HUMANITY, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get at and more generally present than you seem to know. You are yourselves human beings, dear people. Yet how many have so fully understood their fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man will behave or why any man behaves as he does? But with that I am not to-day concerned. I am concerned with another matter, which is the impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we desire to do so. Note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of you, try to get away from your brothers. You do not like solitudes; you like sham, theatrical solitudes. You like the Highlands on condition that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. Now if you had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards of the Rhine and the Moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the Highlands, then you are certainly[202] taking humanity with you. If you could follow the thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting rid of humanity. All the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. You cannot make a desert except by staying away from it yourself. All of which leads me to the Barber.
First, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man. For exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing this. Of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. For though I had not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as I went into the Uplands I bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a Decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned mine.
My way over the mountains lay up a gulley which[203] turned as unexpectedly as might the street of a medi?val town; and which was quite as narrow and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils. Still, though I hated to be away from men I went on because I desired to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people, of whom I had heard from poets and of whom I had read in old books. They were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within the State. This curious little place I determined to see, though the approach to it was difficult. There are many such in Europe, but this one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and I might say in a sense worshipped, by the powerful Government to which it is nominally subject.
Well, then, I went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it grew dark before I was aware, and when I could have sworn I was about four thousand feet up I was close upon eight thousand. I had hoped to manage the Farther Valleys before nightfall, but when I found it was impossible what I did was this: I scrambled down the first four or five hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until I came to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. It was not large enough to supply a cottage[204] well, but it would do to camp by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to burn. Next morning with the first of the light I went on my scramble downwards—and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered in the great mountains of Europe knows so well), I was in the Wrong Valley. I was used to that sort of thing, and I recognised the signs of it at once. I made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; I tried to guess from my map what sort of error I had made (and failed). I knew that if I followed running water I should come at last to men. At about three o’clock in the afternoon I made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much noise as though it were a politician. Then I thought I would sleep a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all necessary). It was five when I rose and took up my journey again. I shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when I saw something which is quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. That meant a road, and a road means men—sooner or later.
Sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now almost continuous, I rounded a big rock and there was............