No sooner did the plan let them off at New Caledonia, than Barby found another friend. He was a Kanaka taxi driver, over six feet tall and muscled like a blacksmith, with sooty skin and hair turned yellow from many applications of lime, a standard native treatment for lice. He chewed betel incessantly, which Barby thought was fascinating, since it turned his tongue and lips the color of a ripe tomato. His name, he said in wonderfully bad English, was Henri. He pronounced it 'On-ree.

The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.

No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible; or clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They are polite, so polite; no one stares at us.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

That is the one thing sorrow surely does—in our pain, it reveals the deep treasures of this marred and beautiful world. And guides like Shadow do this for us—they make us travelers. They break our hearts so we can flow to the greater heart where happiness, too, becomes a sacred matter.

There was something much greater she needed to feed her soul, and perhaps one day soon she would go...

Keep traveling, even if you don't know where the road will end.

We will meet again somewhere...

To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveler, it's an end in itself.

Looking back I can see that there have been no breaks from one departure to the next; I start planning again before we've even arrived back home.