char x THE TRIDENT 141 



parts, by the point of the compass at which it stands. 

 Garwood and Trevor-Battye took the ponies and went down 

 the valley, whilst I struck camp. They were lost in the 

 mist a few yards away, and I was alone with the glaucous 

 gulls. Pulling down and packing tents and baggage is slow 

 and rather tough work for a single pair of hands. As each 

 bundle was completed I carried it down to the foot of the 

 hill, across a brook, and deposited it at the margin of the 

 ford about three furlongs away. There were infinite small 

 tins and bags to be bundled up somehow ; having travelled 

 hither on sledges, there were no sacks to hold them. After 

 an hour or so the mist rose about a hundred feet off the 

 ground, revealing the solemn brown and purple plain with 

 leaden rivers flowing through it — a flat of apparently limit- 

 less extent, for all its margins ultimately faded into fog. 



Eight heavy loads I portered, one by one, down the 

 boggy hill-side. The first was something carried away from 

 camp out into the wide world ; but, as each load followed 

 and fewer remained behind, as each tent was in turn 

 emptied, and the canteen and store-tins disappeared, the 

 sense of home was taken from the old place, and gradually 

 transferred to the pile of baggage by the ford. Strange, 

 how keen in the wilderness becomes the sentiment attach- 

 ing to " one's things," the visible and transient connection 

 that for the time links one with a particular spot and 

 distinguishes it from all others ! Their presence anywhere 

 invests the place with a kind of consecration, as of the 

 Aryans' sacred hearth. Remove them elsewhere, and the 

 spot they quit reverts at once to its former aloofness. The 

 stones on the ground, for a day known so well, give up 

 their individuality, and become mere common fragments of 

 the broken hill-side, not different from millions more about 

 them. The camp-knoll melts into the landscape, and is 

 unrecognised a mile away. 



