The only other parts of Russia to compare with the Caucasus are the Crimea, the Urals, and the Altai. The delightful Crimea is all too limited in extent. It is very beautiful, and possessed of marvelously good air. It is more invigorating in the Crimea than in the Caucasus. It is also easier and safer tramping. It may take some time to recover from Bolshevism, but I daresay it is more delightful in desolation than it was in the days when it was the national pleasure ground of the Russian middle and upper classes.
The Urals are tame beside the Caucasus, but they have a poetry of their own. The many lakes and little hills and birch forests make a welcoming land. One ought to know something of geology and mineralogy when tramping in the Urals. It is one of the most remarkable parts of Europe from a geological point of view. Every stone is interesting. The man who can combine geology and tramping is likely to have a very interesting experience, and one that might even add to science in its results. The Ural region, it should be noted, is very extensive, and is for the most part unprospected—especially northward. The chief difficulty in tramping becomes ultimately absence of people, and of food. The gnats also swarm badly at night.
The Altai is also more or less untrodden country; vast majestic mountain ranges separating Siberia from China, forested and beautiful, now rather difficult of access, even for a starting point.
Of course, I went to Russia, not merely to tramp for tramping’s sake, but in order to fill in life, which is limited at home. I found tramping to be the quickest way to a nation’s heart. Many regions in which I have tramped I could not recommend for the pleasure—thus, Archangel to Moscow through the wet and gloomy forests of the North, or Tashkent to Vernoe, across the Central Asian desert. That sort of expedition I would call student tramping, and recommend it heartily as a means of learning the truth about a country. No number of museums or handbooks or columns of statistics can give you the sum of reality obtained quite simply and without particular effort, upon the road. I have not tramped in India or China or Japan, these problematical countries. But, while there may not be much pleasure in footing it there, I believe it to be a way toward the understanding of their peoples.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ART OF IDLENESS
THE world is large enough, or is only too small, as takes your fancy or speaks your experience. But blue sky by day and fretted vault of heaven by night give you the foil of the infinite, making your petty exploit a brave adventure. After surveying the map of the world, thinking on this country and on that with gusto of a Marco Polo, you may modestly decide to take a little trip in Hertfordshire, like Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who, on a certain journalistic occasion, set forth to the discovery of Rutland. Instead of going, like Kennan, into the wilds of Siberia for a year or so, you may decide to go across the New Forest during the Whitsuntide week-end, a little voyage au tour de ma chambre. There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva. Quality makes good tramping, not quantity.
The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental. I listen with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the springy morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist. Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments, not in distance run.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be picked, nests to be looked into, song birds to hear, falcons to be watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof of the mole’s track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in velvet in his home. The sound of the tapping of the woodpecker shall guide you to the loose-barked tree where with watchful eye a bird of beauty is hunting the unmannerly wood louse. You shall approach gently the deer who, in a group, wait for you with startled eyes. They run from the crashing and speedy—they can be won by the gentle. Wild nature is not so wild as we think, or we are wilder—it is not so far from us, and we are nearer.