A hundred years ago, when Robert Falcon Scott set out for Antarctica on his Terra Nova expedition, his two primary goals were scientific discovery and reaching the geographic South Pole. Arguably, though, Scott was really chasing what contemporary observers call a sufferfest. He set himself up for trouble: Scott brought Manchurian and Siberian ponies that quickly fell through the snow and ice; he planned, in part, for his crew to “man-haul,” meaning that the men would pull sleds full of gear, instead of relying on dogs. Even when Scott’s men faltered, they continued collecting specimens, including rocks. The expedition ended terribly; everybody who made the push to the pole died. Miserable, starving and frostbitten, one of Scott’s last four men killed himself by walking into a blizzard without even bothering to put on his boots.
100年前(1912年)，英国极地探险家罗伯特·法尔肯·斯科特启程前往南极洲，开始进行特拉诺瓦远征(Terra Nova，意为“新陆地”) 。斯科特此行的主要目的有两个：科学发现；抵达地理学上的南极点。然而我们可以说，斯科特真正追求的，是当代观察家所称的“苦难之旅”。斯科特总是自找苦吃：他购买的满洲矮种马和西伯利亚矮种马在冰雪中迅速倒地；他没有采用“狗拉雪橇”，而是采用“人拉雪橇”，也就是让探险队员用人力拉动满载各种设备的雪橇。即使是在冰雪中举步维艰的时候，斯科特探险队依旧在采集岩石等标本。此次远征的结局非常悲惨：四名向南极点发起冲锋的探险队员全部葬身冰原。饱受饥饿、冻伤折磨的劳伦斯·奥茨（四名队员之一）甚至连靴子都没穿就步入暴风雪中，凄凉地结束了自己的生命。

In the taxonomy of travelers, the word “explorer” suggests a morally superior pioneer, a man or woman who braves the battle against nature to discover new terrain, expanding our species’ understanding of the world. “Adventurer,” by contrast, implies a self-indulgent adrenaline junkie, who scares loved ones by courting puerile risk. The former, obviously, is the far better title, but it’s tough to claim these days. The world is Google-mapped. Reaching the actual virgin territory of space or the deep ocean requires resources that few possess. In short, the noble fig leaf of terra incognita has fallen away and laid bare the peripatetic, outsize bravado of Scott’s kindred spirits. The resulting itineraries are pretty strange. We now have guys like Felix Baumgartner sky-diving from a balloon-borne capsule at 128,100 feet.
在旅行者的分类学中,“探险家”指的是道德高尚的先驱者，他或她为了发现新的地域，勇于向大自然发起挑战，从而拓展了人类对世界的认识。相反，“冒险家”指的是自我放纵的肾上腺素迷。他们追求幼稚的冒险，让心爱的人担惊受怕。显然，前者的含义远远好于后者。但时至今日，要获得“探险家”的头衔非常艰难。世界各地都为谷歌地图所覆盖，要抵达外太空或大洋深处真正的处女地又需要大量的资源，大多数人根本不会有。简而言之，“未知领域”凸显了斯科特式的环游大冒险，但这块华美的遮羞布已经不复存在。旅行路线因而变得非常奇怪。现在，我们有菲利克斯·保加拿这样的冒险家，这名跳伞好手从气球悬吊的太空舱里一跃而下，征服了128100英尺的高度。
Baumgartner falls squarely — and for more than four minutes, breaking the speed of sound — into the adventurer camp. But then there’s Sarah Marquis, who perhaps should be seen as an explorer like Scott, born in the wrong age. She is 42 and Swiss, and has spent three of the past four years walking about 10,000 miles by herself, from Siberia through the Gobi Desert, China, Laos and Thailand, then taking a cargo boat to Brisbane, Australia, and walking across that continent. Along the way, like Scott, she has starved, she has frozen, she has (wo)man-hauled. She has pushed herself at great physical cost to places she wanted to love but ended up feeling, as Scott wrote of the South Pole in his journal: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Despite planning a ludicrous trip, and dying on it, Scott became beloved and, somewhat improbably, hugely respected. Marquis, meanwhile, can be confounding. “You tell people what you’re doing, and they say, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Marquis told me. “It’s never: ‘Cool project, Sarah! Go for it.’ ” Perhaps this is because the territory Marquis explores is really internal — the nature of fear, the limits of stamina and self-reliance and the meaning of traveling in nature as a female human animal, alone.
