- By MARIE B. BYLES.
- (Bush Club and Sydney Bush Walkers.)
- "For seven consecutive days in the year at least, each man
or woman under the Rule (of the Voluntary Nobility, the Rulers
of H. G. Wells' "Modern Utopia") must go right out of the life
of all men or women and have no sort of intercourse with
mankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without paper or
money. Provisions must be taken for the period of the journey, a
rug or sleeping sack— for they must sleep under the open sky—but
no means of making a fire. They may study maps beforehand to
guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey
but they may not carry such help. They must not go by the beaten
way, or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare,
quiet places of the Globe—to insure good training and sturdiness
of body and mind—to draw their minds for a space from the
insistent details of life, from the intricate arguments and
fretting effort of work, from personal quarrels and personal
affections and the things of the heated room—out they must go,
clean out of the world—they must be alone with nature, necessity
and their own thoughts."
- It was twenty years since I had read those lines in H. G.
Wells' "Modern Utopia," but they had left an indelible
impression. Now was the chance to find out just how the rulers
of this Utopia really felt.
- NO BOOKS FOR COMPANIONSHIP.
- Reluctantly I put back on the bookshelves the slim volume of
"Some Sayings of the Buddha," which had seemed so appropriate to
take into the wilderness, for did not Buddha discover truth
while sitting alone in the forest? It seemed like putting away
the last link with mankind, and, frankly, I got just a trifle
panicky. But one must go alone!
- Unfortunately, I am not as hardy as those men and women of
the future, and anyhow H. G. Wells forgot to say what happened
when it rained, or perhaps the Utopians managed the weather—like
everything else—more satisfactorily than we do. Therefore it was
with certain concessions to weakness in the form of tent,
matches, compass and map that I eventually found myself at the
hotel at Kosciusko. At the Christmas dinner table the weirdest
and most wonderful reasons were invented as to why I should go
camping alone in the wilds for nine days. They ranged from
nudism and Yogi-ism. In the end I persuaded people I was neither
a nudist, nor a famous writer, nor a great poet, but just a
trifle mad. They appeared satisfied, and I was allowed to depart
in peace.
- The first morning I woke up in my tent above the calm waters
of a lonely alpine tarn, and the old school motto seemed to
flash across the sky:
- "So here hath been dawning another blue day. Think! Wilt
thou let it slip useless away?”
- And here were sixteen hours of daylight, and I positively
had to let them slip useless away. I've seldom tackled a more
difficult problem, but it had to be done, and I did it.
-
I walked a little, sometimes
slept in different places, and was once caught in a severe
thunder storm, but for the most part the holiday was uneventful.
-
Gradually
things emerged from the ground and the air and the sky that I
never knew were there before, and there was an increasing thrill
in little things like the porcelain-blue edges of the tiny white
flowers starring the moss-green banks of the laughing
streamlets, and an adventure in noticing they varied their
petals from five to seven.
-
Gradually,
too, the world and its happenings got further and further away,
and history passed like a cinematograph film to a god on
Olympus. The hills with their knowledge of the last ice age, ten
thousand years ago, took no account of empires—Babylonian,
Roman, Spanish, British, German or Japanese, what did they
matter ? The only thing that counted and persisted in that
cinematograph film, and grew as the years passed, was the little
slender plant of human kindliness and helpfulness, and that had
nothing to do with empires or wars.
-
Does one
learn anything new from being alone with Nature? Definitely, no!
One gets from Nature only interest on the capital one takes to
her. One gets no fresh capital.
-
Bat, if
one does not get anything new, one does get something old, very
old—the ability to sit still, to possess oneself and think.
About a hundred years ago, when life was comparatively slow,
Matthew Arnold wrote :
-
"We see
all sights from pole to pole, And glance and nod and bustle by,
And never once possess our soul Before we die."
-
Since then motor cars, aeroplanes,
telephones, wirelesses and a thousand other ways of speeding up
life have come into existence. We have been gathering speed like
an express train, faster and faster until to-day the inevitable
crash has come and the world is plunged into an orgy of
self-destruction. Perhaps, if everyone had gone out into the
wilds for one week every year completely alone, it might have
put on just sufficient brake to have prevented this appalling
crash. Anyhow, that is what the silent hills seemed to say as
they stood serene and calm in the dying sunlight.
-
And did I'
enjoy that lonely, tranquil holiday as much as other holidays ?
Frankly, I do not know. Such a holiday is not as exhilarating as
a strenuous one with congenial companions and plenty of
geographical problems to solve, but in the fullest sense of the
word a tranquil, lonely holiday is "recreational." One returns
from it completely re-created, cleaned and renewed mentally and
spiritually, and with an overwhelming love for humanity—if only
because one has done without the human species for so long. One
also returns with a detachment from the troubles of this world,
which all the greatest teachers have insisted is the essence of
happiness.
-
-
.... Far
away in the distance the mountains rose darkly, tipped by the
moon's rays and backed by stars.
-
As we
stood against it on the rise, the wind chilled our bodies, and
wove fantastic patterns with leaves and branches. With each
descent in the path came a break from the chill blast, but every
rise meant a further glimpse of the fascinating and almost
unreal scene far below us.
-
We had
heard nothing but the rustling of stunted bushes and leaning
trees till, quite suddently, laughter came to us on the wind,
and over the next crest the glow of a fire was visible. This
meant Glen Raphael, friends around a glowing fire, hot stew and
sound sleep, with an early rise next morning to view the glories
of the sun piercing the mists of Clear Hill.
-
