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Bradantia Directory 09
Page 02
We walked and walked the entire day, until 6 p.m., covering a distance of 26 kil. The Indian Miguel worried me the whole day, saying that cutting the _picada_ was heavy work and he could not go on, as his finger was hurting him, and the pay he received--L1 sterling a day--was too small for the work he had to do. I had to keep constant watch on him, as he was a man of a slippery nature, and I did not know what he might do from one moment to another. Also he said we were simply committing suicide by trying to go through the virgin forest, as we should meet thousands of Indians who would attack us, and we had no chance of escape. I needed this man and his companion to carry my sextant and the unexposed photographic plates, some two hundred of them, which were of considerable weight.
IT HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god. For it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred, and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue, that it should have any character at all, of the divine nature; except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self, for a higher conversation: such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen; as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really, in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo; because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.
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