Review written for ClubReading.com by Tony
Fletcher is the author of the hiker’s bible, The Complete Walker. His meticulous approach and careful planning would drive any partner to murder, but make for an authoritative written voice. This voice carried me with him on his walk through the length of the Grand Canyon, a walk which no one had done before. On the way I found I shared with him the sense that man is a part, and just a part, of the universe.
EXCERPT FROM The Man Who Walked Through Time:
I sat and rested on the rock platform, looking over and beyond the river at the strata on stata that mounted one on the other to the North Rim. I could see them all, every layer. They were replicas of those I had just moved down through. And after I had sat and looked at them for a while I saw that now, from a distance, I could see with eye and intellect what I had all day been understanding through instinct. Now, as my eye traveled downward from the Rim, it watched the rocks grow older.
It watched them grow older in a way that would have been impossible when I was living, day after day, surrounded and cushioned and segregated by the accoutrements of the man-ruler world-by chairs and electricity and money-thrust and the rest of the tinsel. I knew that when I returned to that world I probably would remember what I saw as a flight of fancy, as airy symbolism. But at the time, as I sat there on the rock platform above the sparkling river, the pageant I saw spread out before me shone with a reality as rich as any I have ever caught in the beam of logic.