历时四分多钟，保加拿成功完成了此次超音速跳伞，径直跳入了冒险家的阵营。不过,这里还有一位莎拉·马奎斯。她或许应该被视为斯科特式的探险家，但却生不逢时。在过去的四年中，这位现年42岁的瑞士女人用时三年，独自走完了10000英里的征程：从西伯利亚出发，穿越戈壁大沙漠、中国、老挝、泰国；然后乘坐货轮前往澳大利亚的布里斯班，进而穿越澳洲。一路上，她也和斯科特一样，经历了饥饿、冰冻、“人拉雪橇”。马奎斯精疲力竭地抵达目的地后，才发觉这些自己本想用心去爱的地方原来与斯科特探险日记中的南极点如出一辙：“天哪！这地方糟糕透了！”虽然斯科特导演了一次非常荒唐的南极探险，最终还为此付出了生命，但他还是因此备受爱戴（多少有些难以置信）。不过，马奎斯可能会让人感到惊诧。“你告诉别人你在做什么之后，别人会说‘你疯了’”马奎斯对我说道：“他们从来不会说‘好酷的计划，莎拉！试试看吧！’”也许这是因为马奎斯是在探索真正的内在世界 – 畏惧的天性、毅力和自力更生的极限、一个人类女人独自在大自然中旅行的含义。
Meeting Marquis is strange if you’ve only seen her trip photos. In those, she is filthy, her hair is a rat’s nest and her eyes are introspective, beseeching and very alert. In person, she’s beautiful and charming; she always has a smile for waiters and cabdrivers, and her bangs are so well cut that they make her seem French. (Marquis’s hairdresser squashed her idea of shaving her head for her recent trek, saying, “After all the work we’ve done?!”)
如果你只看过马奎斯的旅行照片，你和她见面的时候就会觉得很陌生。旅行照片里的马奎斯非常邋遢，头发如鼠窝一般糟乱，目光内省、恳切而又非常机警。但实际上马奎斯是一个美丽迷人的女子。她总是微笑面对服务生和出租车司机，一头刘海剪得非常齐整，看上去像法国人。（马奎斯最近想把头发剃掉方便探险，但美发师坚决否决了这一提议“我们把头发做的这么漂亮，你难道要全剪掉？！”）
Marquis grew up in Montsevelier, a village of 500 people in the Jura Mountains, in what Marquis describes as “the northern part of Switzerland — it’s not the nice part.” Her father, who worked as an engineer, paid Marquis one franc for every 100 slugs she picked out of the family garden. She befriended the family ewe, Moumou, and trained the pet rabbit to come when called. She liked people less. “My mom had nine sisters, and my dad had eight sisters and brothers, and those aunts and uncles all had three or four kids, so it was a big, screaming family, and for me it was a nightmare,” Marquis told me when I met her last winter in Washington. At age 8 she ran into the woods with her dog and spent the night in a cave. Marquis’s mother called the police, but when Marquis returned, her mother didn’t scold. Fighting Marquis’s wanderlust was hopeless.
马奎斯在侏罗山里、人口500的芒特塞韦利耶村长大。她称此地为“瑞士北部 – 不是好看的那部分。”马奎斯在家庭花园里每捉到100只蛞蝓，就可以向工程师父亲换取1瑞士法郎。她把家养的母羊沫沫当作朋友对待，训练宠物兔听到号令后立刻赶来，但她不怎么喜欢人。“我妈有九姐妹，我爸有八个兄弟姐妹。这些叔叔伯伯姑姑姨姨每人又有三到四个孩子。在这个庞大的家庭里，尖叫之声不绝于耳。这个家就是我的噩梦”去年冬天我们在华盛顿见面时马奎斯如是说。8岁那年，马奎斯牵着狗跑进森林，在洞穴里过了一夜。母亲焦急地报了警，但马奎斯回家后，她并没予以训斥，因为想要改变马奎斯的旅行癖是根本不可能的。
When she was 16, Marquis answered a classified ad for a train company that promised free travel. She loved the idea of seeing Paris and Milan, but once Marquis started work, her colleagues, almost all of whom were older men, harassed her relentlessly. On the first day one man claimed he could smell that Marquis had her period. The experience was a boot camp — punishing but character-strengthening. “I learned how to build myself,” she said. “I built the tough skin I needed for later on. I learned how men worked.”
