The best dress for walking is nakedness. But our sad though fascinating world rarely offers the right and necessary combinations of weather and privacy, and even when it does the Utopia never seems to last very long.

It is always there, of course, when you come back from the green world. You have been living by sunrise and sunset, by wind and rain, surrounded by the ebb and flow of lives that respond only to such simple, rhythmic elements. But now the tone and tempo of the days switch. Instead of harmony, jangle.

Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.

By walking naked you gain far more than coolness. You feel an unexpected sense of freedom from restraint. An uplifting and almost delirious sense of simplicity. In this new simplicity you soon find that you have become, in a new and surer sense, and integral part of the simple, complex world you are walking through. And then you are really walking.

Life should be an unfinished business.

Details of the many walks I made along the crest have blurred, now, into a pleasing tapestry of grass and space and sunlight.

I had better admit right away that walking can in the end become an addiction ... even in this final stage it remains a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion.