The next afternoon plainclothes agents escorted us onto the first flight out of Pakistan. Later it all would be declared a mix-up. A confusion of paperwork. I would be allowed back into Pakistan within days to resume my disrupted global walk. But on the night we landed in exile in a steaming Arabian city -- I still wore my filthy snow pants -- I felt numb. Standing dazed in the noisy airport immigration queue, I stared at the backs of my sun-blackened hands. And I recalled dusk atop Irshad Pass.

A pale disk of sun had slipped beneath a chink in the storm clouds. For perhaps two minutes everything gleamed with electrum light. Silver-gold shafts sprayed the Karakoram, igniting the tops of the snow pyramids that stretched in serried ranks to the edges of the world. It was the sort of light that burned away the loss in my heart. It was light through which I could imagine walking, with all my people, into the promise of new country.