A hundred years ago, when Robert Falcon¹ Scott set out for Antarctica on his Terra Nova expedition², his two primary goals were scientific discovery and reaching the geographic³ 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 ponies⁴ 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 faltered⁵, they continued collecting specimens⁶, including rocks. The expedition ended terribly; everybody who made the push to the pole died. Miserable⁷, starving and frostbitten, one of Scott’s last four men killed himself by walking into a blizzard⁸ without even bothering to put on his boots.

一百年前，罗伯特·法尔康·司各特(Robert Falcon Scott)开始特拉诺瓦之旅，启程前往南极洲的时候，目标有两个：一是科学发现，二是达到地理意义上的南极点。然而我们可以说，司各特真的在追寻当代观察家所谓的“苦难迷恋”。他总是自找苦吃：出行时带了满族小马和西伯利亚小马，没多久它们就堕入了冰雪；安排了“人拉雪橇”，也就是让同行者全力拉动雪橇，而不是依赖于狗。甚至当司各特的随从人员挣扎前行时，依然要收集各种标本，包括岩石。这场探险的结果非常惨烈，这群拼命前往南极的人全都死了。司各特的最后四个同行者之一，因不堪悲惨、饥饿和冻伤，走进暴风雪自杀，连靴子都没穿。

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 terrain⁹, expanding our species’ understanding of the world. “Adventurer,” by contrast, implies a self-indulgent adrenaline junkie, who scares loved ones by courting puerile¹⁰ 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 virgin¹¹ territory of space or the deep ocean requires resources that few possess. In short, the noble fig¹² leaf of terra incognita has fallen away and laid bare the peripatetic¹³, outsize bravado¹⁴ of Scott’s kindred spirits. The resulting itineraries¹⁵ are pretty strange. We now have guys like Felix Baumgartner sky-diving from a balloon-borne capsule¹⁶ at 128,100 feet.

在旅行者的分类学中，“探索者”一词意味着道德高尚的先锋，是某个男人抑或女人，勇敢地与大自然搏斗，发现新的领地，拓展人类对世界的了解。与之相比，“冒险家”一词则暗指一个自我放纵的为肾上腺素驱使的瘾君子，总在追求幼稚的惊险，让亲人担惊受怕。显然，前者是个明显褒义的头衔，但近几年来，我们却很难这样区分。全世界都可以使用谷歌地图了。达到太空中真正的处女地，或者潜入深海，所需的资源太多，不是某个个体所能拥有的。简言之，未知领域尊贵的无花果叶已经随风飘逝，更凸显出浪迹天涯的司各特精神是何等的可贵。从那以后，人类的探险路线已经相当不同。现在，我们有了菲利克斯·鲍加特纳(Felix Baumgartner)这样的勇敢者，能在128100英尺的高空，从热气球的小舱里跳下去。

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 cargo¹⁷ 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 stamina¹⁸ and self-reliance and the meaning of traveling in nature as a female human animal, alone.

鲍加特纳直接跳了下去，经历了超音速的4分多钟，跳入了冒险家的阵营。然而，我们又有了莎拉·马奎斯(Sarah Marquis)，她或许应该被视作一个司各特那样的探索者，却生不逢时。她42岁，瑞士人，在过去的四年中，用了三年时间，孤身徒步旅行了大约一万英里，从西伯利亚出发，穿越戈壁沙漠、中国、老挝和泰国，然后乘坐货船到了澳大利亚布里斯班，又徒步横跨了澳洲。一路上，她像司各特一样，捱过了饥饿和严寒，也曾经试过人拉雪橇。她强迫自己耗费极大的体力到达了她本想热爱却最终只能略一感受的地方，正如司各特在日记中对南极点的描述：“伟大的上帝啊！这真是个糟糕的地方。”尽管司各特筹划了那场荒谬的旅行并死在途中，但他却因此深受热爱，有时候难以置信地获得了极高的尊崇。同样，马奎斯也令人不解。“我跟人们说起我的所作所为，他们会说，‘你疯了。’”马奎斯告诉我，“从来没人说：‘真是个超酷的计划，莎拉！去做吧！’”也许这是因为马奎斯探索的领域本质上是内在的——她探究的是恐惧的本质、耐力和自我依赖的极限以及一个女性人类个体孤身一人在荒野中旅行的意义。

Meeting Marquis is strange if you’ve only seen her trip photos. In those, she is filthy¹⁹, her hair is a rat’s nest and her eyes are introspective, beseeching²⁰ 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 trek²¹, saying, “After all the work we’ve done?!”)

