He tried to sit quietly and be part of the timelessness of the place.

“I hate it as much as you.” “No, you don’t. But I think you would if you didn’t have me along to do your suffering for you.”

And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.

I feel that this town, this river, this sky, all belong to me as much as to them.

“Oh, I don’t know!” she said, with an edge of annoyance in her voice. “How can I tell? It’s impossible to get into their lives, and know what they’re really thinking.”

The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.

Mrs. Lyle’s vivid warning worried him a little. It would not be amusing for very long to sleep in dirty beds, eat inedible meals, and wait an hour or so every time one wanted to wash one’s hands.

Watching the road was hypnotic rather than monotonous.

They sat down on the rocks side by side, facing the vastness below. She linked her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder. He only stared straight before him, sighed, and finally shook his head slowly. It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life; she knew that, and she also knew that he loved them more if she could be there to experience them with him. And although he was aware that the very silences and emptiness that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that. It was as if always he held the fresh hope that she, too, would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things.

. . . the five African years, spent in every part of the continent, had managed to give them both an astonishing list of diseases, and they still suffered intermittently from most of them.

A wind that was dry and warm, coming up the street out of the blackness before him, met him head on. He sniffed at the fragments of mystery in it, and again he felt an unaccustomed exaltation.

For, as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question, not so the traveler, who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.