16岁那年，马奎斯回复了一家承诺提供免费旅游的铁路公司的分类广告。她很想亲眼感受巴黎和米兰，但在工作伊始就遭到了同事们(基本上是老男人)持续不断的骚扰。工作第一天，一个男人宣称他能嗅出马奎斯来了例假。这段如新兵训练营般的工作经历让马奎斯饱尝艰辛，但也锤炼了她的性格。“我学会了该如何让自己变得坚强，”马奎斯说道：“我锻炼出了日后所需的一身硬骨。我学会了男人的工作方式。”
Marquis’s desire to travel began to coalesce around the question of whether she could survive by herself in nature. First, she decided to ride a horse across Turkey. On that trip, she ate apricots off trees and slept with her head on her saddle. Muslim women bathed her in warm goat’s milk. But after that, Marquis’s itineraries veered away from romance and pleasure into solitude and suffering. In her early 20s she flew to New Zealand and set out on a four-day backpacking trip with some noodles, a huge radio and three or four books — “everything except what I needed.” The outing, by typical standards, was a fiasco. Day 1 it poured; Marquis didn’t know how to set up her tent, and she was freezing and bored because, she now said wryly, “at night there was nothing to do.” But near the end of the trip she had a sort-of epiphany. “Something happened,” she said. (Articulating her reasons for pursuing her travels is not one of Marquis’s strengths.) “Over the years I’ve had this feeling again and again.” Chasing that inexplicable sensation is why she walks.
为了确定自己能否在大自然中独自求生，马奎斯渐渐产生了旅行的渴望。刚开始，她决定骑马穿越土耳其。在这段旅途中，她吃着树上掉下的杏子，枕着马鞍入眠。穆斯林妇女用温热的山羊奶为她洗浴。但此后，马奎斯的旅行渐渐与浪漫与欢乐无缘，等待她的是孤独与痛苦。二十来岁的时候，马奎斯飞往新西兰，开始进行为期四天的背包旅行。她带了些面条、一台大型收音机、三四本书 – “什么都带了，就是没带自己需要的东西。”根据正常标准判断，马奎斯此行可谓惨败。第一天大雨倾盆；马奎斯不知该如何支起帐篷。身上冰凉，心中无聊。“晚上根本无事可做，”她现在苦笑着说道。然而在此次远足即将结束的时候，马奎斯突然明白了什么。“发生了一些事情，”她说道。（阐明旅行的原因并非马奎斯的强项。）“这些年来，这种感觉一次又一次地涌上我的心头。”她坚持旅行，就是为了追求那样一种难以名状的感觉。
Marquis spent the winter after that trip earning money by bartending in Verbier, a fancy off-piste ski resort in the Alps. The next summer she returned to New Zealand. This time she walked into the South Island’s Kahurangi National Park without food to see if she could survive for 30 days. That trip, too, was a trial. Marquis failed at spearfishing, consumed only mussels and lost 20 pounds. But she not only recaptured that inchoate feeling she craved; she also glimpsed the savageness of her desire. “That was the first time I actually got in touch with the wild,” Marquis said. “You know when you’re really, really hungry? You have to teach yourself that food is not a big issue. You just need sleep and sweet water.”
