Speaking in the imperative from outside of the putative ‘zone' of encounter with an alien condition, this text guides a phenological exploration of the uncanny, negotiating sensory, psychological, analytical, and perhaps hallucinatory, paranoid, and other modes of openness and resistance to something unknown. Drawing inspiration from epistemologies of ignorance, the personal and mass psychologies of denial, discourses of the infinite (from the sublime to traumatic), the text leads the reader and an implicit observer (of chapter 4) through processes of investigation, revelation, intoxication with whatever is going on inside ‘the zone’. Curiosity competes with fear in a reprisal of philosophy’s classical fable—Plato’s allegory of the cave. Entering the zone carries its own risks of being cast out of other gardens. Leaving indeterminate whether these instructions are given to a person exploring the material inscriptions of another human culture or another species being, or to a robot exploring another planet, the text invites readers to palpate their own habits and assumptions, and aims to foster receptivity to difficult truths. Is the zone a space of disavowal of our own inhumanity? Is there something to be learned there? Or to be hidden away more securely (like the efforts to burry nuclear waste for eons). The title, Tasting, is drawn from the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali’s (1058 - 1111 CE) epistemology, and refers to a mode of perception that transcends the cognitive and the sensory—the mode of experience of the divine, which here at the roadside picnic offers a parable for another kind of seeking.