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To pass from theological, and philosophical truth, to the truth of civil business; it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear, and round dealing, is the honor of man's nature; and that mixture of falsehoods, is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding, and crooked courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice, that doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men. For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood, and breach of faith, cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal, to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold, that when Christ cometh, he shall not find faith upon the earth.

On January 24th we continued our journey over horrible deep mud-holes, which made the trail extremely dangerous. On that particular day we were travelling over sticky soil, so that when the mules trod in the deep holes they stuck with their hoofs and fell over, immediately struggling wildly to free themselves. One of my men was nearly thrown down a precipice that day, and all of us, as well as all the pack animals, had many unpleasant falls during that march. Swampy places like that were encountered for hundreds of metres at a time. In one place that day we had two kilometres of continuous swampy mud. In the afternoon I had a nasty fall, the mule rolling right on the top of me and nearly breaking my right leg. The animal in falling had sunk its head in the sticky mud, and was struggling madly to release itself. The animals were then marching chest-deep in mud. In my helpless condition I tried to get off when the animal fell, but sank up to my waist and stuck fast with my legs in the mud. When the mule rolled over, it knocked me down on the edge of the precipice, my leg remaining caught under the animal. Had not one of my muleteers been by my side at the moment and rushed to my rescue, I should have fared badly indeed.

Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that it tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed too much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to make our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do so, but it must be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we must face the fact that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed amiss, and realise, if we can, that our happiness is bound up with energetically trying to escape from conditions which we cannot avoid. When we are young and fiery-hearted, we think that a tame counsel; but, like all great truths, it dawns on us slowly. Not until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp how huge, how complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields, woods, hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in middle age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about it are, though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in youth, if only for the delight of learning how much more magnificent is the real design.

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