He stopped halfway up the hill, hands on his hips, mouth hanging open, and put down the bag with the straps that were cutting into him. Lise was still climbing up ahead and didn’t even turn around; she was nearly at the top. Perhaps she was still emptying her mind, switching off as if meditating. There was so much sweat on his face he couldn’t see any more, and it stung his eyes, as if he were drowning in the ocean. He wiped it away with his T-shirt, and when he looked up, he couldn’t see her any more. With the sun in his eyes, he couldn’t even see the path in front of him. There was no longer a path, it was just a tangle of brambles and branches that seemed to pull at his feet. It was turning into a nightmare. He picked up his bag and started walking again but didn’t know where to go, so he headed for the top, the crest, where Lise must have started her descent. Either she was enjoying the feeling of being unstoppable, or she was simply trying to scare him. To lose him. That’s what he thought when he reached the top of the third hill and still couldn’t see her. And yet he could see everything from up there; he felt as if he was on top of the world. Franck turned around, letting the whole panorama sweep over him. The little house seemed very far away now, lost in its surroundings. It was the only house on the 360-degree horizon, in a land where past and present merged. It was a timeless scene, unchanged for centuries, with nothing to suggest what time or era it was, and it was only the three small clouds drifting in the sky that seemed to connect it to the world. There were rows of hills as far as the eye could see, the same view endlessly repeated, with no sign of civilisation, not even the cables of a power line or the rising smoke from a power plant or bonfire. ‘In the middle of the Black Triangle’: he remembered the expression he had come across on the internet. Lise had wanted them to get lost, and she had succeeded.