“We’re almost there,” Tashi says. Jim looks up, surprised, and sees they are on the last slope below the ridge, the edge of the range with all its towers extending left to right above them, for as far as they can see. They’re headed for a flat section between towers. “How do you feel?”

“Great,” says Jim.

“Good man. The altitude bothers some people.”

“I love it.”

On they climb. Jim gets summit fever and hurries after Tashi until his breaths rasp in his throat. Tashi must have it too. Then they’re on top of the ridge, on a very rough, broad saddle, made of big shards of pinkish granite. The ridge is a kind of road running north–south, punctuated frequently by big towers, serrated knife-edge sections, spur ridges running down to east, out to west.… To the west it’s mountains for as far as they can see.

“My God,” Jim says.

“Let’s have lunch here.” Tashi drops his pack, pulls off his shirt to dry the sweaty back of it in the sun. There is still no wind, not a cloud in the sky. “Perfect Sierra day.”

They sit and eat. Under them the world turns. Sun warms them like lizards on rock. Jim cuts his thumb trying to slice cheese, and sucks the cut till it stops bleeding.

When they’re done they put on the packs and start down the western side of the ridge. This side is steeper, but Tashi finds a steep chute of broken rock—talus, he teaches Jim to call it—and very slowly they descend, holding on to the rock wall on the side of the chute, stepping on chunks that threaten to slide out from under them. In fact Jim sends one past the disgusted Tashi and sits down hard, bruising his butt. His toes blister in the descent. The chute opens up and the talus fans down a lessened slope to a small glacial pond, entirely rockbound: aquamarine around its perimeter, cobalt in its center.

They drink deeply from this lake when they finally reach it. It’s mid- or late afternoon already. “Next lake down is a beauty,” says Tash. “Bigger than this one, and surrounded by rock walls, except there’s a couple of little lawns tucked right on the water. Great campsite.”

“Good.” Jim’s tired.

The west side of the range has a great magic to it. On the east side they looked down into Owens Valley, and so back to the world Jim knows. Now that link is gone and he’s in a new world, without connection to the one Tashi yanked him from. He can’t characterize this landscape yet, it’s too new, but there’s something in its complexity, the anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. Nevertheless it is all very complex. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.