But now it struck Rodolphe—not for the first time—how dreadfully easy it would be simply to keep walking. Straight down the street, out past the city walls of Paysage. Out past the plowed fields, out where the highway dwindled: first to a dirt track, then to a mere mule path through the endless tangled wilderness of Europe. A savagely thriving world, without boundaries, without direction, without constraint.