I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a
Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when
I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be
only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about
enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in
itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you
are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind
the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper
pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary
consultation over the map--that is enough for the way.
At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to
the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our
burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we
enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no
cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour,
but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is
the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave
of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if
you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is
for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and
Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the
path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your
wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts
as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way
again singing:--
Bed in the bush with the stars to see.
Bread I dip in the river--
There's the life for a man like me.
There's the life for ever.
What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world,
you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life
you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide
sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will
outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life--the whistle
of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep--add to the sense of
primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and
ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the
waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have
passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day.
There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have
startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with
wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision
of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk
hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into
these wild fastnesses of the mountains.
And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you
are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are
getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of
an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands
wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale,
or--yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld
Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New
Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on
the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of
"The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:
I'm not a climber, not a climber,
Not a climber now,
My weight is going fourteen stone--
I'm not a climber now.
We shall not find Gaspard there to-night--Gaspard, the gay and intrepid
guide from the Dauphiné, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at
Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the
rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the
shepherd, will be there--Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a
town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man
in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody--only when he is in a good
humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we
shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?"
Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down
the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from
afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.
To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our
rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in
going a journey is the early start. Have the whip-hand of the day, and then
you may loiter as you choose. If it is hot, you may bathe in the chill
waters of those tarns that lie bare to the eye of heaven in the hollows of
the hills--tarns with names of beauty and waters of such crystal purity as
Killarney knows not. And at night we will come through the clouds down the
wild course of Rosset Ghyll and sup and sleep in the hotel hard by Dungeon
Ghyll, or, perchance, having the day well in hand, we will push on by Blea
Tarn and Yewdale to Coniston, or by Easedale Tarn to Grasmere, and so to
the Swan at the foot of Dunmail Raise. For we must call at the Swan. Was it
not the Swan that Wordsworth's "Waggoner" so triumphantly passed? Was it
not the Swan to which Sir Walter Scott used to go for his beer when he was
staying with Wordsworth at Rydal Water? And behind the Swan is there not
that fold in the hills where Wordsworth's "Michael" built, or tried to
build, his sheepfold? Yes, we will stay at the Swan whatever befalls.
And so the jolly days go by, some wet, some fine, some a mixture of both,
but all delightful, and we forget the day of the week, know no news except
the changes in the weather and the track over the mountains, meet none of
our kind except a rare vagabond like ourselves--with rope across his
shoulder if he is a rock-man, with rucksack on back if he is a tourist--and
with no goal save some far-off valley inn where we shall renew our strength
and where the morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet.
I started to write in praise of walking, and I find I have written in
praise of Lakeland. But indeed the two chants of praise are a single
harmony, for I have written in vain if I have not shown that the way to see
the most exquisite cabinet of beauties in this land is by the humble path
of the pedestrian. He who rides through Lakeland knows nothing of its
secrets, has tasted of none of its magic.