A horrible feeling of desolation pinched my heart. I listened rigid but heard nothing but the creep of blood in my ears.

Great and shadowy and strange was the World and I drifted solitary through its vast mysteries.

A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again in my mind.

I found myself standing astonished, my emotions penetrated by something I could not understand.

I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop.

I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience.

What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?

It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expedition.

As the hush of the evening crept over the World, the sun touched the mountains and became very swiftly a blazing hemisphere of liquid flame, and sank.

Then, slow and soft and wrapping the World in fold after fold of deepening blue, came the night.

And then, the splendor of the sight – in the sky, one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.

The full temerity of my voyage suddenly came upon me. At last I began to feel the pull of the Earth upon my being, drawing me back again to the life that is real, for men.