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air, and you walk down the steps—a reminder that we arrive not in a place, but onto it.
    If there is a charm to this manner of ending a journey and leaving an aircraft, it’s because for many of us it is unusual, and it generally occurs in hot places. Few of us want anything like this experience if we fly home to darkness and sleet. Still, such warm moments are a chance to disassemble the word touchdown, to recall old films of arriving royalty or the Beatles disembarking the aircraft named Jet Clipper Defiance on even a cold February day; the cover of cloud or the blaze of sunshine as feet reach new ground; a weight of arrival that rests as much on the air as on the earth.
    —

    I’ve just landed in Tripoli. We’re not staying overnight here; such a trip, in an overlapping of the terminology of airline crews and Tolkien, is known as a there-and-back. We’ve parked the plane, the passengers have disembarked, the cleaners have boarded. We arrived early—helped by a tailwind—and so we have some free time before we must begin the preparations for our return.
    I wander into the terminal. It’s true that airports are increasingly homogeneous, globalized places, but anyone who thinks that this process is complete might compare Tripoli’s airport to, say, Pittsburgh’s. I walk past the Libyan families and the Western oil workers, looking forward, perhaps, to their first beer in months after takeoff. I head to the roughly decorated cafeteria, to buy a snack I’ve come to like here: a tasty creation something like a spinach turnover. I browse in the small shop that stocks shelves of books written by Muammar Gaddafi and a handful of postcards of glamorous old Tripoli, the palm trees on the avenues faded and the address side discolored and a little damp.
    Eventually I return to the aircraft and walk to the back of the plane, to where rough metal stairs— air stairs, naturally—are positioned by an open door. I sit on them in the shadow of the tail, watching the occasional jet land, from airlines and cities whose names are unfamiliar to me. It’s hot, and since passengers can’t see me from the terminal, I take off my tie. I eat my Libyan turnover and then a sandwich I made in London this morning.
    Airport tarmacs have their own smells, of course, but here is also a telltale hazy breeze, one that mixes the heat and the nearby ocean with the golden dust that accumulates on everything and that I will have to brush from my trousers when I stand up. Soon enough it’s time to leave Libya, to fly back up into the common air, to cross the Mediterranean, and Corsica and the Alps and Paris, and then to descend to England’s sky.

    We bank over Tower Bridge. Not very long afterward I walk under the sky where I have flown, under the lights, timed like clockwork, of the next hour’s planes, to meet friends at a restaurant on the South Bank. They ask me how my day has been. Good, I say. It was good. Anywhere interesting? they ask, though they mean it half as a joke; nowhere I might answer would surprise them anymore. During the meal my attention drifts occasionally. How could it be, I ask myself, that I have gone to Africa today and returned? I blink and look around at my friends and the crowded restaurant, at the twinkling glasses and the dark woodwork. And I remember, as if from a dream, the blue sea of air over the Mediterranean, the blaze of an ordinary afternoon in Tripoli, and my lunch on the air stairs, in the shadow the plane brought to Libya and then took away.
    —
    Geography is a means of dividing the world—of drawing the lines of political entities or per-capita income or precipitation that best illuminate the surface of our spherical home and the often jarringly physical characteristics of our civilization on it. Aviation both writes its own geographies and reflects older ones, as does every air worker and traveler.
    There are places I have flown to, and places I have not. This is a way of thinking about the planet