Few readers can know as little about these new regions as I did. But, as they were to be the background for the next few hundred miles of travel, I felt more involved in them every day. All at once I was surrounded by fresh clues—the moulding on a window, the cut of a beard, overheard syllables, an unfamiliar shape of a horse or a hat, a shift of accent, the taste of a new drink, the occasional unfamiliar lettering—and the accumulating fragments were beginning to cohere like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