如果你只见过马奎斯的旅行照片，那么，与她见面会是一件奇怪的事。照片中她很肮脏，蓬头垢面，头发像个老鼠窝，目光内省而警觉，充满渴求。当你与她面对面坐下，会发觉她美丽动人：对待服务员和出租车司机她始终含着微笑，刘海修剪得如此精致，像个法国人。（马奎斯的发型师粉碎了她最近一趟徒步旅行之前剃光头发的主意。他说：“什么？我们好不容易做好的发型你要剃掉？”）

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.

马奎斯在芒特塞维利耶长大，那是侏罗山区一个五百人的村庄，马奎斯说那一带位于“瑞士的北部，不算很好”。父亲是个工程师，小时候，她在家中花园里每捉到一百只鼻涕虫，父亲就会给她一瑞士法郎。家中的母羊茉茉是她的好朋友，她训练过的小兔子召之即来。她喜欢清净。“妈妈有九个姐妹，爸爸有八个兄弟姐妹，七大姑八大姨们每人又有三四个孩子，这是个充满刺耳尖叫的巨大家庭，在我看来无异于噩梦。”去年冬天在华盛顿见面时，马奎斯这样告诉我。八岁那年她带着狗跑进森林，在山洞里住了一夜。马奎斯的妈妈报了警，但马奎斯回家后，妈妈却没有骂她。因为她明白，与马奎斯的漫游癖作对，是一场必败的战争。

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, harassed²³ her relentlessly²⁴. 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.”

马奎斯十六岁那年，按照分类广告的指引，来到一家火车公司工作，因为它承诺可免费旅行。能见到巴黎和米兰，这个念头让她迷恋，但一开始工作，她就发现同事几乎都是老男人，而且她遭到了他们肆意的骚扰。上班的第一天，一个男人就宣称他可以闻出马奎斯的例假来了。这种经历就像新兵训练营，充满惩罚，但却锤炼性格。“我学会了如何锻造自己，”她说。“我练出了一身后来所需的坚韧皮肤，也学会了男性的工作方式。”

Marquis’s desire to travel began to coalesce²⁵ around the question of whether she could survive by herself in nature. First, she decided²⁶ 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 veered²⁷ away from romance and pleasure into solitude²⁸ 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 wryly²⁹, “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 inexplicable³⁰ sensation is why she walks.

马奎斯对旅行的渴望越发深浓，最后归结于一个疑问：她能否孤身一人在荒野中逃出生天。一开始，她决定骑马穿越土耳其。在那次旅行中，她从杏树上采果子吃，头枕着马鞍睡觉。穆斯林女人们让她在温暖的羊奶中洗澡。但从那以后，马奎斯的路线就转变了方向，从浪漫与欢愉转向孤独与苦难。二十出头的时候，她飞到了新西兰，带了些面条、一台巨大的无线电和三四本书，开始了为期四天的背包徒步游。“除了我需要的东西，其他什么都带了。”她那场远足用典型的标准来看，是一场惨败。第一天，大雨倾盆；马奎斯不知道如何扎帐篷，冻得要死，百无聊赖，原因正如她现在含着苦笑所说的那样：“到了晚上，什么事都做不了。”但在苦旅即将结束时，她有了某种灵光一闪的领悟。“某件事发生了。”她说。（把无休止旅行的原因说得清清楚楚，并不是她的长项。）“在过去的几年中，我一次又一次地领略到这种感觉。”追寻这种难以言说的感触，就是她远足的原因。

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 inchoate³¹ feeling she craved³²; she also glimpsed the savageness³³ 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.”

那次旅行回来之后，马奎斯在威尔比尔当酒吧招待，度过了一个冬天。威尔比尔是阿尔卑斯山脉一个极地滑雪胜地。次年夏天，她回到了新西兰。这次，她走进南岛的卡胡朗吉国家公园，没带食物，想看看自己能不能荒野求生三十天。同样，那趟旅行也是一场实验。马奎斯用鱼叉扎鱼的计划宣告失败，她只有牡蛎可吃，瘦了二十磅。但她不仅重新得到了自己渴望的那种莫可名状的体验，而且瞥见了自己欲望中的野性。“那是我第一次真正与大自然亲密接触，”马奎斯说。“你知道非常、非常饥饿是什么样的感觉吗？你必须告诉自己，食物不是什么大问题。你所需的只是睡眠和淡水。”

