SLOWLY but surely, our ship was shrinking. (Today)

BASICS (Today)

WE had awakened before dawn to get a jump on the desert heat and rolled out under a headlight moon, pedaling fast in the cool morning of the Dolores River Canyon. There were no cars, not out here. There was only the sound of bike tires on asphalt, the river's murmur, the cascading song of a canyon wren and that beginning-of-the-world smell of river mud in the blue morning. Horses nuzzled the rough cottonwoods by the riverbank. Pale sandstone walls rose up around us and caught the colors of sunrise. (Today)

WHEN I walked into Victoria Hall at Oxford University's Keble College last month, I was sure I had entered a far more genuine Hogwarts experience than anything Universal could have created at the new Harry Potter theme park in Orlando. Before me was a Gothic dining hall nearly the length of a football field, filled with long wooden tables illuminated by reading lamps. From the cathedral-high brick walls hung portraits of the college's former wardens and founders beneath stained glass windows. As I lingered over a breakfast of sausages, roasted tomato, baked beans and eggs, I found myself staring up at the image of the college's namesake, the Rev. John Keble, and could have sworn I saw him fidget within his frame. All that was missing was a flurry of owls delivering the mail. (Today)

BRAD FIRE CLOUD, stonecutter, paused from his toil on a recent steamy Arkansas morning as sweat streamed into his short, black beard. Dressed in the dun-colored tunic and pants of a feudal worker -- albeit one wearing OSHA-mandated steel-toed boots -- Mr. Fire Cloud assessed the 70-pound chunk of limestone he had been hewing into a smooth block with hammer and chisel. "This'll be for an archway of the castle," he said in the melodious drawl of his native Ozark Mountains, while nodding toward the massive fortress taking shape in the forest clearing behind him. (Today)