strawberries, plums, grapes, and a number of species not known or sold
in towns. The _kizil_, with its bloodlike juice, is excellent boiled
with plenty of sugar. Wild grapes make good fruit but are inclined to
blister the lips. There is an endless abundance of grapes upon the
slopes of the Black Sea shore. The wine is heady, and is apt to put you
to sleep in the noontide. It is better enjoyed in the evening. It is
marketed in skins--but is none the less good for coming out of a tight
pig.
The only other parts of Russia to compare with the Caucasus are the
Crimea, the Urals, and the Altai. The delightful Crimea is all too
limited in extent. It is very beautiful, and possessed of marvelously
good air. It is more invigorating in the Crimea than in the Caucasus.
It is also easier and safer tramping. It may take some time to recover
from Bolshevism, but I daresay it is more delightful in desolation than
it was in the days when it was the national pleasure ground of the
Russian middle and upper classes.
The Urals are tame beside the Caucasus, but they have a poetry of
their own. The many lakes and little hills and birch forests make a
welcoming land. One ought to know something of geology and mineralogy
when tramping in the Urals. It is one of the most remarkable parts of
Europe from a geological point of view. Every stone is interesting.
The man who can combine geology and tramping is likely to have a very
interesting experience, and one that might even add to science in its
results. The Ural region, it should be noted, is very extensive, and
is for the most part unprospected--especially northward. The chief
difficulty in tramping becomes ultimately absence of people, and of
food. The gnats also swarm badly at night.
The Altai is also more or less untrodden country; vast majestic
mountain ranges separating Siberia from China, forested and beautiful,
now rather difficult of access, even for a starting point.
Of course, I went to Russia, not merely to tramp for tramping’s sake,
but in order to fill in life, which is limited at home. I found
tramping to be the quickest way to a nation’s heart. Many regions in
which I have tramped I could not recommend for the pleasure--thus,
Archangel to Moscow through the wet and gloomy forests of the North,
or Tashkent to Vernoe, across the Central Asian desert. That sort of
expedition I would call student tramping, and recommend it heartily as
a means of learning the truth about a country. No number of museums
or handbooks or columns of statistics can give you the sum of reality
obtained quite simply and without particular effort, upon the road.
I have not tramped in India or China or Japan, these problematical
countries. But, while there may not be much pleasure in footing it
there, I believe it to be a way toward the understanding of their
peoples.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ART OF IDLENESS
The world is large enough, or is only too small, as takes your fancy or
speaks your experience. But blue sky by day and fretted vault of heaven
by night give you the foil of the infinite, making your petty exploit a
brave adventure. After surveying the map of the world, thinking on this
country and on that with gusto of a Marco Polo, you may modestly decide
to take a little trip in Hertfordshire, like Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who, on
a certain journalistic occasion, set forth to the discovery of Rutland.
Instead of going, like Kennan, into the wilds of Siberia for a year or
so, you may decide to go across the New Forest during the Whitsuntide
week-end, a little _voyage au tour de ma chambre_. There are thrills
unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva. Quality
makes good tramping, not quantity.
The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by
the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you
do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then
a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental. I listen
with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty
miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the
art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the springy
morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist. Life is like a road; you
hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from
hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments,
not in distance run.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be
picked, nests to be looked into, song birds to hear, falcons to be
watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in
the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof
of the mole’s track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in
velvet in his home. The sound of the tapping of the woodpecker shall
guide you to the loose-barked tree where with watchful eye a bird of
beauty is hunting the unmannerly wood louse. You shall approach gently
the deer who, in a group, wait for you with startled eyes. They run
from the crashing and speedy--they can be won by the gentle. Wild
nature is not so wild as we think, or we are wilder--it is not so far
from us, and we are nearer.
You can enter a wider family if you are gentle. The rabbit which tempts
your stones will come and smell at your toes, the birds will hop on you
and sing as you lie in the grass, even the alleged ferocious animals,
such as bears, will come and take bread from your hands--if they feel
you are near to them.
_He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small_
means he liveth best. Pan is indeed more truly our god than Diana. The
chaste Diana, the great huntress, is a romantic figure--but not one of
us. She would not have us with her, we will not have her with us. We
will keep company with wood nymphs and satyrs, and will help to turn
the animals another way when we hear Diana’s horn resounding in the
forest. She shall go on and find the world a wilderness in front of
her--the living and the loving all slipping behind.
Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of
her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking.
The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth
and squeaks to you--you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit
on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl
wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door,
that does not look like a door, opens.
The noontide meal is a siesta which can be very pleasantly prolonged.
