tramping
tramping
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE OPEN
He is blooded to the open and the sky;He is taken in a snare which shall not fail.
He is blooded to the open and the sky;He is taken in a snare which shall not fail.
He is blooded to the open and the sky;He is taken in a snare which shall not fail.
He is blooded to the open and the sky;
He is taken in a snare which shall not fail.
ITHINK of storms and of heavy rain and biting wind as exceptional. They give feature in the midst of halcyon days and nights. The tramping life is not in caves and huts and holes and inns, but in the open. The life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him. It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what youbreathe in with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man big, it builds a man within.
The lark sings as it rises, conquering the world; it is sheer joy in the open which causes that sweet bird breast to heave in music far in the heavens above. And as we rise, and the earth in its grandeur falls away to right and left, our being heaves in a life which is joy. Ours is a bird’s happiness.
It is a joyous moment which delivers us from the control of a narrow gorge. We wind in and out of the shadow of great rocks. Enormous cliffs hang over the way. I think, for instance, of the great gorge of Dariel in the Caucasus. It is interesting, but it is oppressive. You come to it from the glorious northern plateau, the Terek Steppes, where there is space and sun for miles of Indian corn. You follow the river into the gloom of the way it has cut through the range. It is somewhat enchanting. You come in sight of a shut-off corner, and it calls to your feet. You mustsee what is round that corner. But when you get there you find a road merely to another magnetic shut-off corner. You must go on. The next corner reveals another corner, always darker, gloomier. The noise of the rushing river increases as the great walls enclosing it come nearer together. You feel yourself becoming smaller and smaller, as if seen from above. You and your friend are a couple of small animals groveling at the bottom of a pit. On the right you see the ruins of Queen Tamara’s castle and that fatal window where her unfortunate guests were hurled into the river—the castle to which the Demon came. You feel yourself on your guard, as if some mysterious fate were in store for you. I have slept several times in a recess below that castle, and experienced an eerie feeling which is not caused entirely by history and tradition, but by something dreadful in the actual geography of the place. Thence, however, it is a splendid tramp up to the slopes of the great Kazbek mountain. You get into an exalted region, among stars and young clouds, and feel as ifyou had got away from the Devil and come nearer to God.
This grand open upper mountain country is continued to Kobi, which is a little Georgian village, hidden somewhere in a spacious basin of rose-colored porphyry. An ideal place in many respects. I have often thought of going there to live for a fair space of time. But since the War the region has become much more dangerous to strangers.
Of course, it may be urged that for glorious open country, it is hard to rival Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire Downs. That is true. It is fine country for a short tramping expedition. It widens the mind. A great thing to have a mind as wide and tolerant as the Great Plain, as healthy as the Downs.
The Steppes, however, make a greater impression—being so vast, so wild, so untamed, untameable. There is an exuberance of earth which I would not miss. There is an infinity greater than our domestic infinities. It will soon strike you when tramping that the word infinite does not always mean the same: there are grades in infinity and measures of the immeasurable.Thus there is a further and greater infinity upon the Steppes, upon the Veldt, upon the Canadian cornlands, than, for instance, on a clear day in the Fens.
There is also greater measure upward. The tent pole of the sky is longer. Clearer air gives a greater sense of the upward depth of space. At night this is especially noticeable. The stars are not pasted on black canvas, all one level surface. There is depth in the outer sky. You can see the planets poised; you can see behind the moon.
One may dream of prison in a cave, or gain a morbid fear of the narrowing walls of a ravine, but open country disenchants the mind. Freedom, room to breathe, is at least suggested to the senses. The wind does not attack in storm battalions, but comes equably and large-heartedly across the plain. The wind is a sane traveler, flicking the tops of the grasses as you do with your staff. It does not behave like a madman with a sword; it is not a wild cat springing from tree to tree. Not that you cannot get the worst of the wildness of a wind upon the moor—but it has a qualitythat gives courage, that puts heart into a man. Hence the Borrovian: “There’s a wind on the heath, brother!” The wind there is one’s friend.
Traveling on the Central Asian plain I remember a steady wind that blew all night long, as if it were engaged on the whole-time job of keeping the starry sky polished and swept. All night the ends of my sleeping sack flapped in the wind and I looked through trembling eyelashes at the moonlit snowy peaks of the great mountain wall between the “Tableland of Fools” and India.
A wind that came all the way out of the heart of China, never ceased to blow, and yet never raised the desert sand. The great wind of the old world was blowing, as it has blown for ages. It blew out of the past, turning the monotonous page of history books, blew out of dreams and legends of forgotten man, as out of the storybooks of the Caliphs, a wind which arose God knows where, far beyond the trails of the caravans, in the heart of the East.
You lie in a marvelous stillness. The stars become your men and women. You becomea man of Chaldea, and the constellations revive. There steals into your heart, and oh, how you needed it, the sweet influence of the Pleiades. Spellbound, you watch a ballet, a story up above. There are men on elephants and men tending camels, long strings of camels, ropes of camels, gulf streams of camels wending their way out of the South of the Universe into the bleak North. There are jeweled queens and striding harlequins and hesitating dwarfs. There are thirteen-year-old brides, with streaming luminous hair, riding on high-stepping ponies, riding the ways of the dark sky, till bid for by the heroes who come striding along the great ways from Arcturus.
The civilized world has been removed like a table that has been cleared, a table cluttered with papers and dishes. Civilization has been swept to one side. You cannot see it now; it is far away—indeed, out of your ken entirely. You are reduced to a child—whatever your age. You are a petted child of the universe. You shall be all by yourself in the midst of the world, and the Divine picturebook shall be put in your hands for you to open, to look at, to turn the marvelous page. So you lie there enthralled, with dilated, excited, bright-shining eyes; just you, so many feet by so many, and look up at infinite breadth and infinite depth. What is a cabinet thought about the stars, a
“Whoever looked upon them shiningNor turned to earth without repining.”
“Whoever looked upon them shiningNor turned to earth without repining.”
“Whoever looked upon them shiningNor turned to earth without repining.”
“Whoever looked upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining.”
compared with the rapturous poetic experience of having lived nights with them, reading them in the great open chamber of the Universe!