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 beavers³⁴ camping near water in Patagonia; she hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest³⁵ 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，回到了生活的循环中——打工，赚够钱之后就离开，奔向下一项极限挑战。她曾经在不知道路线的情况下划着独木舟穿越了加拿大阿冈昆公园；在巴塔哥尼亚的河边露营时，她遭到了海狸的攻击；她徒步走过了2650英里（约等于4265公里）长的太平洋山脊步道。那种“来自内心的野性呼唤”让她一直心醉神迷，于是，她决定在澳大利亚徒步8700英里。

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 inadequate³⁶ supply of noodles she could carry, Marquis brought a slingshot, a blow gun, some wire to make snares³⁷ and a net for catching³⁸ insects. In the warm months, Marquis ate goannas, geckos and bearded dragons. In the cold months, when the reptiles³⁹ hid, she subsisted⁴⁰ on an Aboriginal⁴¹ standby, witchetty grubs — white, caterpillar-size moth²² larvae⁴² 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 condensation⁴³, either by digging a deep hole and lining⁴⁴ 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.

为了那趟旅行，马奎斯联系了自己的第一个赞助商，北面公司。她感觉自己的旅行经历并没有让这个公司刮目相看。她想北面给了她几只背包、两顶帐篷和一些衣服，因为她说：“我告诉他们我的打算，他们想，我们可不能眼睁睁地看着这个小东西不带装备就出发。”马奎斯随身可以携带的面条不多，为了弥补食物的不足，她带了弹弓、吹枪、制作绳套及结网的绳子用来捕食虫子。在温暖的季节里，马奎斯吃巨蜥、壁虎和鬃狮蜥。在寒冷的季节，爬行动物都藏了起来，她就靠本土常见的巫蛴螬为食。那是一种白色的毛毛虫大小的蛾子幼虫，生活在金合欢树根周围的土里。（马奎斯说，这种虫子如果生吃，口味像是没加糖的炼乳。在炽热的沙地里烤过之后，变得酥脆可口。）自始至终，马奎斯都尽量不与人类社会接触。她用宽松的衣服和大太阳镜遮住了自己的女性气质，把头发挽起藏在帽子里。缺水时，她收集冷凝水，挖一个深坑，在阴凉的底部铺上塑料袋，或者在灌木周围捆上防水布，收集露水。如果这些技巧仍然不能带来足够的水——这种情况很少发生——她就喝蛇血。到了夜里，马奎斯挨着树干睡觉，用一种她所谓的“几近肉欲”的方式贴着树皮。她爱上了澳大利亚纳拉伯平原上一棵被风吹弯的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, overflowing⁴⁵ 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 slaughtering⁴⁶ more animals; she says it felt “like killing⁴⁷ a friend.” So she decided to carry rice and hard biscuits (the latter inedible⁴⁸ 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38岁生日那天，她开始了那趟旅行，从西伯利亚出发，穿过亚洲，回到澳大利亚，徒步走到到她挚爱的那棵树下。马奎斯从伊尔库茨克起点出发时录制的那段视频感觉就像一部恐怖片的背景。“你好！嗯，我们在这里了。”她说着就转身离开了镜头。“出发了！”她的背上是75磅重的背包，跟在她身后的是一辆满载着户外装备的定制的小车，用蹦极绳子捆紧，模样像个十字架，功能则兼具独轮手推车和大拖轮行李箱的特点，也就是一辆旱地上的雪橇。离开澳大利亚之后，马奎斯无法接受杀戮更多的动物，她说感觉“就像杀害朋友”，于是决定携带米饭和硬饼干（后者哪怕没有“可口的热茶”也可以吃下去），这意味着她需要拉着一辆车旅行。现在，这辆车重达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 antibiotics⁴⁹, tea-tree oil for massaging⁵⁰ her feet, a solar-powered charger, a beacon⁵¹, a BlackBerry, a satellite phone, Crocs, a compass, a tiny emergency stash⁵² 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 pajamas⁵³ (“you put them on and you feel good, you feel gorgeous”).

为了准备这场远足，马奎斯花费了两年时间，每天负重75磅，徒步或穿着雪地靴步行二十英里。在旅途中，除了其他物品，她还要携带五套内衣裤、一把随身大折叠刀、广谱抗生素、用于脚部按摩的茶树油、太阳能充电器、信标、黑莓手机、卫星电话、洞洞鞋、指南针、仅为紧急情况准备的一点点安非他命（她说：“这是最最最最无奈的备选方案。万一失去了一只脚，你需要毫无痛觉地走出困境。”）和一套粉色美利奴羊毛睡衣（“穿上以后感觉很好，觉得自己漂亮极了。”）。

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 exhausted⁵⁴, it’s unbelievable.”

