It was more than twenty-five years ago that I started from Savannah over the old stage-road to Augusta, finding my way by faint uncertain blazings on the tree-trunks through a hundred and thirty-odd miles of swamp. They were solemn miles. Trees thicker than my body grew in the ruts where wheels had run; more than once the great diamond rattlesnake coiled in my path, chilling the silence of the river bottoms with his shivering whirr. Once I heard the gobble of the wild turkey and the scream of the bobcat; and at night, while sleeping in an old abandoned church on the river bluff, I was awakened by the snuffling of a bear which had thrust its muzzle underneath the church door in the foot-worn hollow of the sill.
It was a lonesome place. A faint road led away from it off through the swamp; but, aside from the gravestones near by, there were no other human signs around. How long since human feet had crossed the threshold, I do not know.
The chintz altar-cloth that I tried to draw over me (the night was chill) crumbled at my touch and drifted off into a million dusty fragments. I had meant no desecration. I was very weary and had crept in through a window from the night and cold. A slow rain had settled down with the dusk, attended by darkness indescribably profound. And beneath the long-draped pines outside slept those whose feet had worn the threshold—slept undisturbed by the soughing of the wind, wrapped in the unutterable loneliness of the coiling river and the silent, somber swamp.
Yet here had passed a highway between two great cities just a few years earlier, before the railroad was built farther out through the State. Already the swamp and the river had taken the highway for their own, and from human feet given it again to adventure, to the gliding form, the swift wing, and the soft padded foot.
The giants of old, the frontiers and clipper ships of old, are gone. They went out with the ebb tide, and here already comes back the flood! And with it the same old human chance, the magical chance of escape. Lay aside the rifle and you pick up the camera—to creep with it into the lion’s den; or to climb with it into the top of a towering oak, on some sheer mountain wall; and, pushing it before you along a horizontal limb, feet dangling in space, a stiff wind blowing, eagles screaming overhead, canyon wall below you, and far, far down the narrow canyon bottom, you hold on, body balancing camera, but nothing over against the swaying brain, and grind out a hundred feet of movie film. This is to shoot a good many lions.
Life offers us all the chance of escape. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us; but beneath the surface we need go no deeper than our own hearts to find a frontier, and that adventurous something for which the decorous and conventional allows no place in its scheme.
CHAPTER II