gorge. We wind in and out of the shadow of great rocks. Enormous cliffs
hang over the way. I think, for instance, of the great gorge of Dariel
in the Caucasus. It is interesting, but it is oppressive. You come to
it from the glorious northern plateau, the Terek Steppes, where there
is space and sun for miles of Indian corn. You follow the river into
the gloom of the way it has cut through the range. It is somewhat
enchanting. You come in sight of a shut-off corner, and it calls to
your feet. You must see what is round that corner. But when you get
there you find a road merely to another magnetic shut-off corner. You
must go on. The next corner reveals another corner, always darker,
gloomier. The noise of the rushing river increases as the great walls
enclosing it come nearer together. You feel yourself becoming smaller
and smaller, as if seen from above. You and your friend are a couple
of small animals groveling at the bottom of a pit. On the right you
see the ruins of Queen Tamara’s castle and that fatal window where her
unfortunate guests were hurled into the river--the castle to which the
Demon came. You feel yourself on your guard, as if some mysterious
fate were in store for you. I have slept several times in a recess
below that castle, and experienced an eerie feeling which is not caused
entirely by history and tradition, but by something dreadful in the
actual geography of the place. Thence, however, it is a splendid tramp
up to the slopes of the great Kazbek mountain. You get into an exalted
region, among stars and young clouds, and feel as if you had got away
from the Devil and come nearer to God.
This grand open upper mountain country is continued to Kobi, which is
a little Georgian village, hidden somewhere in a spacious basin of
rose-colored porphyry. An ideal place in many respects. I have often
thought of going there to live for a fair space of time. But since the
War the region has become much more dangerous to strangers.
Of course, it may be urged that for glorious open country, it is hard
to rival Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire Downs. That is true. It is
fine country for a short tramping expedition. It widens the mind. A
great thing to have a mind as wide and tolerant as the Great Plain, as
healthy as the Downs.
The Steppes, however, make a greater impression--being so vast, so
wild, so untamed, untameable. There is an exuberance of earth which
I would not miss. There is an infinity greater than our domestic
infinities. It will soon strike you when tramping that the word
infinite does not always mean the same: there are grades in infinity
and measures of the immeasurable. Thus there is a further and greater
infinity upon the Steppes, upon the Veldt, upon the Canadian cornlands,
than, for instance, on a clear day in the Fens.
There is also greater measure upward. The tent pole of the sky is
longer. Clearer air gives a greater sense of the upward depth of space.
At night this is especially noticeable. The stars are not pasted on
black canvas, all one level surface. There is depth in the outer sky.
You can see the planets poised; you can see behind the moon.
One may dream of prison in a cave, or gain a morbid fear of the
narrowing walls of a ravine, but open country disenchants the mind.
Freedom, room to breathe, is at least suggested to the senses. The
wind does not attack in storm battalions, but comes equably and
large-heartedly across the plain. The wind is a sane traveler, flicking
the tops of the grasses as you do with your staff. It does not behave
like a madman with a sword; it is not a wild cat springing from tree
to tree. Not that you cannot get the worst of the wildness of a wind
upon the moor--but it has a quality that gives courage, that puts
heart into a man. Hence the Borrovian: “There’s a wind on the heath,
brother!” The wind there is one’s friend.
Traveling on the Central Asian plain I remember a steady wind that blew
all night long, as if it were engaged on the whole-time job of keeping
the starry sky polished and swept. All night the ends of my sleeping
sack flapped in the wind and I looked through trembling eyelashes
at the moonlit snowy peaks of the great mountain wall between the
“Tableland of Fools” and India.
A wind that came all the way out of the heart of China, never ceased
to blow, and yet never raised the desert sand. The great wind of the
old world was blowing, as it has blown for ages. It blew out of the
past, turning the monotonous page of history books, blew out of dreams
and legends of forgotten man, as out of the storybooks of the Caliphs,
a wind which arose God knows where, far beyond the trails of the
caravans, in the heart of the East.
You lie in a marvelous stillness. The stars become your men and women.
You become a man of Chaldea, and the constellations revive. There
steals into your heart, and oh, how you needed it, the sweet influence
of the Pleiades. Spellbound, you watch a ballet, a story up above.
