Getting back meant less to her than to me, who had, paradoxically, at once more ties and more detachment: a greater capacity to enjoy a life to which at frequent intervals I feel myself a stranger, and at the same time more friends and facilities with which to enjoy it. I wished it was not like this. On the road we had, I think, found much the same kind of happiness in much the same kind of things; and I would have liked the end of the road to have given us both an equal pleasure.

They gave us lunch, and afterwards we sat round a fire, talking pleasantly and reading The Bystander, in whose pages the startled, cretinous faces of first-nighters, the simper of hack beauties (‘who is, of course, . . .’) presaged repulsively the world awaiting us. As a cure for nostalgia, give me an illustrated weekly paper.

We were getting very near the end of the journey, and after dinner I promised Wahab my boots. They were splendid boots, boots beyond compare; but in spite of the cobblers of Kashgar they were—I had to admit it—in extremis. Next morning, as I drew them on and laced them up (an interminable and irritating process) for the last time but one, I remembered very clearly how they had come into my life. An office on Wall Street; an invitation to shoot quail in Alabama; and then the boots, bought cheaply in a store on Broadway. I remembered how, crashing up Sixth Avenue on the elevated, I had (almost) caressed the bulky parcel which symbolized a week’s reprieve from what I regarded as the intolerable process of being initiated into high finance. Even when new, they had been the best of boots; I had had a lot of fun in them. Baptized in the swamps of Alabama, they had won their spurs on a Guatemalan volcano. They had trodden rabbits out of English brambles, and they were no strangers to the nauseous but snipe-haunted mud of rice fields of South China. Thus seasoned, they had journeyed to Brazil and bore the scars which boots acquire in the Matto Grosso jungles. They had even been round the world, pausing en route to march with a Japanese column on a punitive expedition in Manchuria. They had been a marvel to the ill-shod Caucasus, and a joke (because they were so thin) in wintry Mongolia. On this journey alone I had been asked how much they cost at least a hundred times. They stood for freedom and the backblocks; they stood for the luck which had always dogged me while I wore them. And it is not, after all, every pair of boots in which you can travel, sockless, for several months without discomfort, sometimes doing twenty-mile stages on foot. I gave them to Wahab in Srinagar, though I cannot believe that they are not still somewhere among my possessions, ready for foolish and improbable activities. We shall not look upon their like again.

It all seemed to belong to another journey, made by other people.

We no longer felt homesick for Kashgar, or indeed for anywhere else.

. . . and the Mauser pistols of the waiters knocked ominously against the back of your chair as they leant over you with the dishes.

The raptures of arrival were unqualified. Discovery is a delightful process, but rediscovery is better; few people can ever have enjoyed a bath more than we did, who had not had one for five and a half months.

We had neither of us, before starting, read one in twenty of the books that we ought to have read, and our preconceptions of what a place was going to be like were never based, as they usefully could have been on the experience of our few but illustrious predecessors in these regions. Cherchen, for all we know or could find our, might be a walled city, or a cluster of tents, or almost any other variation on the urban theme. This state of affairs reflected discreditably on us but was not without its compensations. It was pleasant, in a way, to be journeying always into the blue, with no Baedeker to eliminate surprise and marshal our first impressions in advance; it was pleasant, now, to be within one march of Cherchen and to have not the very slightest idea what Cherchen was going to look like.

Kini fished a mackintosh out of her saddle-bag, and the sight of its dank folds evoked a vision of England, of jaded holiday makers quartering their small island in search of sun and privacy.

We had, by this time, an unbridled lust for news or anything that smelt of news.

We neither of us particularly minded discomfort and uncertainty and doing without most of the things which civilized people consider, or imagine that they consider, essential to the conduct of a rational life; and we both liked fresh air and exercise, of which we got plenty. We were both adaptable and fairly phlegmatic; and we were both fatalists, as all travelers, and especially travelers in Asia, ought to be.

