tramping
tramping
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHITHER AWAY?
THE principle motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a subconscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on something very wonderful—beyond the horizon’s rim. The joys of wandering are often balanced by the pains; but there is something which is neither joy nor pain which makes the desire to wander or explore almost incurable in many human beings.
The child experiences his first wander-thrill when he is taken to places where he has never been before. I remember from the age of nine a barefoot walk with my mother along the Lincolnshire sands from Sutton to Skegness, and the romantic and strange sights on the way. What did we not build out of that adventure? And who does not remember the pleasurable thrill, the pleasure that’s all but pain, of being lost in a wood, or in a strange countryside, and meeting some crazy individual who humored the idea by apostrophizing a little brook in this style: “I am now marching upon the banks of the mighty Congo”? The imagination wishes to be stirred with the romance of places, and is stirred. In a great city like London or New York, even though living there, certainly I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick fire by the roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil.
“Where,” I am asked, “would you go a-tramping now if you were absolutely fancy-free and passports and Bolsheviks were unknown?”It would probably be in Russia, where I have vagabondized over thousands of miles already. I should like to resume my six-thousand-mile journey southwest to northwest, which was interrupted by the War in August, 1914. But, alas, the Moscow of the Bolsheviks does not encourage adventure of that kind.
Again, I’d like to buy a boat at Perm and slip down to the Petchora River, and go with the stream thousands of miles north, selling the boat to the Samoyedes at the mouth of the river, thence tramping perhaps by the tundra roads or sledging it to Mesen. What a romance, what a journey, as it seems to me now, in complete inexperience of it!
Or I’d like to take a party of literary men across the Altai, and in a verdant valley live for half a year without letters and newspapers, and each write his own book, express his own peculiar happiness in his own words.
Or I’d like to plunge south from Verney, in Seven-Rivers-Land, or from Kashgar, and climb to the mountain passes into India; andas I think of it a sense of the last poem of Davidson creeps into the memory:
Alone I climbThe ragged path that leads me out of Time.
Alone I climbThe ragged path that leads me out of Time.
Alone I climbThe ragged path that leads me out of Time.
Alone I climb
The ragged path that leads me out of Time.
So much for Russia. I’d love to tramp the whole length of Japan, and peer into all the ways of the modern Japanese. There, however, speaks another interest, and that is not so much to explore strange lands as to explore strange people. Life teaches the wanderer that peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times be irresistible. You long to be familiar with Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Chinamen, Arabs, Americans, and the rest. And it takes you afield, it takes you far, far away from 1, Alpha Villas, or the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.
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 awonderful 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. Itwould 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—Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
One everlasting whisper, day and night, repeated—so:“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
One everlasting whisper, day and night, repeated—so:“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
One everlasting whisper, day and night, repeated—so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
The Japanese question to the Polar explorer: “What did you find when you got to the Pole?” is a foolish one. You may bring nothing back in your hands from an expedition, but you have garnered within. You have garnered for yourself and also for others. It is always worth while to quit for a time the rabbit hutches of civilization and do something which stay-at-home folk call flying in the face of fortune. “Is it not comfortable enough where you are?” they ask.
However, tramping, as I am writing of it, is not Polar exploration, nor footing it along the rocky ways of the mountains to Lhasa. It is a smaller, gentler, matter. It is merely accepting the call of Nature; taking those two weeks which Wells described in his Modern Utopia—and taking more. But it matters greatly where one chooses to go. Some countries are better than others, some districts better than other districts.
England cannot be said to be excellent tramping country; very good for a walking tour where one seeks an inn each night, but not good for a tramp in which one hopes to sleepà la belle étoile. Even when the weather is fine the dews are heavy. In the occasional dry, hot summers which occur it is however, delightful to adventure forth in the West Country or in Cumberland, or even in the Highlands. One or two jaunts are very attractive, for instance, to tramp the old Roman Wall from Carlisle to Wallsend at Newcastle, or to tramp the Scottish border from Berwick to the Solway. One passes over remarkably wild and desolate country. I think especiallyof the track from Jedburgh to Newcastleton, and a forlorn district called, if I remember rightly, Knot of the Hill, which, however, is very much of the hill. One meets upon occasion uncouth, friendly mountain shepherds with plenty of philosophy in them. There are some wild tramps in Wales, especially in the marches. The Shropshire border is most interesting. If, however, one dives westward for places such as Dinas Mawddy or Dolgelly, one should take provisions for a couple of days. It is easy to lose yourself, and when you come upon people they speak only Welsh, and one has some trouble in making oneself understood. Dartmoor and western Ireland and the mountains and coastways of Donegal afford remarkable scope for adventurers with pack on back.
