"Thanks," he said easily; "I think I'll put up a tent. I've got the craze for sleeping out of doors."
"I'll sleep out with you," said Stack.
"The mosquitoes will eat you up," said Ralph coolly. "I've got only a one man shelter."
He pitched his tent on the edge of the river bank, across a little muskeg from Mixer and Staley's buildings. He ostentatiously went to bed at an early hour. As soon as everything was quiet he crept out, and hoisting the bundle which contained his boat to his back, started to climb the portage trail.
At two o'clock he returned. Making all the rest of his baggage into a pack, he got away again before the dawn began to break. At five he was on the shore of the lake with all his belongings. At six he had his boat set up and packed, and was setting off. All these movements were reported to Joe Mixer later.
Ralph, thrusting his paddle into the water which would eventually bear him back to Nahnya, felt like an exile coming into his own country again. The world and its business, which obtruded irritatingly on his dreams, was all behind him, and when he stepped into his boat he left his matter-of-fact self on the shore. This was Nahnya's land. With the keenest satisfaction he gazed around him, letting the scene photograph itself on his brain. Ralph never forgot anything that he had once looked at squarely. Seeing the quaint islands, he smiled. "Nature's shop-window," he thought, "setting out her spring line."
Entering the little river the reeds and the lily pads presented familiar faces, and every bend recalled the previous journey, evoking the presence of Nahnya so strongly that he had an actual physical consciousness of her sitting behind him, seeing all that he saw. He played with the idea, forbearing to turn his head that he might not dispel the comforting illusion.
He had intended stopping at each place where they had spelled on the first journey, but this he found was impracticable, no matter how hard he worked. His tubby craft could never make the headway of the slender dugout, and his paddle lacked the skill of Nahnya's. In the rapids he was soon in trouble, but here the elastic sides of his coracle proved an advantage. She bounced off the rounded boulders without taking any harm. When she ran high and dry it was no great matter to step out into the shallow stream and guide her back to the channel.
Though he paddled until near dark he had to go ashore several miles short of their first camping-place. It was on a grassy point in the middle of a quiet reach of the river that he chose to spend his first night alone in the silence. Solitude, Silence, and Darkness, older than all created things, are terrific to us newest creatures with nervous systems. Very few of us know them really. In an inhabited land at any hour of any season there is no such thing as silence. Ralph sat beside his fire thrilling in the presence of the ancient sisters. He was weighed down, overwhelmed, intimidated. He felt as if he and his little fire existed like an island in an infinite void.
All this was changed by the cheery sun. He continued his journey downstream joyfully. These two days that he spent entirely cut off from his kind ever afterward lingered in Ralph's mind with a flavour distinct from all the other days of his life. Away from all the distracting business of life, nor tugged opposing ways by human associations, it was as if he had come face to face with his own self for the first time. It seemed as if the fetters of the flesh were a little loosened, enabling him to feel more keenly, and to think with a greater lucidity.