The last part of the journey was the most tedious. They felt they were close but they weren’t, not yet. They crossed the border, crossed a line of hills, crossed another. They learned the name of the river they were following, the Annan. Several times they stood their horses off the road to let drovers pass. On one occasion more than three hundred cattle were herded past them, heading south. There was something military about it. The numbers. The smell and churn of the road.

To Medina the land seemed wild as Spain, as old Castile. In the high country he saw eagles—small bent sticks turning in the currents of the sky, the sky itself a type of blue like the lining of something, like the source material of distance. Madre perla. Madre de Dios . . .

Two nights they slept in the hills, waking shivering, hugging themselves, foul-tempered, though by noon the sun was hot enough to suck the damp from their coats so that each man rode inside his own cloud. On the third night they stayed at an inn, solemnly eating everything that was brought to them, then sleeping in a windowless room on two straw pallets, sprawled, silent, dead to everything.

In the morning they followed a new river. (“Fuck the Annan,” said Calley, and Medina had said, “Yes, fuck the old Annan.”) The sense was of having climbed the country river by river. The Severn, the Wye, the Eden, the Annan. Now they had the Clyde.

One more night in the open, then, early afternoon the next day, Medina stood in the stirrups of his horse and pointed to the smoke that hung in a brown cloud over the river. An hour later they could pick out spires, the stacks of industry, and later still—pushing their horses on—the sun setting in window glass, all Glasgow for half an hour like the embers of a fire.

The city built itself around them. A zone of scrubland, a midden ghosted by dogs. Then shanty, brickfields, the first formal streets newly built or still unfinished (tons of dressed stone with a watchman camped at the top). Further on they saw the bones of an older city, streets in a curl, houses piled like broken crockery, human faces white as bindweed . . .

They had lost the river; now they discovered it again, its channels running through mud beneath a handsome bridge. There were globe-headed lamps on the bridge and the lighters were at work, one of them, a boy, holding a length of smouldering cord of the kind gunners use.