A description is quite like wear and tear. Colours lose their brightness. Edges become blurry. In the end, what is being described ends up fading, vanishing. This applies to any landscape. That’s why travel literature is a blighting curse, a plague. Travel guides have brought irreparable ruin to a significant portion of the planet. Printed by the millions, in countless tongues, travel guides have watered down numerous places, disfiguring and misrepresenting them. In my youth, I also ventured to write down descriptions of a few chosen locations. But when I re-read these descriptions, when I tried to take a deep breath to allow the intense presence of these locations to suffuse me once again, when I tried to listen to their murmurs, to their quite rustlings, to their whispers, I was inexorably struck by the reality that to describe is to destroy.