Extreme altitude beauty makes leaving a place feel impossible.

Evidence

On returning down the gulch the view was grander than I have ever seen it, the gulch in dark shadow, the park below lying in intense sunlight, with all the majestic canyons which sweep down upon it in depths of infinite blue gloom, and above, the pearly peaks, dazzling in purity and glorious in form, cleft the turquoise blue of the sky. How shall I ever leave this “land which is very far off”? How can I ever leave it? is the real question. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 235

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on ‘the land which is very far off’—how travelers narrate the dread of descending from beauty back into ordinary life—could open on Bird’s rhetorical question.