But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. The end of the road was always just out of sight. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous.

So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.

From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. 'Every day on a bike trip is like the one before-but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile.'Īs a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved-that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher-had gone extinct.

Land of lost borders kate harris