There are men on elephants and men tending camels, long strings of
camels, ropes of camels, gulf streams of camels wending their way
out of the South of the Universe into the bleak North. There are
jeweled queens and striding harlequins and hesitating dwarfs. There
are thirteen-year-old brides, with streaming luminous hair, riding on
high-stepping ponies, riding the ways of the dark sky, till bid for by
the heroes who come striding along the great ways from Arcturus.
The civilized world has been removed like a table that has been
cleared, a table cluttered with papers and dishes. Civilization has
been swept to one side. You cannot see it now; it is far away--indeed,
out of your ken entirely. You are reduced to a child--whatever your
age. You are a petted child of the universe. You shall be all by
yourself in the midst of the world, and the Divine picture book
shall be put in your hands for you to open, to look at, to turn the
marvelous page. So you lie there enthralled, with dilated, excited,
bright-shining eyes; just you, so many feet by so many, and look up at
infinite breadth and infinite depth. What is a cabinet thought about
the stars, a
“_Whoever looked upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining._”
compared with the rapturous poetic experience of having lived nights
with them, reading them in the great open chamber of the Universe!
[Illustration]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE TRAMP AS COOK
_Then did he study some half hour
But as the Comick saith his heart was in the kitchen._
I think Coleridge was annoyed by the man who interrupted him with the
words “Them’s the jockeys for me,” referring to some steak puddings
which had been brought before his eyes. Coleridge was regarding some
choice bit of Scottish scenery, the Falls of Clyde, I think, and a
rough, unlikely-looking fellow had used what Coleridge had considered
absolutely the right adjective concerning them--majestic--and the
poet turned on him to learn more of this verbal grace. Then a toad
leapt from the mouth of the princess who had previously given a pearl.
“Them’s the jockeys for me,” said he, regarding the steak puddings.
It is recorded somewhere in Coleridge’s _Table Talk_. I read it some
twenty or twenty-five years ago, and the two expressions have remained
with me--“majestic” and “them’s the jockeys.” In fact, I adopted the
word majestic as applied to scenery there and then, that, and the
Shakespearian “majestical.” “It seemed I did him wrong, being so
majestical.” It has almost become a vice of style. That, however, is by
the way. The poetry of our life, and of our book, shall be interlarded
with--I may not say puddings; one does not lard with puddings, with the
fatness of cooking and eating.
The dawn stars make one hungry. Noontide makes one hungry, and so does
afternoon. The tramp is loath to tighten his belt.
I have described, in another book, how one should make coffee, and I
will not repeat. But the first thing about it is love, as I wrote in
a verse during my tramp with Vachel Lindsay, “Coffee should be made
with love; that’s the first ingredient,” and “the chief cause of coffee
being just indifferent is your indifference towards the coffee.” I feel
this is also true of the most of cooking. You must bring a loving heart
to the primus or the camp fire. No soured personality can be trusted
to stir the beans, far less make the coffee. I have not examined the
psychology of good cooks, but I imagine few of them are bitter, few
of them are egoists. Watch a thoroughgoing egoist over the camp fire,
cooking for _you_. But I ask too much--take the pan from him, take the
pot away.
He will be saying to you, “I had a very interesting letter from Thomas
Hardy apropos of a letter I wrote to the _Times_, approving entirely
what I said--” Meanwhile the coffeepot has tilted on its stone and
is pouring its goodness to the ants and the beetles. It is a miching
malicho, it means mischief. You must take over from him, let him sit
himself on a rock and pour forth, but not tend the fire and let the
coffeepot pour forth.
Lindsay wrote a reply to my recipe for making coffee. His was a recipe
for making tea. He did not omit love. But as well as tea leaves he
recommended leaves of various books to be put in the pot. I do not
know that I care for this tea from book leaves and, I suppose, old
bindings. I have had it indoors, given me by some dusty recluse, in his
portentous library. Qua tea it was not so excellent, qua soporific, it
was good.
One may put in a little philosophy, however, with both tea and coffee.
“Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” We need a little for our
repast, but we want no soda to bring out the flavor.
Lindsay, being an American, knew little of tea. That is why we traveled
almost exclusively on coffee. In any case, a practical detail to be
noted, it is not wise to make coffee and tea from the same pot. The
flavors adhere even to a very well rinsed vessel and spoil one another.
