Later, when she wakes up, the sun has set and the light in the car is violet and jade. Her mouth is dry as cotton and she lets her face fall toward the window. And there they are, behind her: not mountains, not really, just some fog-shrouded cardboard cutouts retreating in the distance. “One of the most colossal disappointments in my whole life,” she called them, more than fifty years later. “Not a goddamn mountain in sight.”