One ought to be very careful in Great Britain about wayside fires. Even when one is careful to put them out thoroughly with water before leaving one is apt to get into trouble with the farmers, the police, etc. One should also remember that if found sleeping behind haystacks, or in barns, one is liable to be haledbefore the justice and charged with vagrancy. Not that the tramp need be ashamed, when motorists appear there in strings charged with obstruction and speeding and the like. As a practical detail, however, it may be mentioned that sleepers are very rarely discovered.
America is, of course, the tramp’s paradise, a country made by tramps. I do not mean the hoboes which infest the railroads to-day, but the Johnny Appleseeds of time past, who went exploring beyond the horizon and the sunset. The first thing to be said about the New World is its enormous stretch and variety. Many people have walked the three thousand miles from New York to San Francisco. I even came across a woman who had done it in high-heeled boots. It is no novelty. A more difficult transcontinental jaunt would be the four thousand miles of the Unguarded Line—the frontier of Canada and the United States. This is a good literary expedition, and any one who did it and described it well would make his name. My friend Wilfrid Ewart had it in mind to do, and he went prospectively over the details of such a vagabondage. But he wasunfortunately killed in Mexico. Such a tramp would not be confined to frontier posts, but should be crisscross, now in the Republic, now in the Empire.
Another tramp which has seldom been done, except by laborers, is to follow the wheat harvest north from Texas. The harvesting starts in June in the South, and great gangs of harvesters work northward with the summer. This implies a readiness to work in the fields. It is arduous, but a great experience. You garner wheat: you garner gold. If you take lifts when offered you may get all the way to Oregon by September and find the corn still standing there.
In America, however, the roads are killing. You can only tramp in the early hours of the morning and the cool of the evening—at least, in summer. The noontide is too hot, the many cars throw up too much dust. Cross-country tramping is much happier and provides more adventures.
But the man in the car is much more hospitable in America than in any other part of the world. When tired of some waterless, treelesscountryside, you can come on to the highway, hail a passing car, and be taken a long step further forward. The leisured and educated Americans do not tramp for pleasure and find some difficulty in understanding it. There is a well-known motto:Why walk if you can ride?And Americans without automobiles make their more fortunate brothers carry them. A hand wave from a pedestrian brings a car to a halt and you jump in. Journeys have been made from New York to Los Angeles, Boston to New Orleans, “stepping cars,” all the way. It is not to be recommended, however, as it is an abuse of a delightful hospitality.
Still, unless you are studying American civilization, it is hardly worth while to tramp from town to town. The wildernesses are so much more interesting. It is worth while for any one thinking out a novel walk to apply to the Department of Forests and National Parks at Washington. A National Park, conventional as it sounds, may easily prove to be a reserve of territory as extensive as an English county. They are commonly referred toby propagandists as “vast natural playgrounds”—but as yet they are but little used. Yellowstone Park is the only one which is visited by great numbers of people. The others are in nowise overrun. Indeed, the railway journeys to them are generally so long that the masses of the eastern cities cannot profit by them. There are two specially marvelous ones, Sequoia and Yosemite, notable for their trees; the highest and the oldest trees in the world are to be found in these primeval wildernesses.
The Grand Canyon can afford at least a week’s walking. It is a mistake to go down it on horse or mule, and when down in the depths there is a marvelous journey for the pedestrian along the rocky flank of the fast-running Colorado River. If at Grand Canyon in August it is well to visit the Hopi Indians and see the Snake Dance. However, it is really better to visit the Canyon later in the year. At Christmas it is delightful. At midsummer it is really too oppressive down below. When I went down there was snow above and soft vernal airs three thousand feet under,spring flowers in bloom, and one could sit happily by one’s wood fire in the afternoon sunshine.
