During the first hour or so, he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to be overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. A sense of scale habituated to the daily perspectives of rooms and streets was suddenly affronted by a colossal emptiness. The mass of rock rising above the valley was one long frown set in stone. The hiss and thunder of the stream was the language of threat. His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake.
Clive kept on because the shrinking and apprehension were precisely the conditions -- the sickness - from which he sought release, and proof that his daily grind -- crouching over that piano for hours every day -- had reduced him to a cringing state. He would be large again, and unafraid. There was no threat here, only elemental indifference. There were dangers of course, but only the usual ones, and mild enough; injury from a fall, getting lost, a violent change of weather, night. Managing these would restore him to a sense of control. Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.
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