Soru

We had been in the valley for three weeks before Dr. Aris spoke of the map. Up to that point, my duties had consisted entirely of carrying the brass theodolite and ensuring the inkwells did not dry out in the mountain wind. To the newspapers in the capital, Dr. Aris was a visionary expanding the empire’s borders, but to me, he was a silent, plodding presence whose primary interest seemed to be the exact distribution of high-altitude lichen rather than the expansion of territory.

When he finally unrolled the vellum map on the camp table, he did not point to the new roads or the proposed railway line. Instead, his finger traced a series of faint, pencil-marked contours along the eastern ridge. 'The cartographers in the ministry think a mountain is a static obstacle,' he muttered, more to himself than to me. 'They draw their straight lines and expect the world to conform. But look at this gap. The water knows the path of least resistance, and so do the traders. A map that ignores the path of least resistance is merely a piece of propaganda.'

I watched his weathered hand rest on the paper. In that moment, I realized that Dr. Aris did not share the grand, imperial ambitions of his patrons. For him, the survey was not an act of conquest, but a quiet conversation with the landscape. While the ministry back home celebrated his progress as a triumph of national will, Dr. Aris seemed to view our expedition as a way to escape the very civilization we were tasked with extending. I wrote down his observations in the logbook, feeling a strange complicity in his silent rebellion against the state that paid our salaries.

Based on the passage, the narrator is best described as which of the following?