Tramping in the South of the United States is very pleasant in autumn and spring, especially in Florida and Alabama. In the summer it is too hot and the mosquitoes unusually thick. A very interesting November tramp is from Atlanta, the largest city in Georgia, to Savannah on the coast. In this way you can follow, as I did, the track of Sherman’s army in its famous march to the sea.
But there are places less far afield than these. There is hardly any wilder country anywhere than in upper New York State. A tramp through New England is likely to be congenial to most Englishmen: the people are so much nearer to the English. Canada also presents enormous fields for pleasure tramping, or for tramping which is almost exploration. The far Northwest especially is wild and little traversed.
Europe, however, has equally strong claims on those who tramp, being even more diversified than is America. The language difficultyis the chief drawback. There are a hundred or so tongues. Customs and laws are also bewildering. Still, the best way to see the Pyrenees or the Alps is pack on back. The charming works of Hilaire Belloc on the “Path to Rome” and the Pyrenees are memorials of excellent tramping in Europe.
A pilgrimage from inn to inn in France, especially going south through the wine country, is utterly pleasant. One dispenses with a coffeepot in these parts, a liter bottle is better. Fill it with thevin du payswherever you go; a bottle of Chablis in the village of Chablis, a bottle of Nuits St. Georges in the village of Nuits St. Georges, a bottle of Pommard at Pommard, identifying the country by the wine of wayside inns. It is well to taste and try what any countryside, town, or hostelry is famous for, be it Creole gumbo or stuffed peppers, be it even snails, even frogs’ legs. I remember in younger days the disgust of the waiter in a little hotel opposite Chartres Cathedral when I rejected a plateful of snails which, with a clatter, he had put before me—a flagon of red wine, a chunk of bread, and aplateful of Roman snails. I said “No! Take them away!”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders.Que diable!If I didn’t want snails why did I come to that hotel? Snails were their specialty. However, I confess now I have eaten snails. The first time was at Pont de Vaux, near Mâcon of Burgundy fame. The snails came on as a third course at the Hôtellerie de la Renaissance, cleverly disguised, and before I knew it I was saying, “I like these; I wonder what they are!”
They were purveyed upon a silver tray, or nickel, I suppose; they had been taken out of their shells and put into tiny pots, one snail one pot. There were a dozen or so tiny pots on the tray, each no more than half an inch across the top, and in each a snail floated in a little bath of melted butter and spice. There was a slender two-pronged fork which looked like a toothpick, and you ate the snail with that.
Very tasty! Very novel! Perhaps that was how the Romans ate them. Perhaps in ancient Egypt they ate them in that way, and theseare the original fleshpots. Be that as it may, I felt much amused and intrigued and turned with a friendly gesture to my bottle of local Mâcon. I was more pro-French after that, having got over a prejudice, I could no longer say, “Disgusting people; they eat snails!”
France is a delightful country for a spring escapade. Go South and stay in the country inns, and disenchant the Northern seriousness! It’s a great idea. Go out from Paris to Fontainebleau, where the birds are singing in choirs in the silvery lichened trees. You can sprawl at your length in the sun in May. It is cold sleeping out, but there are inns. You will walk amid wild daffodils and budding hyacinths. Summer is coming north to meet you at Joigny or Dijon. You enter the Côte d’Or country and spectacular stone villages among green hills. From Dijon by red-earth vineyards whence the well cut vines are sprouting an elemental eye-placating green. Your eyes need placating after the dreary North with its cities and industries. The vineyards have low stone walls which incidentally make excellent seats for the wanderer on which tomunch his bread and Camembert and stand his bottle of Burgundy. You come to Beaune, a name on a bottle, on a wine list, now a place well established in your mind and heart. So also Pommard, Volnay, Mersault, Nuits, Mâcon, to mention but a few.
