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Helen had come to Croagh Patrick , in County Mayo , because she wanted a threshold she could not argue with . The mountain is a place of pilgrimage . People say Saint Patrick fasted here . She was not sure she believed the story . She believed the path , which was already steeper than her plan , and which people around here call the Reek . What she wanted was the summit . She had pictured the small chapel at the top as the moment when the week would change its name : not a walk , a pilgrimage . The path refused the division . Every step was the same kind of step , loose stone , then a pause , then someone ahead who had done this before and someone behind who had not . There was no gate where the ordinary day stopped . Anthropologists call that in - between liminal : you have left the ordinary day , and you have not arrived . On the mountain the word felt less like a theory and more like a knee that had started to complain . She had expected hardship to arrive with a meaning already attached . It arrived blunt . The distance was not a symbol she could set down . It was the reason her breath went short , and the reason the people around her stopped talking except to warn one another about the loose rock . If sacred travel means anything on this slope , it is travel that keeps its purpose while the body starts to bargain . Helen bargained . She would be reverent at the top . She would be ordinary until then . Near the summit the chapel was as small as a room that has to live in the wind . She stood with the others . Nobody became a different person in front of her . A man raised the bottle he had carried up , drank , and passed it back to his own pocket . She had wanted a sign that the place was doing something to them . What she got was a view over Clew Bay and the knowledge that she had climbed . On the way down she understood the part she had skipped in every account . The arrival is a place . The pilgrimage is the fact that you are still on the way when the place appears . Some people carry a token home , or a story they will tell too neatly later . She picked up nothing . The mountain had already given her the thing she had tried to postpone , which was the walk itself . She reached the road at the bottom and did not feel holy . She felt that she had been to the top , and that the top had not done the work . The path had . She let that be the whole of it .
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