Foreword

FOREWORD

There are many to whom new places are only new pictures. But, after much wandering, this thing I have learned, and I wish I had learned it sooner: that travel is a matter, not only of seeing, but of doing.

It is much more than that. It is a matter of new human contacts. It is not of places, but of people. What are regions but the setting for life? The desert, without its Arabs, is but the place that God forgot.

To travel, then, is to do, not only to see. To travel best is to be of the sportsmen of the road. To take a chance, and win; to feel the glow of muscles too long unused; to sleep on the ground at night and find it soft; to eat, not because it is time to eat, but because one's body is clamoring for food; to drink where every stream and river is pure and cold; to get close to the earth and see the stars—this is travel.