After I left Debrecen I walked for days and put up my tent at night. An old couple driving a horse and cart stopped and spoke to me. I tried out my broken Hungarian and they laughed. But it was obvious they were offering me a lift, so I got up on the cart, with my backpack and tent. They offered me some fiery apricot liqueur, home-made by the look of it. We drank it from the bottle. The land was fiat. You could see forever. You could see as far as the future. At first we could still see the Hortobagy River, brown in the weak sunshine, and carpets of sunflowers. But then, as we jolted along a track in the cart, there was just the puszta—the dry Great Plain of Hungary. It’s where the Hungarians grow their wheat and catch their wild horses. A Hungarian poet once said that the earth and the sky are one in the puszta. I understand what he means. As far as you can see in every direction, the sky comes down and touches the land. This dry yellow land is not beautiful in the usual sense, but being in it, being part of it, I felt a great sense of peace. I have always hated mountains and skyscrapers because they are bigger than I am. But this... When I lay down and watched the puszta from the back of the cart, it was like being in a great safe fiat bed that had no sides but just went on forever. It was then, at that moment, that I felt I could do anything in the world that I wanted. I was eighteen years old. Then, in the distance, we saw the horses. At first there was just a cloud of dust. Then, suddenly, about ten small, wiry, brown Hungarian wild horses charged across the Great Plain. They got near enough for me to see them tossing their heads. Two csikos, Hungarian cowboys, were chasing them. The cowboys saw the cart and shouted something. The old man shouted something back and he and the old woman laughed. They said something to me in Hungarian, probably trying to explain what the cowboys had said. I fell asleep. When I woke up, the horses and the two csikos had gone but nothing about the scenery had changed. We were still moving forward but it was as if we had stopped. I didn’t want us ever to arrive anywhere. I wanted to stay on that cart in the Great Plain forever. But at the same time I knew that when the journey was over, everything was going to be just fine. And it was. The grass on the Great Plain didn’t change very much.