How happy I was to know the word

Every time I rounded a corner, I’d encounter a sublime new gorge or escarpment. In the haze, the horizons of distant peaks braided together. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane observes, in his book “Landmarks,” that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as landskein. “Skein” can mean either a coil of yarn or a flock of birds in a V formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses both ,knitting the V’s of mountaintops together. Each time I saw the jagged, braided horizon, I thought about how happy I was to know the word.

(describing a two-day backpacking trip in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, near the Sahara Desert)