Excerpt from First Footsteps in East Africa
To most of us, life without adventure would appear intolerable, more stagnant than a marsh, and more monotonous than the desert. In marsh or desert there is often the chance of risk, the hope of discovery, and nearly always the grandeur of solitude. But without adventure the finest opportunities of risk, discovery, and even solitude could not be ours, and life would be reduced to a dead level of safety, knowledge, and society. I am using the word "adventure" in the special sense which it has come to bear - the exploration of unknown lands and savage or unknown peoples. There are other kinds of adventure - campaigns, battles, lonely explorations of thought, and dangerous discoveries of unknown truth or beauty. Almost any act of devotion in which life or reputation or possessions are risked for some greater object than gain or self-advancement might be called an adventure. But the word generally summons up to our mind a picture of the world's explorers, and, perhaps, it is significant that the great periods of exploration have coincided with the most remarkable discoveries of truth and beauty, and that the brief lifetimes which we mark by such names as Herodotus, C?sar, Columbus, Drake, and Livingstone are also conspicuous in the world's history as ages of particular power in wisdom, art, invention, and scientific thought. It seems as though the discovery of strange lands and tongues and customs was in itself sufficient to shake man's easy self-complacency, to disturb the power of habit which always seeks to enchain him, and to urge us into unvisited regions beyond the established frontiers of knowledge or belief.
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