远足结束后，马奎斯在阿尔卑斯山的越野滑雪胜地韦尔比耶当酒吧招待赚取金钱，度过了一个冬天。第二年夏天她重回新西兰，不带食物就走进了南岛卡胡朗吉国家公园，想知道自己能否在野外生存30天。但此次旅行依旧是场痛苦的试练。由于不会用鱼叉捕鱼，马奎斯不得不以贻贝为食，瘦了整整20磅。然而，她不但找回了梦寐以求的旅行初心，而且得以一见心中的野性。“这是我第一次真正接触野外，”马奎斯说道。“你知道你什么时候会真正感到饥饿。你必须教会自己，食物并不是大问题。你只需要睡眠和甜水。”
Marquis returned to Switzerland and embraced the cycle — work for money, then leave on some extreme challenge she devised for herself. She canoed through Canada’s Algonquin park without knowing how to portage; she was attacked by beavers camping near water in Patagonia; she hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. She remained captivated by what she describes as “this wild call from inside me” and decided to walk 8,700 miles around Australia.
马奎斯回到瑞士，继续工作–旅行的循环 – 工作挣钱，然后奔向自己为自己设计的极限挑战。她不知道如何水陆联运，却划着独木舟穿越了加拿大阿冈昆公园；她在巴塔哥尼亚的水域附近宿营时遭到了河狸的攻击；她走完了全长2650英里的太平洋山脊步道。马奎斯依旧沉醉于她所称的“内心深处的野性呼唤”，并决定环游澳大利亚，走完全长8700英里的征程。
For that trip, Marquis lined up her first sponsor, the North Face. She doesn’t think she impressed the company by her pitch. She believes it gave her a few backpacks, a couple of tents and some clothes because, she said, “when I told them what I was going to do, they thought, We can’t let that little thing go out without gear.” To supplement the inadequate supply of noodles she could carry, Marquis brought a slingshot, a blow gun, some wire to make snares and a net for catching insects. In the warm months, Marquis ate goannas, geckos and bearded dragons. In the cold months, when the reptiles hid, she subsisted on an Aboriginal standby, witchetty grubs — white, caterpillar-size moth larvae that live in the roots of Mulga trees. (Raw, Marquis said, they taste like unsweetened condensed milk; seared in hot sand, they crisp up nicely.) Throughout, Marquis tried to minimize human contact. She hid her femininity with loose clothes, big sunglasses, hair piled up in a hat. When water was scarce, she collected condensation, either by digging a deep hole and lining the cool bottom with plastic or by tying a tarp around a bush. If those techniques didn’t yield enough liquid — and they rarely did — she drank snake blood. At night Marquis slept close to the trunks of trees, touching the bark in a way that she describes as “almost carnal.” She fell in love with a particular twisted and wind-bent Western myall tree on Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.
为环游澳洲，马奎斯开始和自己的第一位赞助商 – 乐斯菲斯(the North Face)接触。她认为自己的游说并没有用给这家公司留下深刻印象，但她还是相信公司会提供一些背包、几顶帐篷、若干衣服，因为“当我对他们说我准备干什么的时候，他们想，我们不能什么设备都不带就动身。”由于无法携带足量的面条补给，马奎斯还携带了一把弹弓、一把吹枪、几条用以制作陷阱、罗网捕捉昆虫的金属线。在这温暖的几个月里，马奎斯以澳洲巨蜥、壁虎、松狮蜥为食。在寒冷的几个月里，由于爬行动物都躲了起来，她只能靠澳洲土著的应急食品 – 在澳大利亚围篱树根部生活的木蠹蛾幼虫维生。（她说这种虫子生吃的味道有点像不加糖的炼乳，如果在滚热的沙子上烤过之后这些虫子就会变得酥脆可口。）自始自终，马奎斯都尽量减少与人类的联系。她穿上宽松的衣服，戴上大型太阳镜，再把头发盘进帽子里，从而将自己的女性气质隐藏起来。如果饮水不足，马奎斯就挖个深洞，在底部铺上塑料薄膜或把防水布系在灌木上收集凝结水。万一这些技巧也无法获得足够的饮水，她就饮用蛇血。晚上睡觉的时候马奎斯就贴着树干，用自己称之为“近乎于情欲”的方式摩挲树皮。她爱上了一棵澳大利亚纳拉伯平原上被风吹弯、格外扭曲的西部垂枝相思树。
On June 20, 2010, Marquis’s 38th birthday, she set out to walk from Siberia through Asia and, once back in Australia, trek to her beloved tree. The video of Marquis walking away from her starting point in Irkutsk feels like the setup for a horror film. “Hello, O.K., so here we are,” she said just before turning away from the camera. “Time to go now!” On her back is a 75-pound pack, and trailing behind her, overflowing with gear secured by bungee cords, is a custom-made cart that looks like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a giant roller bag — her dry-land sled. After Australia, Marquis couldn’t handle slaughtering more animals; she says it felt “like killing a friend.” So she decided to carry rice and hard biscuits (the latter inedible without “a nice, hot cup of tea”), which meant she would need to pull a cart. It now weighed 120 pounds.
