Contour Interval

The valley is not on any sheet I was issued. I found it the way people usually find low places: by walking downhill for longer than I meant to.

I have started mapping it anyway. Twenty metres between lines — that is the convention, printed small in the margin of every map I have ever owned, and on some mornings a convention is the only handrail there is. The first day I reached the third line and sat down on a stone. The ground was not hard. It just kept going down, and I had not packed enough of whatever it is you need for that.

In the margin I wrote: 760. A number cannot comfort anyone. But it does not exaggerate, and that week I needed something that wouldn’t.

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Here is what I know about contour lines. Each one joins places of the same height. Where they crowd together the ground falls away quickly; where they drift apart it is nearly level, and you can walk for an hour without noticing you have gone anywhere at all. That second kind of ground is the more dangerous. Nobody warns you about the gentle slopes.

A line never simply ends. It closes on itself, or it runs off the edge of the sheet into country someone else will have to draw. I have checked this. I walked one for half a day to see whether it would stop, and it did not stop; it went round behind a stand of birches and met itself, as if it had known all along where it was going.

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The map does not care whether I am high or low. I find this restful. Everyone else has an opinion about the height I am at — that I ought to be climbing by now, that I have been down here long enough, that the view from the ridge is very fine and I should really make the effort to see it. The map has no opinion. It writes 760, and then 740, and then 720, in the same patient hand.

I am at 720 now. I can hear water somewhere below, though I cannot see it. In the evening the fog comes up from the valley floor like something breathing out, and the lines I drew in the afternoon go one by one, until only the nearest is left — the one I am sitting on.

It is enough to know which line you are sitting on. I did not believe that at first. I am writing it down so that I will believe it later.