It only takes half an hour to make the fire and boil the pot, but you
have left no “back in half an hour” notice in any town; there should
be no “got to be” anywhere at any time, no hotel that you are making
for twenty miles the other side of the range; no rendezvous with a
young cousin or an old man at the crossroads at sundown, but a blessed
insouciance regarding men and things.
The grand desideratum is to have found an agreeable spot. “We can put
in forty minutes here!”--“My friend, _hours_!”
The ants shall carry away the sausage rind and the beetles devour the
cucumber peeling; bees shall sip where sweet coffee has fallen, shy
rodents shall clear earth’s table of crumbs--while the heart wells up
with joyful conversation, or the eyes drowsily settle on their lower
lids. There is a joyous, light-green glittering sleep between the
hours of two and four, hours not lost nor to be missed in the temporal
economy of the tramp.
There arrive light and happy dreams, the soft-stepping _arrières
pensées_ of the tramping life. The whole soul has relaxed, the
mainspring of citizenship has run down, and will ring no alarms.
It means a change in the condition of passivity. You are at home to
fairies and fancies and to the spider of happiness who spins golden
webs. It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not tramp;
you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the primitive,
opening doors, making new connections with the great unity of which you
have been a nonconscious part.
You wake with no headache, but with, instead, a freshness and
eagerness. You do not start at the unfamiliar scene; you know yourself
to be at home. You look upon your companion still sleeping--did you
ever look upon your friend asleep--not in a bed in a hotel, or on a
red sofa after dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train--but
in Nature’s house? There you will feel him nearer, more of a friend,
more kindred. The same wood sprites have hopped on you both while you
slumbered and dreamed.
You continue the way with more _camaraderie_, doing an indolent eight
or nine miles before sundown. The afternoon walk is likely to be
different from the morning one; you are less eager, more passive and
indulgent and sociable. One is on the lookout for a fellow tramp--for
an exchange of thoughts. If you are by yourself, you have at least the
_alter ego_ of your thoughts, and if with another there is his mind.
One should not, however, always be shy of a chance third--the man who
comes out of Nature to meet you.
Things happen _hors de programme_ which we could never put into our
program. That is why programs of coming life should be of the most
general character, none of that “to-day I brew, to-morrow I bake” type
of miscalculation. “To-day I do not know what I shall do; to-morrow I
know less” is better. “Someday or other the Queen’s daughter I take” is
sufficient--if not too much. Leave plenty of room for God--the devil
may use some of the spare room, but no matter, he is only a secondary
character in our affairs.
The tramp carries no wrist watch. He has no zero hour--no zero plus
forty-three at which he must take his section over the top. In his
cave he has no presentation timepiece mounted on lions or mermaids.
As he walks he does not raise his eyes to scan Big Ben through the
gloom--for his life is not parceled out in Parliamentary quantities.
He has no dashed repeater in his pouch, no alarm clock at his ear. The
deathwatch does not sound in the wall of his forest house; he does
not live and sleep beside that coffin on end called a grandfather,
“his life-seconds numbering tick-tock-tick.” He listens for no morning
hooter; he boils his eggs without a measure of sliding sand; he punches
no time clock when he begins his day’s tramp, and at the end the last
trump shall catch him unawares--an irrelevancy.
The most profound philosophers have been engaged for any number of
years trying to explain time, and they are all agreed that it is an
illusion. The universe would go on existing if all human beings were
destroyed, but what we call “time” would not. Time, they are assured,
must be relative. The little beetle which we tread upon feels a pang
as great as when a giant dies. His normal life may be five months
only--but he has as extensive a notion of his life as we have of what
we call the normal span--our fourscore years. The insect which lives
only an hour fits the fourscore years of impressions into it somehow.
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of
distance run”--the insect does it, better than you can.
The fact is, the minutes are not unforgiving. We have to reverse many
of the Grub Street maxims: “Take care of the minutes, Freddy, and the
hours will take care of themselves.” No, take care of the hours and the
minutes can go hang. Take care of your life and your days will be all
right.
Lord Chesterfield’s _Letters to his Son_ and Arnold Bennett’s _How to
Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day_ are of little value to us. We will not
read in our baths, nor memorize French verbs while we fry. Or we will,
if we like, but not upon the compulsion of filling time.
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion;
only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens
your mind. Town makes men contentious; the country smooths out
their souls. The worship of time as a reality is such a powerful
superstition that the mind returns to it often after it has got free.
It returns again and again, reciting its outworn creed: Thou shalt have
one birthday a year and one only; six days shalt thou labor, but only
the seventh is the Lord thy God’s.
The tramp repeats it, and then unpacks his heart with stinging words.