2010年6月20日，马奎斯在自己38岁生日这天踏上了18000英里的征程，从西伯利亚出发，然后穿过亚洲。这一次她又回到了澳大利亚，一点点地走向那颗心爱相思树。马奎斯从起点伊尔库茨克出发时拍摄的视频感觉有点像恐怖电影。“你们好！我们正在这里，”马奎斯说完便转身离开了镜头。“该出发了！”她背着75磅重的行李包，后面拖着一辆定制马车。各种各样的设备用弹力绳固定在马车上，把马车塞得满满当当。这辆马车就是马奎斯的旱地雪橇，其外形兼具独轮车和巨型拖轮箱的特点。穿过澳大利亚后，马奎斯不愿再宰杀动物，因为这感觉就像“杀自己的朋友”。所以她决定携带米饭和硬质饼干(不就着“一杯热腾腾的香茶”这饼干就没法吃)。这就意味着她要拉动一辆马车，而这辆车现在已重达120磅。
To prepare for the expedition, Marquis spent two years walking or snowshoeing 20 miles a day, wearing 75 pounds. On the trip itself, she carried, among other things, five pairs of underwear, a large pocketknife, wide-spectrum antibiotics, tea-tree oil for massaging her feet, a solar-powered charger, a beacon, a BlackBerry, a satellite phone, Crocs, a compass, a tiny emergency stash of amphetamines (“that’s the backup backup backup of the backup; in case you lose a foot and you need to get out and not feel a thing”) and pink merino-wool pajamas (“you put them on and you feel good, you feel gorgeous”).
为准备此次远征，马奎斯用了两年的时间准备：负重75磅，每天步行或穿雪鞋步行20英里。在此次旅途中，马奎斯携带的物品包括五套内衣、一把大折叠刀、广谱抗生素、用来按摩足部的茶树精油、一个太阳能充电器、一台无线电发送器、一个黑莓手机、一台卫星电话、一双卡骆驰鞋、一个指南针、一小点应急用的安非他明（“这是备用品的备用品的备用品的备用品；万一你断了一只脚，需要毫无痛觉地走出困境的时候才用”）和粉红色美利奴羊毛睡衣（“穿上去感觉非常好，感觉自己非常性感漂亮”）。
The afternoon she departed from Irktusk, Marquis walked just a few miles and set down her load. “That first day I don’t even eat or do anything,” Marquis explains. “By that point, I’m so exhausted, it’s unbelievable.”
那天下午，马奎斯离开伊尔库茨克踏上征程。但她只走了几英里就卸下了负重。“第一天我一点东西都没吃，一点事情都没做，”马奎斯解释道。“到那时候，我就已经筋疲力尽，真是无法相信。”
In truth, the first six months on Marquis’s trips are always harrowing. She describes it as “the washing machine”: endless agitation, physical pain, emotional pain, nonstop bargaining among opposing internal voices — the inner demons that whisper, Remember the delicious foam on the cafe latte? and the inner angels that reprimand, Coffee isn’t accessible now, so why talk about it? “You can’t move your hands, you can’t move your feet, you just want to die,” Marquis said. “You think about sleep all the time, because maybe sleep will set things straight.”
