Sunday, October 17, 2004 1:22:35 PM

The bur of the failing road filled the silence that word have been in the jeep. She had not said another world as parting throngs of natives became the occasional man pulling a car to no man at all. Now the land cast out before them, a grey-green tarp that covered indiscriminate objects; distant lumps that might have been mountains or maybe shadows. The erratic topography he had read about. The writer’s prose becoming each moment more inadequate to explain the grandeur this small jeep was disappearing into. Looking at her reflection in the flat glass of the windshield, he wondered if she knew where she was going.
She pushed the jeep hard up steep hills and slow and methodically over large rocks. She kept on when the road changed from the two tracks of a truck to the single track of a man walking. Ever climbing, she kept on the throttle even as the path vanished, completely reclaimed by a slowly encroaching nature. The small young trees that they rolled over snapped back up behind them, blocking his view of the way back out. He figured that she must know her way back out.
The trees were blocking the sun with sprawling canopies and their broadening trunks could not be run over by the truck. Soon they could no longer weave through the trees and the jeep came to a stop. She finally looked over at him and with a smile of relievf she said, “We made it.”
He looked out the windshield to see what he must have missed. Only more of the same sylvan lay before them.
“We made it where?” He asked.
As if could it not be more obvious, “Here.”
“Where exactly is that?”
“At our end, we can’t go any further.”
She laid her hand palm up on his knee. He looked from it to her eyes, then back to her hand. He took her hand in his and said,”It is nice here.”
She smiled.