As dawn broke over the Tell Atlas mountains in late July 1931, a 21-year-old American writer gazed up at their silhouetted slopes from the deck of the ship Iméréthie II, which was crossing the Mediterranean towards the North African coast. This was a young Paul Bowles's first glimpse of a landscape that would fascinate and obsess him throughout his life, and which would deeply colour all of his future writing. Bowles's autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), contains the following sketch of his first sight of the mountains of North Africa:

This sketch of Bowles's initial impression of the North African desert is defined by its sustained meditation on the interaction between the landscape and the human mind. The passage moves from a lyrical description of the landscape's effect upon the observer – the ‘magic’ emanating from certain areas of the earth's surface – into a detailed explication of the relation between the human mind and the environment. Bowles asserts the presence of a ‘secret connection’ between mind and landscape that is ‘set in motion’ by proximity to ‘certain areas of the earth's surface’. He describes this connection as a ‘passage’, and the material connotations of the word, in combination with the earlier ‘mechanism’, evoke a physical pathway between the human mind and the world beyond. This proposition that human and environment might share a common materiality, allowing the environment to infiltrate and affect the mind, gestures towards a ‘trans-corporeal’ understanding of the human. Stacy Alaimo describes trans-corporeality as: ‘Imagining human corporeality […] is always intermeshed in a more-than-human world’. This process in turn ‘underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment” ‘.