事实上，马奎斯在前六个月的旅途中一直备受煎熬。她将其描述为“洗衣机”：无休无止的搅动、身体上的痛苦、情感上的折磨、内心深处总是有两种截然相反的声音在谈判 – 心中的恶魔在喃喃细语，记得拿铁咖啡上的美味泡沫吗？心中的天使在严厉斥责，现在根本喝不到咖啡，说这个干嘛？“你的手动不了，你的脚也动不了，你只想去死，”马奎斯说道。“你满脑子都在想睡觉的事情，因为一觉醒来后，可能就会发现大大小小的事情已经理顺了。”
A few months into her journey, Marquis shot a video of herself in her sleeping bag. Like a hostage clutching a newspaper, she holds a thermometer that reads minus 20 Celsius. “I don’t sleep much these days. I do not know what time it is. Maybe midnight, or something like that?” In the next day’s video, she looks wrecked. The previous night a wind- and sandstorm ripped across the Mongolian plains. To keep the nylon of her tent from tearing, Marquis removed the metal poles holding it up. But she still feared the gales would blow away her gear, so she unzipped herself from her collapsed shelter and lay atop her pack, tent and cart.
几个月后，马奎斯拍摄了一段自己缩在睡袋里的视频。她紧紧握着一支读数为零下20℃的温度计，就像一个人质紧紧抓着一张报纸。“这些天来我睡的并不多。我根本不知道时间。现在是午夜？还是午夜前后？”在第二天的视频里，马奎斯看上去非常憔悴。前天晚上，风沙暴在蒙古平原上肆虐。为防止尼龙帐篷被撕裂，马奎斯移走了起支撑作用的金属杆。不过她还是害怕设备被狂风卷走，于是她走出塌下的帐篷，躺在包裹、帐篷和马车上面，用身体压住它们。
Another night during those first months, while Marquis camped on a vast, overgrazed steppe that she describes as looking like an ugly golf course, she heard horses galloping toward her. The visitors turned out to be Mongol horsemen, all in traditional overcoat-like deels, making a vodka-fueled raid on her camp. After trying to steal her tent, they rode off. But for weeks, in the evenings, the men returned, treating Marquis, she said, as “the little entertainment.” To protect herself, she began waking before dawn, walking until midafternoon, then looking for a place to hide for the night — if possible, in a cement sewage pipe. “Everything is going on under those roads,” she said. “There is waste. There are dead sheep. But for me it was not a problem. I was safe.”
还有一件事也发生在最初几个月的旅行里。某天晚上，马奎斯在一片过度放牧的辽阔干草原(她称此地为丑陋的高尔夫球场)上宿营的时候，听到有马队向他奔来。一群身穿传统蒙古长袍的蒙古骑手来到了她的身边，借着伏特加的酒劲袭击了她的营地。这群人为偷取帐篷尝试了一会之后，就骑马离开了。但在接下来的几周里，每当夜幕降临的时候，这群人就会回来，“以戏弄马奎斯为乐。”为保护自己，马奎斯在黎明前就醒来，一直走到下午三点钟左右，然后开始寻找夜晚的藏身之处。如果可以的话，就待在水泥污水管里过夜。“污水管里什么乱七八糟的都有”她说到，“有垃圾。有死羊。但对我而这这些都不是问题。因为我至少是安全的。”
Eventually, however, Marquis passed out of Mongol territory. The washing-machine cycle ended. Her body changed, and her mind changed, too. Her senses sharpened to the point that she could smell shampoo on a tourist’s hair from a mile away. “One day you walk 12 hours, and you don’t feel pain,” Marquis said. The past and present telescope down to an all-consuming now. “There is no before or after. The intellect doesn’t drive you anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.”
