The section directly in front of them was actually one of the more reassuring, with wooden planking over the dirt and guard rails on both sides and, on the downhill side, not a straight drop but a steep slope where trees took root at crazy angles.

Majid nodded toward the plaque, moving only his head. He was trying to move his body as little as possible. “It says here that someone fell off and died.”

“Think of it as a sidewalk,” said Catherine. “When you walk down a sidewalk, you don’t have trouble staying on it, do you? You just walk straight ahead without thinking. I doubt you’ve ever suddenly veered and fallen off a sidewalk.”

Well, that was true, Majid granted, and this path was (mostly) as wide as a sidewalk. But his roots were in a desert country where things were flat, where if you did fall off a sidewalk you might sprain an ankle (or, more likely, get pulverized by a speeding Range Rover), not tumble down a kilometer through brush and rock.

Catherine was moving ahead, showing him how easy it was. As she ducked below a rock overhang, the cliff intruding on the trail from above, she called back to him, “You haven’t, have you? Fallen off a sidewalk?”

“Not that I can recall,” he said. If he wanted to keep talking to her, to stay in earshot, he had to follow. The key, clearly, was not to think about the drop. Put one foot in front of the other. He ducked under the rock overhang (did they have to make it harder with bonus obstacles?) and fell in line behind Catherine. And decided his best tactic was to keep looking straight ahead, like steering a motorcycle, where you don’t turn the handlebars or consciously lean, you only look where you want to go. Looking straight ahead meant looking at Catherine, and the way she moved, and her pants tight on her body, and her climbing boots oddly sexy on her narrow feet.

She was far from the first Western girl he had had. The first had been a Moldovan prostitute in the old port area back home. In a state where engaged Western couples had been jailed for kissing on the beach, there were places in the unchic old city, nestled between discount clothing stores and auto repair shops, where prostitution was tolerated. Majid had been brought there by two older friends and was so terrified he might be spotted by someone who knew his parents that the event was a fiasco. In Cambridge things had been different. His parents weren’t around. He went with the flow.