The moment of landing is always wrapped in a hush, the kind that settles after great movement—engines winding down, bodies shifting from anticipation to patience. And then, through the small oval windows, appear the first faces of the new land. They are not dignitaries or poets, not famous revolutionaries or mythic heroes, but men and women in fluorescent vests, their hands waving, guiding the great steel bird to rest. They are the anonymous sentinels of arrival, the quiet custodians of thresholds.

How strange, how magical, that the first greeting of a country should come not from a grand archway or the warm embrace of a waiting friend, but from those who labor in the margins of travel. They are the keepers of movement, ensuring the smooth passage of the weary and the expectant, those returning home and those stepping into foreign soil for the first time. There is something of ancient ritual in their gestures, something almost divine in the way they beckon the vessel forward, their arms like the hands of priests blessing the arrival of pilgrims.

No one remembers their faces, and yet they are the first to see us. Before we have exchanged words with a customs officer, before we have smelled the air of the new city, they have already laid eyes on us, standing beneath the colossal nose of the aircraft, as steady as the mountains and roads and rivers that make up the land we are about to enter. They do not ask who we are, where we are from, or why we have come. They simply make way, tracing invisible paths with their hands, allowing the great wheels to touch the ground with certainty.

In another time, in another world, they might have been the first to see the sails of a ship on the horizon, the first to hear the hoofbeats of travelers arriving at the city gates. Perhaps they are the quiet gods of passage, these nameless figures, ensuring that every journey finds its rightful end. And though they will vanish from sight as soon as the plane comes to a stop, their presence lingers, like the first breath of foreign air, like the hush that comes after great movement, like the silent promise of something new just beginning.