It is a longish distance, but another journey or a continuation might be from Lyons along the banks of the Rhône or eastward to Lake Geneva and Switzerland. It is very hot on the Rhône, but there is an added interest in the old Roman cities you pass through. Avignon might be your center, and from Avignon there are delightful pilgrimages to the fountain of Vaucluse, where Petrarch and Laura met, to Tarascon, the byword for obscurity in France, to famous Arles and its amphitheater. But certainly the most wild and delightful tramp would be over the mountains by compass to Cannes, through untraversed and solitary Provence. This can be done in later summer. For although it is extremely hot on the Riviera, the whole way there is at a height, and one drops down to the coast by a precipitous road from the perfume factories of Grasse.
Tramping expeditions of even more beauty can be made on the French side of the Pyrenees, in the country of the Basques. Pious Catholics may be inclined to make for Lourdes and will encounter the sick in body going for health, and perhaps coming in the opposite direction, rejoicing cripples who have been made whole. Whether credulous or incredulous, the tramp will find Lourdes a religious curiosity well worth approaching in the spirit of a true pilgrim on foot. A tramp from Biarritz to Carcassonne, across the ankle of the Franco-Iberian peninsula holds many picturesque sights of strange people and of feudal towns. But mountainous Nature will rule the hearts of all those who come under the influence of the sublime. This is delightful country for sleeping out, provided mosquito netting be carried. Inns, however, are not so numerous, and one should be prepared to make one’s own coffee on one’s own brushwood fire.
Spain, despite some pleasant volumes recording walking tours, is really untouched. It is a remarkable country, and the people, the most conservative and delightful inEurope, look somewhat askance upon Bohemians. There are tens of thousands of beggars who are accepted as philosophically as flies in summer, but the man in tweeds with knapsack on his back is regarded as some sort of strange wild animal. One is almost bound to be called upon to explain oneself to the police, and to find oneself described officially as a vagrant. Jan and Cora Gordon, two delightful vagabonds, got over the difficulty by carrying guitars, and they were understood as itinerant musicians. In the end, because they played so well, they won over the affections of many somber Spaniards. Among other tramping friends of mine, I ought to mention Mr. Forse, the tramping vicar of Southborne, who has made several tours on foot in Spain and issues his impressions as supplements to his parish magazine. I often envied him his experiences.
It was my impression in Spain that it is not wise to wear tweeds. Black is the accepted color for all people. All respectable beggars wear black. On the other hand, state visits are also made in black. With regard to the climate of Spain, it is easy to be deceived. It ismuch colder than most people think. Northern Spain is mostly elevated plateau and is exposed to bitter winds in the spring. Andalusia, however, and the South generally, is serene and warm, hot even, but subject to unpleasant dust storms. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the easiest way to get to Spain is via Southampton and Gibraltar. The railway journey from France is apt to be very uncomfortable.
After these two countries, northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany come naturally to mind. Of these, by far the cheapest is northern Italy, and there is more untrodden ground. It is well to take passports for Austria as well, so as to be free of the Austrian Tyrol if you wish to enter. Austria, however, as a result of the War, lost a great deal of magnificent territory to Italy, and there is plenty of room in the latter country. Southern Germany is, of course, very fine, and not inhospitable, though the cost of provisions has gone up prodigiously. Perhaps that will be remedied—as one remembers Germany in the old days as one of the cheapest countries for travel in the world.Bavaria is, however, still Bavaria, and if beer attract, the brown brau is as good as ever. The Bavarians were the only Germans who did notGott-strafeEngland, America, and the rest, and they are quite pleasant neighbors. The Germans themselves are good walkers, love rucksacks, and the tramp will attract no unpleasant curiosity as in Spain. Switzerland may best be enjoyed afoot. It is common ground for the walkers of all nationalities—a League of Nations center for those who love God’s handiwork in Nature. It is, however, a rendezvous for the lazier type of tourist, and the “lounge lizard” is apt to set the pace for all. It is dangerous to spend more than one night consecutively in one of the large hotels or tourist round-ups. It is a desecration of one’s opportunities to use them for dancing and gentle promenades. The program of the visitor to Switzerland is apt to be a little unambitious. People go with heaps of luggage and find themselves tied to it, returning inevitably to it even from delightful daily expeditions, like cows from pasture. The end of a happy day should be the stepping-stoneto one still happier. A fortnight or three weeks spent going continuously with sunset and dawn joined by your resting place in the hills has a larger content that the equivalent days spent going out to a certain point and then returning to a hotel.
