I’ve long wished to wander for years in the tents of the nomads of the Central Mongolian Plain. I came on them accidentally, tramping in Turkestan; surely among the most interesting peoples in the world, and the oldest, with customs of the most intense human interest. Nothing less than a year with them would do; and that means a year without civilization, for no postman seeks the wandering tents of the Kirghis and the Kalmouk.
I should like also to pursue a study which I once began of the monasteries of the Copts, and tramp in the Sahara desert, to follow the clues of early Christianity up the Nile from Alexandria and the Thebaid, and I would make some study of Abyssinian Christianity in its native haunts. Or, on the other side of the world, I’d like to tramp the communal estate of the Dukhobors, of which I obtained a glimpse in 1922 in western Canada. Or I’d like just now to tramp as a beggar through the heart of the new Ireland.
These, and many other fascinating adventures, haunt the mind like Maeterlinck’s souls of the unborn children in that charming drama of the ideal—“The Betrothal.” If I don’t do them this time on earth, and can’t do them, friends are apt to say: “Well, next time.” One lifetime will hardly suffice to find out all there is to know and to enjoy in the world and in man.
Vachel Lindsay, with whom I enjoyed a wonderful six weeks when we crossed Glacier Park, going by compass, and passed the frontier between the United States and Canada, is eager for a resumption of the trail. Next time it shall be Mount McKinley in Alaska, or Crater Lake, in the far northwest of the States. Perhaps some day I’ll go. Only recently I received from him, by one post, six long letters and a packet of coffee from Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. “Come at once,” said Vachel. But I was in Finland at the time. Otherwise I’d have flung off for Alaska or Crater Lake. The difficulty is to say “No” to such suggestions. It would be a traveling more with Nature than with man—through enormous wildernesses. Imagination could draw a wonderful picture of what such places would be like, but there is one crude unmannerly truth that the traveler always comes upon in the course of his experience of new places, and that is, that imagination, though very charming, is nearly always wrong. Knowledge of living detail shows the world to be full of the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unimagined.
There is a type of tramping which belongs more to the future; a new type, and an even more fascinating one, and that is the taking of cross sections of the world, the cutting across all roads and tracks, the predispositions of humdrum pedestrians, and making a sort of virginal way across the world. This can be tried first of all as a haphazard tramp—a setting out to walk without the name of any place you want to get to. Hence the zigzag walk, of which I write later. Keep taking the first turning on the left and the next on the right, and see where it leads you. In towns this gives you a most alluring adventure. You get into all manner of obscure courts and alleys you would never have noticed in the ordinary way. But in the country, beaucoup zigzag, as they say in France, does not work. You get tied up in a hopeless tangle of lanes which go back upon themselves. As a result of a week’s tramping you may find yourself only two steps from the place you started from. You feel like a lost ant that, after infinite trouble, has got back to the heap. It is dull to be an ant.
In the country a real cross section and haphazard adventurous tramp is one which can be known as “Trespasser’s Walk.” You take with you a little compass, decide to go west or east, as fancy favors, and then keep resolutely to the guidance of the magnetic needle. It takes you the most extraordinary way, and shows what an enormous amount of the face of the earth is kept away from the feet of ordinary humanity by the fact of “private property.” On the other side of the hedge that skirts the public way is an entirely different atmosphere and company. In ten minutes in our beautiful Sussex you can find yourself as remote from ordinary familiar England as if you were in the midst of a great reservation. And you may tramp a whole day upon occasion without meeting a single human being.
I want to do it in Russia some time—tramp across her by the compass, visit the hamlets which are five miles from the road, visit those which are fifty from the road, a hundred and fifty from the road. In that way I should find a Russia as yet unknown, unrevealed. It would be a strange and fantastic quest of happiness.
“There’s no sense in it,” I can hear the stay-at-home repeat. And if he came with me it would not be long before he parted company and went back. “There’s no sense in going further.” And he is quite right if he doesn’t hear the explorer’s whisper in his heart:
One everlasting whisper, day and night, repeated—so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—