Clouds loft over the great eastern range. They descend, crossing a very rough field of lichen-splotched boulders. Mosses fill cracks, mosses and then tiny shrubs. Cloud shadows rush over them. Jim wanders off parallel to Tashi so he can find his own route. For a long time they navigate the immensity of broken granite, each in his own world of thought and movement. Already it seems like they have been doing this for a long time. Nothing but this, for as long as the rock has rested here.

Late in the afternoon they come to the next lake, already deep in the shadow of the spur ridge circling it. Its smooth surface reflects the rock like a blue mirror.

“Whoah. Beautiful.”

Tashi’s eyes are narrowed.

“Uh-oh. We can’t camp here—there’s people over there!”

“Where?”

Tashi points. Jim sees two tiny red dots, all the way on the other side of the lake. Slightly larger dot of an orange tent. “So what? We’ll never hear them, they won’t bother us.”

Tashi stares at Jim as if he has just proposed eating shit. “No way! Come on, let’s follow the exit stream down toward Dragon Lake. There’s bound to be a good campsite before that, and if not it’s a fine lake.”

Wearily Jim humps his pack and follows Tashi down the crease in the rib that holds the lake in, where water gurgles over flat yellow granite and carves a ravine in the slope falling off into a big basin.

They hike until sunset. The sky is still light, but the ground and the air around them are dim and shadowed. Alpine flowers gleam hallucinogenically from the black moss on the stream’s flat banks. Gnarled junipers contort out of cracks in the rock. Each bend in the little stream reveals a miniature work of landscaping that makes Jim shake his head: above the velvet blue sky, below the dark rock world, with the stream a sky-colored band of lightness cutting through it. He’s tired, footsore, he stumbles from time to time; but Tash is walking slowly, and it seems a shame to stop and end this endless display of mountain grandeur.

Finally Tash finds a flat sandy dip in a granite bench beside the stream, and he declares it camp. They drop their packs.

Four or five junipers.

To the west they can see a long way;

A fin of granite, poking up out of shadows.

“Fin Dome,” Tashi says.

To the east the great crest of the ridge they crossed is glowing,

Vibrant apricot in the late sunset light.

Each rock picked out, illuminated.

Each moment, long and quiet.

The stream’s small voice talks on and on.

Light blue water in the massy shadows.

Two tiny figures, walking aimlessly:

“Whoah. Whoah. Whoah.”

Slowly the light leaks out of the air.

And you have always lived here.

“How about dinner?” says Tashi. And he sits by his pack.