Thin Space

Kathmandu, Nepal

I wandered the streets and narrow alleys of Kathmandu with a fellow photographer I knew from my time in graduate school in Washington, D.C.

He grew up in the city and led me through the labyrinth stopping briefly to say hello to old friends he hadn’t seen in years. At times I was sure we were lost, but my guide laughed at the notion. These streets haven’t changed in hundreds of years and certainly not since his childhood just a blink of an eye ago.

Suddenly the sky above me turned dark and as I gazed up I saw a narrow shaft of light coming down toward us, but not on us between the two buildings to our left and right. The canyon was too deep for the sunlight to penetrate to the ground, but it refracted through hundreds of dusty windows that opened into each other from one side of the alley to the other.

I remember thinking it would be easy to step from one apartment to the next through those windows and I am sure someone has just to prove the point.