The places between the places.

We walked into the arch at twenty to four in the morning, when the sandstone is still cold enough to hold your hand against. Our guide, Salem, carried the only light: a paraffin lantern his grandfather had used to lead caravans through the same gap. He did not say much. He did not need to.

I had planned a sunrise. What I got was better: forty minutes of blue, the lantern swinging, and the rock turning from black to violet to rust. I exposed nine sheets of film and kept two.

“The desert is not empty. It is just very patient with you.”

By noon the heat flattens everything, so the days are upside down: walk at dawn, sleep through the white hours, photograph again when the shadows come back. It is the slowest travel I know, and the only kind that has ever given me photographs I still like a year later.