If there are two of you, each may carry his own pot, one for tea, one
for coffee. But it is simpler to be unanimous as regards the choice of
beverage. In Russia I tramped almost always on tea, because the tea is
so good there and needs no milk. In some districts milk is difficult
to obtain. In America, however, “evaporated” and “condensed” in cans
are obtainable everywhere, and are conveniently carried. You need only
make two tiny perforations in the lid of the condensed milk tin. You
blow through one, and it drives a thin stream of milk out at the other.
You cover these perforations with a leaf or a piece of paper, and thus
sealed, the can is carried safely in the rucksack. Of course, if you
open with a can opener it is likely to be difficult to keep your milk
for more than one meal--or it will make an unpleasant mixture in your
rucksack.
China tea has the advantage that it needs no milk. Indeed, milk spoils
it. It should be made very weak, and it is then more refreshing than
Indian tea. I prefer a good Chinese blend, especially on tramp. It is
not, however, possible to prepare tea in any elegant fashion. There
is no “five o’clock” in the wilds. You brew a pot of tea at any hour
which taste suggests. The luxurious may carry a small teapot and
merely boil the water in the can or coffeepot. But the rougher method
is not without appeal. You can sift two spoonfuls of tea into your
coffeepot when the water is boiling and at once take it off the fire. A
better plan is to cut off a small square from your mosquito netting and
tie the tea in that. Your first mugful will be rather weak, but your
second, third and fourth, progressively stronger unless you are able to
pull out the little bag of swollen tea leaves. Wash the bit of netting,
and it is ready for next time. It will last several weeks if you do not
lose it.
I find you can walk further after tea, but coffee makes you more
sociable. You talk more after coffee. If Mrs. Thrale had made the
great Doctor coffee instead of tea Boswell would have missed much more
of what he said. Though tea indoors is very different from tea out
of doors. As a domestic drink it is productive of high spirits, but
out of doors it enkindles purpose. You walk and think and are silent.
It is good for artists and writers. Forms and ideas rise unbidden
to the mind. What good thinking comes after the morning tea on the
road--whole chapters, whole stories, curious conceits and fancies! But
after coffee you cannot keep anything to yourself, and if you have no
companion you take to singing.
If, however, you are very tired or wet through with rain, coffee has
more power to restore. It is better then to make it without milk. Put
seven or eight lumps of sugar in the pot and heat water and sugar
together, not too much water. When quite hot, sizzling, float a double
portion or even treble portion of coffee on top. Do not, for this
potation, use mosquito netting. The coffee should then be watched--for
it may rise suddenly and become wasted. It is as well to stir it, and
then a useful device is the using of cross sticks. “If you make the
sign of the cross over a pot of coffee it will not boil over,” say
the cowboys. And it is a curious fact that two dead twigs, placed
crosswise over the top of the coffeepot, seem to cast a spell on the
brew. The brew should simmer for a quarter of an hour or more. Then
add a little cold water and stir up. The grouts will go to the bottom,
leaving a fine liquor. Though very strong, this type of coffee is
not bitter. You sip it; it lasts a long while. It is much better than
medicine for you, and will drive out any amount of damp from your
system. I think it better than coffee and rum, or warm damson gin, or
any of the concomitants of aspirin. No tramp should carry aspirin. It
is depressing to mind and soul, and generally causes you to give up
adventures.
Bread and cheese and coffee make a good combination, as of course do
cake and coffee, any sort of coffee and cake. Bread and sardine and
coffee go down very well, to say nothing of fried trout. Directly you
get your fish, scrape it and clean it, a dirty job, but you get used
to it, wash it and fry it. If you can eat it within a quarter of an
hour of its swimming in the stream you get some of the hidden and lost
potentialities of trout, the inner worth of those delightful pink
spots, those scales your color-loving eye is loath to scrape. However,
remember the coffee. It can simmer gently while you fry. Bully beef is
redeemed by coffee, so is Maconochie. Eggs go well, but they must be
fried. Boiled eggs go better with tea. Wash them and then boil them in
the same water from which you will make the tea. It improves the tea.
But be careful of the eggs as they boil that they do not dance together
and crack one another. For in that case your tea water will be spoiled.
In Poland, and in Border States and in Russia there are excellent hard
bannocks which soften when heated. You slit them and insert butter. In
Russia they are called _bubliki_; they sell them in the East End of all
great cities. They go remarkably well with tea.
In Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, there are excellent
oaten and rye cakes. They are delightful with Indian tea and milk; not
so good with China tea.
