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drop, ten metres high. Attached to a gnarled tree and the rocks is a frayed-looking blue-and-green nylon rope dangling down the jagged cliff face.
    ‘No.’ I hear my hollow voice rising from the bottom of my lungs.
    Jyrki either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to hear me.
    ‘Are you going first or shall I?’ he asks.
    It’s a rhetorical question; he’s already let go of his hiking poles, which are now dangling on the end of his arms by their wrist straps, and tugs at the rope to check that it’ll hold.
    ‘It’ll be easier for you to come down when I’m there to help you.’
    Jyrki takes hold of the rope, wraps it around his right arm for added support, then starts lowering himself backwards down the slope. OK, it’s not exactly a sheer drop — now that he’s started moving downwards you can see it slopes a bit — but it’s still bloody steep.
    Jyrki only occasionally looks down at his feet — choosing instead to rely more on the rope itself and wedge the points of his boots into the small fissures in the rock — and descends the slope as nimbly as a monkey, jumping the last, couple of feet to the ground. His rucksack yanks him backwards, forcing him to take a few steps to steady his balance.
    ‘Right then.’
    I take two deep breaths and pick up the rope as gingerly as if it were a venomous snake. I decide to copy Jyrki and wrap it around my arm for extra security and grip the nylon rope so tightly that I can feel it digging into my fingers. I back up towards the edge of the cliff and, with my right leg fumbling around, start to make my descent.
    ‘Over there, there. One centimetre to your left.’ I can hear Jyrki’s voice from below. I move my foot slightly to the left and find that there is, after all, a small tongue of rock beneath my foot to take my weight. ‘Right, and another, straight down, a bit more. There you go.’ And with that the grooves on the bottom of my left boot find something to latch on to. ‘Then the next one, a bit further to the right, good. Now move your hands down the rope. You’re doing fine.’
    I’m soaked with sweat by the time I feel someone taking hold of my hips — those strong arms, their firm grip on both sides of my hipbone.
    'Jump.’
    I release the rope and land on Granite Beach. It’s almost as if I’d arrived on the surface of the moon, Jyrki’s hands helping me to defy gravity for a brief moment. I look up, and the slope I have just come down seems to rise halfway up into the sky.
     
     
    Granite Beach. A beach, for God’s sake. What could be nicer than that? Yeah, rigbt.
    This ‘beach’ consists of boulders, eroded by the sea into more or less
    spherical blocks varying from the size of a child’s head to that of a widescreen television.
    The path forces you to balance on and between the rocks because there is simply no alternative: on one side there is the ocean; on the other the steep cliff face. And because the tide flushes and moves these boulders on a daily basis they’re not firmly fixed in one place, so they constantly wobble, rolling and clunking beneath your boots. The tide is coming in now, too, the waves washing against the shore, slamming the rocks against one anodier only a few metres away from us. Our poles are no use either, as they just skim across the curved surfaces of the boulders with a grating screech and end up stuck in between them. It would be suicide to rely on your poles here; at best they are only a half-decent indicator of how wobbly the next stone is.
    The rucksack’s centre of balance somehow always feels wrong; the stone that looks stable wavers the most. I look between the boulders and think of them as giant meat mincers.That’s what they are: if your leg slips down there and your own weight comes crashing down on to the rock, your shin and thigh bones would be smashed with a convincing crunch.
    If your leg gets stuck down there, the next thing to contend with would be the tide.
    Every muscle in your body has to be