The mood passes. We, too, can be sweet and indulgent about time and
time-tables, bivouacking in eternity. We may even carry a compass clock
and, lying in the grass, holding it in our hands, exclaim facetiously
with Touchstone: “It is ten o’clock, in another hour it will be
eleven”--and moralize equally facetiously, for, “so from year to year
we ripe and ripe and then from year to year we rot and rot--and thereby
hangs a tale.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER NINE
EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING
The fire is the altar of the open-air life. Its wandering smokes go
upward like men’s thoughts; its sparks are like human lives.
The coffeepot is the emblem of conviviality.
The roughhewn staff, the tramp’s third leg, is the emblem of his will
to jog on.
The knapsack, like Pilgrim’s burden, is the confession of mortality,
and of the load which every son of Adam carried on his shoulders.
Every door and gate which he sees means the _way out_, not the way in.
There are three emblems of life: the first is the open road, the
second is the river, and the third is the wilderness. The road is the
simplest of these emblems--with its milestones for years, its direction
posts to show you the way, its inns for feasting, its churches for
prayer, its crossroads of destiny, its happy corners of love and
meeting, its sad ones of bereavement and farewell; its backward vista
of memory, its forward one of hope.
Life certainly is like a road, or a network of roads; like a highway
for some, like a pleasant country road for others, like a crooked lane
for some, like a path that bends back to its beginnings for most.
There is the narrow way of the Puritans, a passage between walls of
righteousness; there is the broad way of the epicureans, so broad they
mistake the breadth for the length and lose themselves on it. But,
broad or narrow, the road seems inadequate as an emblem of the tramping
life. There shall be roads in our life but our life shall not be always
in roads.
The road smacks rather of duty and purpose, of utility, and of “getting
there.” Our penchant is to get off the road. I do not care to link
tramping with utility. It may be good for the physical health, but that
shall not be its object; it may be good for broadening the mind and
deepening the sources of pleasure, but these are not the goal. Tramping
is a straying from the obvious. Even the crookedest road is sometimes
too straight. You learn that it is artificial, that originally it
was not made for mere tramping. Roads were made for armies and then
for slaves and laborers, and for “transport.” Few have been made for
pleasure.
But was life merely meant for pleasure? Perhaps not. But it was meant
for happiness or for the quest of happiness.
You are more likely to meet your enemies, if you have any, upon the
road than off it. But then also you are more likely to meet friends
there, too. You may seek your friends with success on the road. And if
you wish counsel they are there to help you. “Life is like a road,”
says a Kirghiz proverb. “If you go astray it is not your enemies who
will show you the way, but your friends.”
Still, where the Kirghiz live, in Central Asia, there are few roads
and you cannot go astray on them. The proverb must refer to mountain
tracks. “Life is like a mountain track.” Yes, that is better. Let the
mountain track be our first emblem of life.
For the Sokols and the Scouts, the roads shall mean much more, because
their lives are auxiliary to military efficiency. They learn to be
ready to resist an enemy of their homeland. A good scout becomes a
good volunteer soldier, a good route marcher. But scout and sokol are
transitional. The Scout movement is like a tug to take an ocean-going
ship out of harbor. There comes a point when the ship can make its
destiny under its own steam. The Scout and Guide movement helps boys
and girls out of the rut of home and village, starts them moving, and
once set going, many of them keep moving all their lives and never once
stagnate. On the roads that lead out into the great world they march in
their companies, with scoutmasters and commanders. Then the road is a
glorious symbol of freedom and life.
The second emblem is the river, which, clear and innocent, finds the
easiest and most charming way from birth to eternity. We were born
on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling
and flowing. We do not know where we go, but we know we are on the
stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the
landscape has changed.
So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship
to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God
as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a
poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet--not
a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure
poetry in His creation. The river, like a child’s definition of a
parable, is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
When we look on a river with a poet’s eyes we see in it the reflection
of an invisible river, the river of Time, the river of man’s life, the
river of Eternity. “Man may come and man may go, but I go on for ever.”
There is a strange and wonderful vigilance about the river which rolls
past us where we sleep in the grass, murmuring and calling the whole
night long, something of the vigilance of the starry sky. You sleep,
but an eternal sleepless sentry paces by all the while.
Then in the morning, when we bathe in the river, we are our own John
the Baptists, out in the wilderness, baptizing ourselves with water,
and saying: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Turn away
from the road for Heaven is near by.” And we eat that wild honey of the
wilderness, which the prophet ate when his baptizing was done.
When we wash in the stream we are washing ourselves with life. When
we swim in the stream, especially against the stream, we are joying
the heart of an unseen Mother who takes pride in us all, knowing that,
although we must at last flow out with the stream, we can triumph over
it for moments.