America, marvelous country, provides the greatest variety of breakfast
foods, cakes, and pies in the world. What can compare with pumpkin pie,
blackberry pie, peach pie? You go into an unromantic-looking “ville” or
“burg,” and surely come away with an unbroken round of pie to civilize
the camp cuisine.
On a long tramping expedition one is bound to study to some degree the
body and its needs. The Army marches on its stomach, so do you. An
attack of indigestion can make a strong man almost too weak to move.
Beware of the cakes of bread sold in the market place in Mohammedan
cities, what in Central Asia the Sarts and Uzbeks bake. They are
difficult to swallow, even with wine, and once inside become a stiff
indigestible mass. Millet bread is also difficult to assimilate. Maize
flour bread is also upon occasion bad to tramp on. On the other hand,
no harm comes from any variety of wheaten and oaten biscuit. One of the
tramp’s temptations is toward wild fruit. He can easily make himself
very unwell by eating unripe or bitter ripe fruit--even when boiled
with sugar. Again, if the coffeepot gets dirty inside and brown curds
adhere to the side you will find you are drinking something rather
upsetting with your coffee. There is no need to scrub the outside of
the coffeepot but cleanliness within should be _de rigueur_. Dried
apricots, when obtainable, are ideal to take on tramp, but they should
be washed before cooking. The stones should be broken and the kernels
thrown in with the flesh of the fruit and some sugar--an ideal dish.
Potatoes are difficult to carry, but when obtained can be easily cooked
under the seemingly dead ashes of your camp fire. They are greatly
enjoyed, as all know who have even on a picnic roasted them and dandled
them timorously in their fingers. It is just as well to hoist them out
of the ashes on the end of a sharpened stick. If the stick will not go
in, the potatoes are probably not yet cooked.
Similarly, various birds, having been plucked of feathers, can be
cooked under the ashes. The fire ought to have been burning an hour or
so, and have accumulated much ember before cooking a bird is tried. But
a hollow may be found for your chicken and the ashes carefully raked
and heaped over it.
Perhaps, however, the best way to cook a young chicken is to fry it.
It is easily fried over the glowing embers and is immensely tasty.
Chicken, with a tang of wood smoke is a feast! One cannot think of
having a chicken every day. But enough has been said to show that the
cuisine of the out-of-door life is not utterly primitive. There is a
variety of good things for those who are not ascetics. And besides all
these good things there enter by chance into the ménage mushrooms, so
shockingly overlooked by town-bred folk; wine, especially the _vin du
pays_, which is sometimes almost a free gift to the wanderer; honey
just taken from the bee; Devonshire cream if you are in the English
West Country, and also bountiful cider. There are good cheeses;
though out of door all cheese is good. You can take your fresh _petit
Suisse_ along with you in France; your Gruyère, your Stilton--there
is some good cheese in every country, and all manner of rough cream
cheeses in the mountains. Goat-milk cheese is apt to make one very
thirsty, so one should have wine to go with it. In America there is the
never-to-be-forgotten strawberry shortcake. You can also get a brick of
ice cream if you carry a chilling box. In Turkish villages you can go
into the restaurants and lift such delicacies as stuffed peppers--even
the thought of them is an appetiser. The _bon viveur_ can carry with
him his _petit verre_. Upon my honor, this tramping business is not
altogether an “eating of roots in the desert.” Still, when provisions
run out and you are far from human habitation, you may be reduced to
eating grass. That is the reverse side of the picture.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TOBACCO
It has been said that whereas a pipe is a man’s wife, a cigarette is
his lady friend. In these terms it is difficult to define a cigar, but
it will be agreed that the cigar is unnecessary on tramp. We have no
afterdinner mood. A pipe will go a long way, the cigarette has to be
cast off and renewed--the cigar does not enter in.
Nevertheless, I shall hear of excellent walkers who carried boxes of
cigars in their rucksacks and lifted the smoke of Havana to the noon
sky. Some fellows even chew an unlighted cigar as they walk.
It has frequently been said to me: “I should think when you got to some
point on your tramps--with great views opening before you, it was a
rare place for a smoke.”
This moved me in my intolerant years to much mirth. How could I share
the beauties of Nature with a pipe! I asked. It seemed to me strange
that one should wish to smoke when the fire of one’s own thoughts was
burning brightly and streaming upward in poetic exhalation.
