movement, movement

Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sanford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the the sun compass and the odometer  mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

- The English Patient, pg246