终于，马奎斯走出了蒙古。“洗衣机式”的怪圈终于也停止了。她的身体有了变化，心理也有了变化。她的感官变得异常敏锐，即使是一英里开外游客头上洗发精的味道也可以嗅出。“你一天行走12小时，但一点都不觉得痛。”马奎斯说道。过去和现在的美好展望在此刻全部消失于无形。“这里没有从前或以后。智力再也不能再引导你前进。智力已经不复存在了。你必须按照大自然的要求，回归野性。”
As Francis Spufford writes in his history of British polar exploration, “I May Be Some Time,” for ages, men have wandered intentionally into extreme hardship, and they “are notoriously bad at saying why.” Marquis and her female peers — women who, say, walk across the Sahara alone with a camel or pull a 200-pound sled to the South Pole — don’t explain it much better. “People always ask, ‘Was it something in your childhood?’ ” says Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica. “I’ve thought about it endlessly: no.”
就像《过一会回来》(朗西斯·斯巴福德所写的英国极地探险史)所描述的那样，数十年来，男人们总是有意识地步入极苦之地，却“众所周知地不善于说明原因”。和男人们相比，马奎斯和其他女子探险家在这方面也不太擅长，尽管她们之中不乏骑着骆驼、独自穿越撒哈拉沙漠，或拉着200磅重的雪橇抵达南极点的勇士。人们总是问我，“你小时候是不是受了什么刺激？”第一位独自滑雪穿越南极洲的女子极地探险家费莉丝蒂·艾斯顿说道。“我思前想后，还是觉得自己没受过什么刺激。”
The rest of Marquis’s trip was not all Zen bliss. Seven months into the walk, she lost a molar. Her gum abscessed, and the attendant infection, which couldn’t be controlled with the antibiotics, started moving down her neck, and she had to be evacuated from Mongolia. Marquis returned to the precise G.P.S. coordinates she left and made it to China, where, one day, some children followed her. She sang with them and taught them how to set up her tent — and then they stole her BlackBerry. In Laos, drug dealers descended on Marquis’s camp one night, firing their automatic weapons into the air. Soon after that, Marquis contracted dengue fever. She tied her left leg to a tree so she wouldn’t wander off in her delirium and drown herself in a river.
在接下来的旅程里，马奎斯体验到的并不只有禅的喜悦。出发七个月后，她掉了一颗臼齿。牙龈化脓了，随之而来的感染无法用抗生素控制，开始向脖子延伸，马奎斯不得不从蒙古撤离。此后，根据GPS坐标的精确指示，马奎斯回到了中途离开的地方，继续前进。她抵达中国，有一天遇到了几个小孩。孩子们跟在她背后，她和他们一起唱歌，教他们如何把她的帐篷支起来。可是，这几个小孩却把她的黑莓手机偷走了。在老挝，毒品贩子突然袭击了她的营地，手持自动武器向空中开火。此后不久，马奎斯染上了登革热。她把左腿绑在树上，以防在神经错乱的时候四处乱走，把自己淹死在河里。
The trip smoothed out during the last year. Thailand was uneventful. Australia was lovely, despite the heat and the last couple of hundred miles, when Marquis’s legs cramped so badly that it was difficult to walk. She wrote a book about the experience, “Wild by Nature” (available only in French). The last page is profoundly anticlimactic. “I have arrived,” Marquis writes. “I touch the back of the tree with my right hand. ‘I’m back, darling.’ I sit down.”
最后一年的旅程比较顺利。泰国之旅波澜不惊。澳大利亚之旅则比较美好，尽管在她腿部严重抽筋难以移动的时候，还有最后几百英里要走，天气也非常酷热。她把这段经历写成了《生来狂野》(只有法文版)。书的最后，用非常质朴的话语为这段波澜壮阔的旅程画上了句点。“我到了，”马奎斯写道。“我右手抚摸着那棵我心爱的相思树，‘亲爱的，我回来了。’我坐了下来。”
In Washington last winter, Marquis met with people from the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, because that’s what explorers do (and pretty much have always done): come home and sell their stories. It was nine months after re-entry into mainstream life, and she was happy to return to some physical comforts: sleeping in a bed, taking two baths a day. But she found being among people overwhelming, and her senses remained so acute that even just sitting in a cafeteria was grating. “You hear the dishwasher?” Marquis asked me, pointing toward an unseen kitchen. I shook my head. Marquis said, resigned, “There’s a radio playing back there, too.”
