We had arrived. I threw myself to the ground, exhausted, and sat gazing into the distance, completely without thought or design, neutralized by the shear intensity of what I was experiencing.
“Come on then, aren’t you going to draw?” Alex blurted out, impatiently. I wasn’t thinking about doing anything, just trying to keep myself together, recovering from the climb, drifting in a kind of emptiness; in a state where all I could do was notice, not to react things. My attention was drawn back to the blade of the saw moving up and down, driven by the rhythm of the two men working it, and I remembered why we had come.
Slowly and deliberately, to conserve energy, I took a drawing pad and cardboard tube containing a pencil, knife and eraser out of my bag. A stub of a pencil was all I had left. I began to sharpen it, willing myself to focus, as I paired wood, then graphite to a fine, tapering point. My eraser was a lump of rubber cut out of the heel of my shoe that left black smudges and didn’t work very well.
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