For take-off the cabin lights are dimmed and daylight drifts in, reflecting off passengers’ clothes and pooling as washes of colour on the pale plastic wall. When we leave the ground and rise above the cloud, sunlight streams through the windows and, as the plane banks steeply south, runs the length of the cabin in a flurry of shadows, a whole day passing in a second.
At sunset the sky is violet. Snowy mountains float below us in a sea of cloud and another plane drifts silently by.
Midnight. In the sleepy, blue cabin, a man stretches his arm into the air; his hand is large, a swollen lump laced with scars. Glowing towns blossom out of the darkness beneath us, to be engulfed by it again at their edge. Roads run from them, tentacle-like, bright, into the deep desert. Street lights are sulphurous, burning with a slow, fiery energy: Some blaze brighter, beacons in the night, one of them for each town.