去年冬天，马奎斯在华盛顿和国家地理演讲人论坛的成员会面。探险家们通常都会做这样一件事(他们基本上都这样做了)：回到家乡，用自己的探险经历换取金钱。9个月后，马奎斯回归了主流生活，能够再次获得某些身体上的舒适她感到很开心：睡在床上，一天洗两次澡。但她也发现自己处在人堆里时会感到很压抑；她的感官依旧敏锐，即使就在自助餐厅里坐着也会感到很难受。“你听见洗碗机的声音了吗？”马奎斯问我，指着那看不见的厨房。我摇了摇头。马奎斯无奈放弃了，说道，“那里还有台收音机在播音。”
Marquis plans to return to northwest Australia in 2016. She said it’s her “dream to go with just a sarong and a knife” — the ultimate test of survival. It’s hard not to wonder where these urges come from. Geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists and religious scholars have all taken stabs at answering, with unsatisfying results. But perhaps the real reason to court a sufferfest — to explore or adventure, or whatever you want to call it — is that it makes a person feel alive. The literature of survival is weirdly upbeat. A few days before dying, in 1912, Robert Falcon Scott wrote a letter telling a friend that he wished that friend were with him “to hear our songs and the cheery conversation.” The day of his death, Scott said of his trip, “How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home.”
马奎斯计划于2016年重返澳大利亚西北部。她说“我的愿望就是系好围裙，拿把刀，然后去旅行！”。这将是野外生存的终极试练。人们很难不好奇，这样的渴求究竟来自何方？遗传学家、神经学家、心理学家和宗教学者都想要解开这一谜题，但没有人获得令人满意的结果。不过，能够让一个人感受到生命的气息，也许就是追求“苦难之旅”的真正原因。这种“苦难之旅”可称之为“探险”，也可称之为“冒险”，或者你也可以自己想个说法。野外生存类的文学作品总是出奇地积极向上。1912年，还有几天就将接到死神召唤的罗伯特·法尔肯·斯科特在信中对一位朋友说，他希望朋友能和自己一起“聆听我们的歌声，聆听愉快的谈话。”而在迎接死神的那一天，斯科特说起此次南极之旅，“来南极探险，比待在舒舒服服的家里要美好得多。”
Of course, if you don’t die — well, then the experience of extreme travel is fantastic. After swimming across a river infested with crocodiles, Marquis wrote that every time she finds herself in the bush, “my happiness increases tenfold.” Perhaps among the purest expressions of joy ever recorded is of the Norwegian explorer Aleksander Gamme on the 86th day of his unsupported 1,410-mile expedition from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole and back in 2012. Desperately hungry and dreadlocked, he comes upon a cache that he buried in the snow for himself a few months earlier. From the frozen duffel he pulls matches, Vaseline and zinc ointment. Then he starts screaming: “YEAAAAA! AAAAHHH! HAHA! YEAA! WHOOOWHOOO.” His elation at seeing a double pack of Cheez Doodles might be greater than any most of us will feel in our entire lives.
当然，如果你没死，极限旅行将带给你非常美妙的经历。游过一条遍布鳄鱼的河流之后，马奎斯写道每当她走进灌木丛，“我就会开心十倍。”2012年，挪威探险家亚历山大·格默在无人支持的条件下，从海格拉斯湾出发，抵达南极点后返回，历程1410英里。他在出发后第86天所说的话也许就是有记录的、对喜悦之情最为纯粹的表述。那一天，饥肠辘辘，蓄着“骇人”长发绺的格默意外发现了几个月前自己埋在雪里的给养。他从结了冰的旅行包里拿出火柴，凡士林和氧化锌软膏，然后开始尖叫:“耶~~~~！！！啊啊~~！！！哈哈！！！耶~！喔~~喔~~”格默发现两袋芝士奶酪(Cheez Doodles)后欣喜若狂，大多数人终其一生可能都未曾感受过这种狂喜。