I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.

The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.