In Macaulay’s History of England (which had now succeeded Arsene Lupin in our intellectual regime) he speaks with smug Victorian condescension of ‘the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place’; and there was a certain fascination in rediscovering a layer of experience whose very existence the contemporary world has forgotten. We had left the twentieth century behind with the lorries at Lanchow, and now we were up against the immemorial obstacles, the things which had bothered Alexander and worried the men who rode with Chinghis Khan—lack of beasts, lack of water, lack of grazing. We were doing the same stages every day that Marco Polo would have done if he had branched south from the Silk Road into the mountains.

But there were days, or parts of days, when no such material stimululs to thought and conversation, no such gross foundation for peace of mind, were needed: days when we rode or walked for hours, singly or together, filled with contentment at our lot. The sun shone, the mountains were alluring on our left, and we remembered the virtues of desolation and felt keenly the compensations of a nomad’s life. Each march, each camp, differed very slightly from the one before; but they did differ, and we appreciated the slight but ever present freshness of our experience as much as we appreciated the tiny changes in the flavor of our food.

The poor gesture which man had made towards establishing himself there, the dingy skeleton of domesticity, enhanced to an overpowering degree the desolation of the place. Dzunchia looked, felt, and smelt like the end of the world.

There were times when the language difficulty, which prevented us from ever really knowing what was happening to us until it happened, lent a certain zest to life.

In all our world only the moon, the familiar moon, was real and linked us to a life we knew.

I argued that we were due for one. I have a superstitious conviction that every improbable enterprise, as long as it is carried out in a sensible and modest way, has a kind of divine right to one slice of luck every so often.

Here, in the greatest temple, looking down from a high gallery upon the huddled chanting figures, I caught for a moment, and for the first time, something of that dark and powerful glamour with which Western superstition endows the sacred places of the East.

Our spacious and remorseful mediations, our regrets for things distant and foregone, would contract rapidly to consciousness of the candlelight and the embers and the kettle; life, and our venture, and ourselves would be reduced once more to their right and ridiculous proportions. What did it all matter? Things might be worse. We still had a chance. Let’s make some tea.

The next day, and for two more days thereafter, we traveled on. Life had become a very simple, soothing affair: so soothing that we forgot our complicated ambitions and the difficulties that lay in store for us. It was enough to be crawling westwards in the bright, clean, mountain air; food and sleep were the only things that seemed important.

And the mere fact that the odds against us had lengthened gave us a feeling of freedom, a perverse, light-headed conviction that we were irresistible. Luck had always been the chief of the factors that could get us through; now that it was the only factor the journey had lost what little seriousness it ever had.

From an aesthetic rather than from an ethical point of view, we were repelled by the modern tendency to exaggerate, romanticize, and at last cheapen out of recognition the ends of the earth and the deeds done in their vicinity.

Most journeys begin less abruptly than they end, and to fix the true beginning of this one in either time or space is a task which I do not care to undertake.

. . . to describe the journey without even involuntary falsification, to tell what it felt like at the time, to give a true picture of a monotonous, unheroic, but strange existence.

Our selfishness was of course the operative factor. I have said that we traveled for two reasons only, and I have tried to explain one of them. The second, which was far more cogent than the first, was because we wanted to travel—because we believed in the light of previous experience, that we would enjoy it. It turned out that we were right. We enjoyed it very much indeed.

So, although we brought back only News from Tartary when we might have brought back Knowledge, we at least had some excuse for going there; our selfishness was in part disguised, our amateurishness in part condoned.

For much of the time we were in country very little known – country where even the collated wisdom represented by our maps was sometimes at fault and seldom comprehensive; and although at almost no point on our route could we have regarded ourselves as pioneers, there was hardly a stretch of it which did not offer great opportunities to specialists – opportunities to amplify, confirm, or contradict the findings of their rare and distinguished predecessors. We did not avail ourselves of these opportunities; we were no specialists. The world’s stock of knowledge—geographical, ethnological, meteorological, what you will—gained nothing from our journey. Nor did we mean that it should. Much as we should have liked to justify our existence by bringing back material which would have set the hive of learned men buzzing with confusion or complacency, we were not qualified to do so. We measured no skulls, we took no readings; we would not have known how.

