However, help is at hand in the shape of a peasant saviour, a deus ex machina who, before he left Stevenson’s company, gave him “some excellent, if inhumane, advice”. “What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg.” There was something neat and high-bred, a quaker-ish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot.”Īnd so RLS and Modestine set off – at her own pace… “Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. Here, Stevenson introduces Modestine, his celebrated donkey: The brilliance of Travels With a Donkey is to keep the reader always suspended in the moment, through a combination of wry and exquisite observation and an undercurrent of delight in the pleasures of the human comedy. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future?” To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. The great affair is to move to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Stevenson also articulates a credo that would become central to the writing of Robert Byron, Redmond O’Hanlon and many other later travel writers: “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. Stevenson is a master of technique he knows instinctively how to animate the most mundane moments However, from a short list, Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes remains Stevenson’s masterpiece, a “little book” that describes a wayward, inconsequential journey and a strange love affair (with a donkey) in which, as in all the best journeys, the author finds himself renewed, refreshed and, returning from his travels, once more ready for the fray. Graham Greene, Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin (among many) all owe a debt to An Inland Voyage and The Amateur Emigrant.

Modestine donkey