Where the maps ran out

We arrived in the afternoon, dragging a suitcase up ninety tiled steps that no map had warned us about, and by the top Nora had stopped complaining because the whole river had opened up beneath us.

Alfama is the part of Lisbon the earthquake forgot — the oldest quarter, a knot of lanes too steep for cars, laundry strung between windows, the number 28 tram grinding past close enough to touch. We had no plan for the first evening on purpose.

At a fado house with no sign on the door, a woman sang about saudade — a Portuguese word for missing something you're not sure you ever had. Nora fell asleep against my arm. I understood the word better than I wanted to.

We took the tram west along the river to Belém, which is where the story we'd stumbled into actually begins. Five hundred years ago the ships of the great voyages left from this exact stretch of water, bound for coastlines nobody had drawn yet.

The Monument to the Discoveries is a huge stone prow crowded with the people who sailed — navigators, cartographers, a queen, a poet. Nora wanted to know which ones came back. The honest answer is: not many. She was quiet after that, in the way children get quiet when a thing turns out to be real.

We fixed it with custard tarts at Pastéis de Belém, the original, warm, dusted with cinnamon, eaten standing up. Then garlic prawns at Ramiro until neither of us could speak. The thread and the seafood, it turned out, ran through the same city.

A rest day of rain sat between Belém and Sintra — we spent it indoors with tinned fish and a card game and the sound of the tram, and it was one of the best days. Then the forecast cleared and we took the early train up into the hills.

Sintra is where the Portuguese kings built their daydreams: Pena Palace, painted egg-yolk yellow and blood red, floating in and out of the morning mist. We had the 08:30 tickets and, for twenty minutes, nearly the whole place to ourselves.

At Quinta da Regaleira, Nora led us down the initiation well — a spiral staircase nine turns deep into the ground, meant to feel like a descent and a rebirth. She counted every turn out loud. Nine down, nine back up, into the light.

On the last morning we took the bus out to Cabo da Roca — the westernmost point of continental Europe, a cliff a hundred and fifty metres above an ocean that, for most of human history, no one had crossed and returned to describe.

There is a stone marker with a line from the poet Camões: onde a terra se acaba e o mar começa — where the land ends and the sea begins. Nora read it, looked at the water, and asked what was on the other side. I said, a long way away, the place we're flying home to.

We stood at the end of the map the old sailors had, at the edge they left from, and then we turned around and went back into the city for one more custard tart. That was the whole trip. That was the thread. We kept it.