A train whistled. It was time to return to the station, to step back into a former life. The interlude was over. The blue and green scenery must be stored away, the plot condensed to meet the exigencies of conversation. In these demure streets, where regular lamps burnt palely in the dusk, it was all, even now, a little difficult to believe. Soon it would be hard to remember.

It had been great fun, and very funny. Reality is a commodity hard to come by: and, when found, not always easily recognizable. One gropes for it through a fog of preconceptions, misled by other people’s labels; the highest authorities have perhaps pondered the subject too deeply to be of service here. No one can say with certainty, ‘I found reality at such a place and such a time’; but there are days and circumstances in which, when one looks back on them, it seems as if reality was not so far away as usual. For me, at any rate, some of the days and some of the circumstances I have described were of that sort, in spite of their strong flavour of the ludicrous and the fantastic.

If I learnt nothing else from that long journey in Brazil, it taught me at least how exquisite a satisfaction can, under the right conditions, be found in ordinary, elemental, unregarded things: a drink of water, a bit of bread, the warmth of a fire, a ride on a lorry. By contrast, the pleasures of normal life seem pale and recondite; in civilization one cannot keep one’s palate clean for experience.

Our hunger, permanent though mild, was probably a blessing in disguise; for nothing turns you in on yourself so much as the Great Open Spaces. Those slow bright days on a shining river between two ragged intermittent walls of trees should, by rights, have provided an ideal background for meditation. Here, if anywhere, you would have thought, were peace and comprehension to be found. But it was not so. The uncharted immensities imposed on us an almost unbelievably parochial outlook; the empty world between those boundless horizons was like a room of mirrors. From day to day nothing changed; the interests and contacts which made up our normal lives had been in abeyance for months. We were bounded in a nut-shell twenty feet long; and, although we could count ourselves lords of infinite space, it was to that overcrowded nut-shell, with its small troubles and its small triumphs, that our thoughts always returned. Only hunger and paddling kept the minds of its occupants from dwelling too closely on themselves through the slow, hot hours.

Food dominated our lives. Continuous hunger is in many ways a very satisfactory basis for existence. It is, obviously, not the key to contentment; but it is an effective protection against the darker forms of discontent. An empty stomach does not give you confidence in yourself; but it numbs the critical faculties, and puts an end to introspection. Preoccupied with your memories of the last meal and your plans for the next, you have no occasion to indulge those grave doubts with regard to life in general and yourself in particular which would normally fill days as monotonous and unvarying as ours were.

They were traveling downstream, with no men and very few supplies: doing their own cooking and taking their time. They had a number of vague but rather dashing plans, each of which they abandoned in turn. They were going up the Rio das Mortes: they were going up the Tapirape: they were going to look for diamonds: they were going to stay in the interior through the rainy season. Each project fired the imagination for a time, and each was eventually dropped and forgotten. In point of fact, they did not much mind what they did and they had no particular qualifications for doing anything at all, except travel, under the best sort of conditions, through a part of Brazil which very few of their countrymen, and none of their class, had ever dreamed of visiting. They were cheerful, aimless vagabonds, full of an enterprise which was none the less admirable for being ill co-ordinated.

For some reason, I remember that hot bright noon as being full of a curious delight. I was in that psychological state always described by the characters in Mr. Ernest Hemingway’s novels as ‘feeling good’. My perceptions were sharper than usual, my power to appreciate had suddenly expanded. All the things I saw seemed to me exactly right; I read their meaning so easily, so instinctively, that there was for once no need to try and define it. I had that uncritical exhilaration, that clear conviction that this was a good day in a good world, which one has known so seldom since childhood, when snow overnight would evoke it, or permission to bathe before breakfast, or the crackle of brown paper on a Christmas morning.