Czechoslovakia is also a country of athleticism, and one encounters good will there at every point. There is a good deal of delightful ground, especially in the Carpathians. It is rougher going than in France, but the people you meet are simpler. More rations need to be carried as villages are further apart and are apt to have less in them than one might imagine. Here are few canned goods. But there is plenty of good fruit. An expedition well worth making is to Ushorod, in the long narrow strip of territory inhabited by the Carpathian Russians.
As regards the rest of Southern Europe, conditions are frequently difficult. The Balkans are bare and sun-beaten, and largely uncivilized. There is plenty of scope for adventure, especially in Albania, where an armed guard is usually required. Dalmatiais extremely interesting, especially the primitive Croats living in the interior. But the country is mostly treeless and subject to the southern sun and the Sirocco. Early morning is the best time for walking. It is often very cool then—but there is little shelter from the noontide ardor. Spalato and Ragusa are excellent starting points, especially the former. Montenegro has very interesting people and the country is obscure enough to please the stoutest adventurer.
I have written considerably in my books concerning tramping in Russia and Siberia. I have been over many thousands of miles of Russia afoot. The happiest times were in the Caucasus, by the Gorge of Dariel road, over the Cross Pass, or by the Rion valley over Mamison, or on the Caucasian shore of the Black Sea. When it is too hot to live in a house in a town, it is heaven on the mountains. Since the War, and the Revolution, the Caucasus has, unfortunately, become much more dangerous for travelers of all kinds. The tribes are warlike, and have been badly treated by Bolsheviks and Europeans in general.Robbers are merciless. Pacification should, however, succeed within the next ten years, and the Caucasus become open again. Weapons are not of much use to a tramp in these parts. If he carry a revolver he should be secretive about it—for a revolver is a great lure. You are almost certain to be robbed if it is known you have a revolver—for the revolver’s sake. It is best to go unarmed and match intelligence against force when necessary. The native horsemen will be found to be of a brow-beating kind, carrying perchance several mortal weapons. It is best to meet them face to face—but smiling—never let them get you scared. They may want to turn you back or force you to work in their fields. But a smiling answer turneth away wrath, and it is well to keep them talking and watch for your chance to escape. It should be remarked that the scope for tramping is not great before the middle of May, or after the middle of October. The passes, the lowest of which is over nine thousand feet, fill up with snow; you get into whirling blizzards and lose the only trail. On Mamison, especially, it is easyto go wrong, as it is extremely desolate. I crossed once before the snows had melted, an experience never to be forgotten or to be repeated.
It is better in the Caucasus to provide for sleeping out. There are inns,dukhans, bedless, dirty, and you can obtain hospitality in the villages. But the guest is scared only as long as he is under the roof. Next morning, after an hour’s grace wherein to hide his tracks, he may become the quarry of mine host.
Villages, the nativeauli, may be entered by day, but it is safer to keep out of them. They do not possess much which cannot be found in the wayside inn. Provisions are very scarce; such things as tea, sugar, bread, ham, generally unobtainable. Eggs, and a species of bread baked from millet seed, are the commonest fare. The latter needs a good deal of red wine to wash even a small quantity down. It is calledchurek, and it is good for chickens.
In the summer and autumn wild fruits of many kinds abound; strawberries, plums, grapes, and a number of species not known or sold in towns. Thekizil, with its bloodlikejuice, is excellent boiled with plenty of sugar. Wild grapes make good fruit but are inclined to blister the lips. There is an endless abundance of grapes upon the slopes of the Black Sea shore. The wine is heady, and is apt to put you to sleep in the noontide. It is better enjoyed in the evening. It is marketed in skins—but is none the less good for coming out of a tight pig.
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 knowsomething 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 andgloomy 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.