And, drinking from the stream, we partake of the water which flows from
the mountain of God--Nature’s communion cup.
The third emblem of life is the wilderness--that place to which wise
men and poets and saints are driven in the last resort. “There is a
pleasure in the pathless woods,” wrote Byron. “There is society where
none intrudes.” The wilderness tells you more, when you are attune
to it. That is seldom the experience of the tramp on his first long
divagation from the beaten track. The wilderness tires him, the forests
blind him, the mountains wear him down, the endless plain rises under
him and he smites his feet.
But there comes a point when there is a symmetry even in the wildest
disarray of Nature, when man’s symmetry of parks and garden cities and
roads and rides is a poor joke, a strange aberration of the human mind.
The universe is a most complicated lock with innumerable wards and
windings and combination numbers. If the starry sky at night is a
lock--you would say there is no key in the world to fit it. No key in
the world truly--but in the human heart somewhere there is a wonderful
key. “Have I not in my bosom a key called ‘Promise?’” said Pilgrim.
When you find that key you can plunge it into the cunning aperture of
Nature or Night. But you must know the combination numbers, and even
then it will not turn if you do not first sing a verse of the Song of
the Heart.
Quite a fairy tale. Even so. Life is a fairy tale, one of a series,
like the _Arabian Nights_. And if it is a fairy tale rather than what
Darwin and Herbert Spencer and Einstein have averred, how much more
important to us all the fairy tale becomes.
Fairy tales are begun in the midst of woods, in strange forgotten
glades, and at moments between dawn and the morning, and sunset and
night.
“Fairy tales,” wrote Novalis, “are dreams of our homeland--which is
everywhere and nowhere.” And to be everywhere and nowhere at the same
time means to be in the wilds, and preferably quite lost. The absolute
tramp, whom, I may say, I have never met, is a man with no address,
no card, no reliable passport, no recognizable finger prints. But of
course he is no ape man, no Tarzan, or son of Tarzan. Choice, not
accident, leads him to the wilds.
The starry sky is the emblem of home, the highest roof in the
universe. The sun is the mind, by whose light man seeks his way; the
moon is the reflection of the mind on the heart, and is the emblem of
melancholy and poetry.
However, of all these emblems, the coffeepot is apt to be the most real
and vital. You will be on your knees morning and evening before your
altar fire, abasing your brow and blowing the flames which are beneath
it. Sun, moon, forest, river, road--these pass, but the coffeepot
remains. It is so in life generally, and the tramp, however much a poet
he may be, is a mortal like the rest of us. The moon may be hidden
by a cloud, but that is not nearly so calamitous as having left the
coffeepot at the last camping place.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TEN
THE FIRE
Do not forget the matches! Our dear friends and the girl guides can
imitate the savages, and strike a light by rubbing two sticks together,
or they carry steel and flint and tinder, and are always ready with a
spark. But that is beyond us. It is difficult to light the two sticks.
Remember the odd scraps of dry paper--especially on a wet day. Even a
scoutmaster finds difficulty in making fire with wet sticks.
Making a fire is a considerable diversion.
Unless you are very hungry it should take time. You find the suitable
place, fix your stones, gather the wood, fill the coffeepot, make
yourself at home, and only then strike the match. It is a mistake to
light the fire before the coffeepot is ready.
You will ascertain the direction of the wind, and put down your
knapsack in a position where sparks will not fly on to it. And you will
place your stones or tripod in such a position that the wind will drive
the flames on to it. If your coffeepot is on the wrong side of the wind
it may take a long time to boil.
You must be careful to choose stones which are high enough and ledgy
enough to afford a draught for the fire, and a secure lodgement for the
coffeepot.
To start the fire you need the thinnest and tiniest of bits of
wood--the little dead stems which lurk in the grass. The long dry
stalks of withered wild flowers are even better than wood, and if you
have these you need no paper to start the fire. They burn like dry
stubble--which is, in fact, what they are. Dead grass, however, is of
little good; it burns, burns out, smokes, and gives little heat.
The second line of fuel is the smart little bits of crackling wood to
be found nearly everywhere. The third line is of stout bits of wood.
The fourth, if you feel like it, is the really substantial timber you
may haul to the scene. To boil your pot you do not need this last, but,
remembering you will sit an hour or so by the camp fire, you do well to
have a supply beside you.
The fire laid, lit, crackling, the pot warming and heating, you may
relax your attention, spread out the victuals, take off your boots,
enjoy the beginning of the night’s rest. It is wonderful coffee that
comes out on these occasions. You might not care for it indoors, but
you revel in it as the product of your own camp fire.