Even now I cannot go back on my personal experience of years past. One
of the most romantic occasions in tramping that I remember was during
a vagabondage in the Crimea, when I reached the Gate of Baidari and
watched for an hour a marvelous changing sunset far over the Black Sea
and its mountainous shore. It was my busiest hour of the day: I was
soaking in that sunset to the core of my intelligence. What rapture,
what prayerful vigilance was mine then, as in the late twilight,
knapsack on back, I stood on grand platforms over the sea and was, as
it were, alone, the one pilgrim in the universe.
In those days I was a nonsmoker. But even later when, through offering
friends cigarettes, I at last began offering them to myself, I do not
associate tobacco with great moments. It is very delightful when riding
a horse to light a cigarette and smoke as you amble along, and it makes
a difference on a long train journey to have the narcotic of tobacco,
but to me, smoking is not naturally associated with tramping. One very
memorable moment after I had begun to smoke, was when I climbed out of
the jungles of Darien on the ridge where Balboa saw the Pacific for the
first time. It was pure poetry to see the blue triangle of the Southern
Sea far o’er the forests and the hills. But where Balboa and his men
sang a “Te Deum” I did not sit on a stone and light up a pipe.
However, there is no doubt that smoking in company is a social grace.
It gives a sense of unity, and at the same time, it is a source of
some pleasure. We are always warned that our cigarette ends have set
forests afire. But the rest of the cigarette has lighted our faces
and lightened our packs. As the soldier finds the route march more
supportable if he has permission to smoke, so also the tramp, on a long
and arduous hill, can get much help from cigarette or pipe. It gives
patience on the way, and then patience again in camp, while waiting for
the pot to boil. And the final peace pipe at the end of the day settles
all experiences into a harmonious unity and prepares the mind for the
night.
Smoking seems to fill up the empty cells in time--when there is nothing
else to do a man takes out a cigarette. On the other hand, after stress
or strain it soothes and it prepares the mind for artistic work. At the
same time in writing, it seems to me, that as good literary work can be
done without tobacco as with it.
Upon occasion, the cigarette, and more often the cigar, will deaden
one’s sensibilities. The effect is the rising of somber impressions,
rather than bright thinking. Tobacco has had considerable influence on
modern literature, though it would be difficult to show just where the
difference is. It has made some writers tolerant, but others merely
laconic; helped some to be witty, helped others to be merely cynical.
Thousands of cigarettes have gone to the making of a novel, and it
would be amusing, and perhaps also interesting, if one could compute
the numbers that went to the various chapters. That is not entirely
irrelevant here, for it is the custom of many writers to think out
their work while walking. They walk and they smoke, and they think, and
the ideas form.
Curiously enough, I smoked my first cigar on the way to Havana, and
could not finish it. It almost finished me. I used to say that cigars
belonged to a certain later period in a man’s life, when he had
succeeded and could lean back in his chair and view the world at ease.
It is perhaps an English idea. Cigars in England are a luxury. But
it is not so in other parts of the world. In England, when we smoke
a cigar, we smoke largely tax. But in other parts of the world this
choicer weed enjoys more freedom from impost. In Germany, in Austria,
in Holland, in the Indies and Mexico, and in many other places, a cigar
is no more a luxury than a cigarette--as cheap, as popular, and better
to smoke.
Hood could write:
_Honours have passed to men
My junior at the Bar.
No matter, I can wait,
So I have my cigar._
but he could hardly have written--So I have my cigarette. The cigar for
us means Nirvana, release from cares, relaxation of the whole being.
I do not think it either the meet reward or the need of the tramp
after his day’s march. When he has had wordy warfare with the police
concerning the validity of his passport, when he finds that he has lost
all his money and half his kit, when he has proposed to his sweetheart
and been rejected, or refused, he may light up a Havana if he has one.
But I take comfort in the thought that unless he has lately parted
from a rich uncle he is unlikely to have a stock of the commodity, and
will draw rather upon the resources of philosophy which he has somehow
stored within.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY
BOOKS
You need a book, but you cannot carry Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ with
you, even if you feel the need. The tramp’s library is limited, for
books are heavy. It is best to tramp with one book only. But it is a
missed opportunity not to have one book. For you can gain an intimacy
with a book and an author in that way, which it is difficult to obtain
in a library or in the midst of the rush of the books of the season.