some other little landmark. Sometimes I was unsure whether the bush I was walking past was the one I’d selected ten or fifteen minutes earlier or not. But I measured the distance I covered and I could feel myself acquiring a sense of distance, as I had once felt myself acquiring a sense of time.