The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane

Basel said, ‘and this is my aunt, making her last visit.’ A look passed between Basel and his mother. The aunt smiled broadly and nodded a greeting to Raja and me. Outside, the thunder gave its first rumbles.
    The family had been forced to abandon the villa in 1967 after the Six-Day War. It was now a ruin. There were fangs of glass in the windows, the floor was strewn with pine needles and acorns, and the walls were dense with graffiti. The villa, visited both by settlers from Dolev and villagers from A’yn Qenya, had become a site of textual dispute. There were crude black drawings of AK-47s spitting out bullets at a spray-painted Star of David, a swastika, a heart dripping black blood, as well as many Romanized names that meant nothing to me, and Arabic and Hebrew texts that I couldn’t read.
    The big central hall gave onto two domed-roof rooms. I scuffed away the dust from a section of the floor with my foot, feeling a glossy surface beneath, and exposed intact floor-tiles, marked with interlocking black diagonals. Basel’s mother came over.
    ‘These are a very special surface,’ she said apologetically, as though the tiles had been left dirty for a day rather than for forty-two years. ‘You need only to wipe them with a mop and – they gleam as though they’ve been waxed!’ She told me that she had left Palestine in 1959 for Kuwait, and then for America, rarely returning to the West Bank. Then she steered me back inside, and gave me a tour of the house, as if I were the first visitor since a recent refurbishment.
    ‘This is where we piled the sacks of flour,’ gesturing to one corner of the hall, ‘and here where we piled the sacks of rice.’
    She stepped close to me and opened her hand to show two knobbly brown pebbles sat in her palm, like a magician revealing a palmed coin.
    ‘I could not resist it, I have taken two more.’
    ‘Not more , mother,’ said Basel from the other room.
    ‘You would like to come and see the bread-oven my father and uncle built?’ She led me out of the back door of the house, past the horse, in the rain, along a muddy path.
    ‘Come, come, and here it is.’ I was expecting a vast stone oven; a blast-furnace built into the hillside. In fact, it was a small rusty carcass, barely recognizable as an oven, with an L-shaped mouth.
    ‘This is how it opens,’ she said, creaking open the bent door. The interior was filled with brown pebbles.
    ‘This is where the pebbles come from?’
    ‘Yes, many from here – a whole bag. I took other stones from Hebron, Haifa, Jericho, Jerusalem, one or more from every part of Palestine. I took these stones home and laid them on the belly of my oven in America, and I bake my bread on them, so that when I lift the loaf up once it is baked, Palestine has left its mark on the belly of the bread. You can get this kind of bread in Ramallah; it is called taboun . I recommend it!’
    Her brow furrowed. ‘The Israelis have stolen this land from us, they are thieves. I once wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan, I knew it would go in the waste-paper basket, but I needed to get it off my chest. “Dear President Reagan,” it began …’
    I stopped listening. Down in the valley, a covey of partridges broke from cover and whirred, churring, across the far flank of the valley. A man came out of a house on the lower side of the village and hurled a bucketful of rubbish down the hillside. I thought of John Berger’s word ‘ landswept’ , coined to describe the regions of conflict zones, meaning ‘a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth’.
    ‘My aunt remembers this place and that is good,’ Basel said to me as we were about to leave. ‘At the border crossing at King Hussein Bridge they gave her one week on her visa. We’ve outstayed the visa by two weeks. It doesn’t matter. Her Alzheimer’s is too bad.’
    The