To these long days beneath the wheeling sun urgency lent an added interest. It is rarely that the mere fact of being in a hurry fails to increase one’s self importance; as we struggled slowly through the wide and faintly contemptuous desolation we as it were buried our heads in our haste and overlooked our own insignificance. Like a bee in a cathedral, the expedition fussed along and kept awe at bay with a buzz. We had seen so much time wasted in Brazil that now we fell in a kind of fury on the flanks of delay, whenever these were exposed. Not that they were exposed very often, or to any great depth. A more than usually flying start might save ten minutes when we broke camp at dawn. The cook might pare off a fraction of our two-hour stop at noon. We might make an extra league or so by camping late. Perhaps dispatch gained for us half a day in six. Of course it was not really worth gaining; it made no difference in the end. But at the time, as I have tried to explain, it gave a tang to life. All round us were hundreds and hundreds of square miles of country on which the march of centuries had left no trace. Since the dawn of time (whenever that was) this patch of the earth’s crust had been green and empty; it was green and empty still. Aeons had passed there, unregarded. And now here were we, stealing minutes under the nose of eternity, gleefully counting our petty swag in a place where a century was hardly legal tender. In all this there was a comforting sense of the ridiculous.

But he gave no hint of what was delaying him, and it was not until afterwards that we learnt that he had stopped because he would not allow his men to paddle on Sunday. Sunday! We had forgotten all about it. To stumble on it suddenly in the middle of that uncalendared wilderness, and to find, moreover, that its existence could discipline this bright unruly life was as surprising as if we had discovered a degree of latitude embodied in a high brick wall. In waste places time is also waste; and a notice bidding us Keep Off the Grass would not have seemed more incongruous than this heroically irrelevant homage to a seventh day. We went on upstream, marveling. The missionary, tortoise-bereft, sat down once more before his little tent.

It [the little hill] belonged to the order of eternal, reassuring things from which we were indefinitely parted but of which we did not consciously feel the lack: things like Saturdays, and bacon and bare branches against a grey sky. I was grateful for the little hill.

But the magic drained gradually out of the day, and you awoke from your thoughts to find that the river had become a hard and customary place.

The routine of travel was invariable. It was odd how grateful one was for that element of routine. It gave form and substance to those dateless days. It rounded up the bright desolate hours and placed on all of them a brand, however faint, which somehow guaranteed the worth. Little habits, little conventions, little regulations were erected like a palisade against the wilderness. Routine is the most portable form of domesticity, and unconsciously but gladly we took refuge in it. We were nomads by numbers.

One began with discovery, passed on to acceptance, and ended in criticism.

Now that we had reached our scene of action this habit persisted. Much of what we saw and did was clearly too good to be true. Life was always perilously close to the pages of those books which publishers catalogue under the heading of ‘Travel and Adventure’. In self-defence – in instinctive pursuance of that policy of nil admirari which is the joint product of repression, sophistication, and all the hot air one hears, we turned to parody. If Indians approached us, we referred to them as the Oncoming Savages. We never said, ‘Was that a shot?’ but always, ‘Was that the well-known bark of a Mauser?’ All insects of harmless nature and ridiculous appearance we pointed out to each other as creatures ‘whose slightest glance spelt Death’. Any bird larger than a thrush we credited with the ability to ‘break a man’s arm with a single blow of its powerful wing’. We spoke of water always as the ‘Precious Fluid’. We referred to ourselves, not as eating meals, but as doing ‘Ample Justice to a Frugal Repast’. To anyone who did not think it as funny as we did it must have been an intolerably tiresome kind of joke. But it made us laugh, and thus served its purpose. It became an important feature in the private code of nonsense which was our chief defence against hostile circumstance.

All these things were familiar, though they had once been remarkable.

