The Actual Movement From One Place To Another, In Europeanised
Countries, Is A Process So Temporary - It Occupies, I Mean,
So small
a proportion of the traveller's entire time - that his mind remains
unsettled, so long as the wheels are
Going; he may be alive enough
to external objects of interest, and to the crowding ideas which
are often invited by the excitement of a changing scene, but he is
still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is
constantly recurring to the expected end of his journey; his
ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted, and before any new
mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel. It
will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day after
day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in
the stirrup. To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to
lead, or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests
and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this
becomes your MODE OF LIFE, and you ride, eat, drink, and curse the
mosquitoes as systematically as your friends in England eat, drink,
and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period
of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing
you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare
and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after
times you may love to date the moulding of your character - that is,
your very identity.
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