maandag 31 januari 2011

Door de woestijn


Wie van plan is door de woestijn te reizen, doet dat best zo traag mogelijk. Dat verdrijft de eentonigheid. Goed advies van woestijnreiziger Wilfred Thesiger, in Arabian Sands. Prachtig boek, trouwens.
"Sometimes I counted my footsteps to a bush or to some other mark, and this number seemed but a trifle deducted from the sum that lay ahead of us. Yet I had no desire to travel faster. In this way there was time to notice things - a grasshopper under a bush, a dead swallow on the ground, the tracks of a hare, a bird's nest, the shape and colour of ripples on the sand, the bloom of tiny seedlings pushing through the soil. There was time to collect a plant or to look at a rock. The very slowness of our march diminished its monotony. I thought how terribly boring it would be to rush about this country in a car."

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