The groundhas to becrossed to count.

The night train leaves Sofia at half past six, and by the time the lamps come on in the corridor we are already past Plovdiv. I have the compartment to myself as far as the border, where a guard takes my passport with both hands, the way you hold a thing that might spill. After Kapikule the track bends and the sky goes the colour of a struck match. Istanbul arrives slowly, and then all at once, the way a coast does.

The bus to Imlil is full of school bags and one live chicken, and it climbs until my ears close. Above the last village the road gives up and the path takes it on, switchbacking through walnut shade toward a pass I cannot yet see. By afternoon the snow line is near enough to throw a stone at. I stop counting the altitude and start counting the breaths.

The ferry down from Split runs late and nobody minds. We stand at the rail passing an island every hour, each one a grey back surfacing and going under again. A woman shares her figs and asks nothing back, which on this coast is simply manners. The Adriatic does not photograph. You have to be leaning on the rail when the light lets go.

The driver keeps a jar of apricots on the dash and offers one at every checkpoint, which is often. The road to Murghab is more idea than surface, a line somebody drew across four thousand metres and then mostly left alone. Up here the shadows have edges. When the engine finally cuts for the night, the silence has a weight to it, and it leans on the roof of the car.

The last ferry to the island carries three cars, a post van, and me. Rain comes across the sound in legible sheets, and then sun, and then rain again, all inside the hour. I walk the machair until the light fails, which this far north it is in no hurry to do. There is a bench at the top of the beach with no plaque, and I understand it completely.