"That is the picture that somehow or other, even in my most material mood, is evoked by the thought of the place. The rationalist explanation of the coming fever is far more satisfactory and scientific; but the other keeps recurring—a curious experience anyhow.
"If you have nothing to do you might write me a line to Stockholm, Poste Restante. I am going north to have a look at the ice. Altogether, what with the East still open before me, I do not expect to come home for two or three years.
"You are one of the few friends I can rely upon, so I carry about with me a letter addressed to you; in case of my death you will be the first to be notified of the fact.
I have given this letter in full, because it affords a good example of Arthur's descriptive style, which always struck me as being vivid and graphic, and also because this little incident, not by the proof it itself afforded, but by the turn it gave his thoughts—then rather rapidly drifting into materialism—was the first step in a kind of conversion from the purely physical views of life he had been apt to take. The episode itself, too, is a curious one, and may deserve to be recorded.
Nothing is more hopelessly wearisome than descriptions of travel; even George Eliot could not make in her diaries Florence anything but dull. I shall confine myself to sketching his route, to telling one incident among the few he told me, and describing his return.
I had no more letters from him; but he has told me that he got to Spitzbergen, and in a whaler to the edge of the great arctic ice-field. He sailed to America and crossed it. From San Francisco he visited Peru and the Amazon, on which river he spent a month. Then he went to Africa, to what part I do not know, except that he came down the Nile; and then he wandered through Asia Minor, Persia, and India; he penetrated a little way into Thibet, and saw China and Japan; he went up to the mouth of the Siberian rivers, travelling for three months with a party of gipsies, who taught him many curious things, such as their own language and freemasonry, the use of simples, the properties of water, and the strange things that can be done with even such things as docks and nettles, and other plants which we toss away as weeds. He told me that in that branch of secret knowledge, as in all others, there was a vast deal of nonsense but a solid residuum of truth; and he said, half jestingly, that they had sworn him a member of their brotherhood, and what was more, he had since discovered many members of the brotherhood in civilized nations, even in "kings' houses."