Certain people, of whom I am one, thrive in an atmosphere of uncertainty. It is not that we have the gambler’s spirit, that we challenge chance for the sake of the game. We are not so dashing. If we take risks, we take them because we are lazy. We delegate our responsibilities to fate. In any situation, the more you are obliged to leave to chance, the less you are obliged to do yourself. Being for the most part inefficient, incapable of foresight, and rather irresponsible, we like best those situations in which a great deal has to be left to chance.

In our more rational moments we fell back on a kind of lackadaisical fatalism; when we got out there, Roger and I used to remind each other, the possible and the impossible, the probable and the improbable, would sort themselves out automatically.

There were the Prudent, who said: ‘This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do.’ There were the Wise, who said: ‘This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do; but at least you will know better next time.’ There were the Very Wise, who said: ‘This is a foolish thing to do, but not nearly so foolish as it sounds.’ There were the Romantic, who appeared to believe that if everyone did this sort of thing all the time the world’s troubles would soon be over. There were the Envious, who thanked God they were not coming; and there were the other sort, who said with varying degrees of insincerity that they would give anything to come. There were the Correct, who asked me if I knew any of the people at the Embassy. There were the Practical, who spoke at length of inoculations and calibers. There were the people whose geography was not their strong point, and who either offered me letters of introduction to their cousins in Buenos Aires or supposed that I would find a good many Aztec ruins. There were the Apprehensive, who asked me if I had made my will. There were the Men Who Had Done A Certain Amount of That Sort of Thing In Their Time, You Know, and these imparted to me elaborate stratagems for getting the better of ants and told me that monkeys made excellent eating, and so for that matter did lizards, and parrots; they all tasted rather like chicken.

So it requires far less courage to be an explorer than to be a chartered accountant. The courage which enables you to face the prospect of sitting on a high stool in a smoky town and adding up figures over a period of years is definitely a higher, as well as a more useful, sort of courage than any which the explorer may be called on to display. For the explorer is living under natural conditions, and the difficulties he meets with are the sort of difficulties which Nature equipped man to face: whereas the chartered accountant is living under unnatural conditions, to which a great deal of his equipment is dangerously ill-suited. Moreover, and finally, the chartered accountant is doing an essential job, and the explorer (in these days) is not.

For (and this is where clubland gets its values wrong) adventure is really a soft option. Adventure has always been a selfish business. Men who set out to find it may – like men who go and get married – feel reasonably confident that a successful issue to their project will be of service to the world. But the desire to benefit the community is never their principal motive, any more than it is the principal motive of people who marry each other. They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea.

Of course there is still plenty of adventure of a sort to he had. You can even make it pay, with a little care; for it is easy to attract public attention to any exploit which is at once highly improbable and absolutely useless.

For adventure – adventure in the grand old manner – is obsolete, having been either exalted to a specialist’s job or degraded to a stunt. It is all very well to cheapen us against the Elizabethans, for whom every other landfall meant a colony. In those days all you needed was an enquiring turn of mind and a profound contempt for scurvy and Spaniards. A passage on any boat with a sufficiently conjectural destination was almost certain to make an Empire builder of you. And since on those journeys every able-bodied man was useful, you were entitled to feel that you were doing something worth doing. Nobody accused you of wanting balance, or said it was time you settled down. The community capitalized your wanderlust. Restlessness was good citizenship.

The expedition may claim to have thrown a little (but not much) light, of a wholly confirmatory nature, on the mystery surrounding colonel Fawcett’s disappearance. Otherwise, beyond the completion of a 3000 mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, nothing of importance was achieved.

But where they make their gravest error is in supposing, as dramatists and film directors have license to suppose, that the process of Getting Away From It All has a climax, that there comes a sharp, sweet moment when the escaper consciously relishes the full flavor of escape. In my experience, no such moment exists. We do not, today, cut loose. We wriggle out of one complicated existence like a snake sloughing its skin, and by the time we have wriggled into the next it has become complicated too. . . . The old life overlaps what should have been the most exhilarating moments of the new; the first stage on the golden road to Samarkand has no enchantment for the man who is doubtful whether he packed his shoes.