那天下午，马奎斯离开了伊尔库茨克，才徒步了几英里就卸下了重负。“那只是第一天，我什么都没吃，什么都没干。”马奎斯解释道。“那时我已经筋疲力尽，太难以置信了。”

In truth, the first six months on Marquis’s trips are always harrowing. She describes it as “the washing machine”: endless agitation⁵⁵, physical pain, emotional pain, nonstop bargaining among opposing internal voices — the inner demons⁵⁶ that whisper, Remember the delicious foam⁵⁷ 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，马奎斯那趟旅行的最初六个月始终如此痛苦。她说就像“洗衣机”：无穷无尽的焦灼、身体上的痛苦、情绪上的煎熬、内心两种相反意见无休止的争吵——内在的恶魔悄声说：还记得拿铁咖啡上那层香浓的泡沫么？内在的天使斥责道：现在又没有咖啡，说这个干什么！“你的手动不了，脚也动不了，只想死掉。”马奎斯说。“你随时想躺下睡一觉，满心希望一觉醒来后，一切恢复正常。”

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 Celsius⁵⁸. “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 wrecked⁵⁹. The previous night a wind- and sandstorm ripped across the Mongolian plains. To keep the nylon⁶⁰ of her tent from tearing, Marquis removed the metal poles holding it up. But she still feared the gales⁶¹ would blow away her gear, so she unzipped herself from her collapsed⁶² shelter and lay atop her pack, tent and cart.

旅程开始几个月之后，马奎斯录制了一段自己在睡袋中的视频。就像一个抓着报纸的人质，她手里拿着温度计，上面显示零下20摄氏度。“这些天我睡得很少，不知道现在是什么时间，也许是午夜，或者午夜前后？”在第二天的视频中，她看上去很憔悴。之前的夜晚，一场大风夹杂沙尘暴席卷了蒙古平原。为了防止尼龙帐篷被撕裂，马奎斯把支撑帐篷的金属杆拆了下来。但还是害怕装备被大风刮跑，于是她拉开坍塌的帐篷的拉链，躺下去，用身体压住背包、帐篷和小车。

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 galloping⁶³ 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.”

在最初的几个月里还有一个夜晚，马奎斯在一片遭到过度放牧的辽阔干草原上露营，她说，那片地方看上去像个丑陋的高尔夫球场。她听见马群朝她飞奔而来，结果来访者是一群蒙古牧马人，全都穿着传统的蒙古长袍，醉饮伏特加之后向她的宿营地发起了攻击。他们试图偷走帐篷，结果未遂就便策马而去。但之后的几个星期，每到夜里，这群牧民就会回来，招惹马奎斯，把这当成“一项小小的娱乐”。为了保护自己，马奎斯在黎明前就醒来，徒步一直走到半下午，然后寻找一个夜里的藏身之地，如果可能，就藏在水泥排污管里。“道路下面，什么脏东西都有。”她说。“有垃圾。有羊的尸体。但对我来说这都不是问题。我很安全。”

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.”

然而，马奎斯终于走出了蒙古的国土。洗衣机般的折磨结束了。她的身体变了，想法也变了。她的感觉灵敏极了，甚至能嗅到一英里之外游客头发上洗发水的气味。“有一天，你走了12个小时，连痛觉都感受不到了。”马奎斯说。往日和今天，都浓缩为一个销蚀一切的此刻。“没有过去，也没有将来。智力不能帮你向前再走任何一步。它一点都不存在了。你变成了大自然需要你成为的样子：就现在这个原始的模样。”

As Francis Spufford writes in his history of British polar exploration, “I May Be Some Time,” for ages, men have wandered intentionally⁶⁴ 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.”

千秋万世以来，人类漫游的脚步总在有意踏入极限的艰险，而弗朗西斯·斯巴福德(Francis Spufford)在他的英伦极地探险史一书中说，“可能在某些时候，我特别不擅长说清楚为什么”。马奎斯和她的女性同好们——女人，孤身一人骑着骆驼穿过沙漠或拉着200磅的雪橇走到南极，也无法更好地解释为何要这样做。“人们总是问：‘你是不是有什么特殊的童年经历？’”第一位孤身滑雪穿过南极的女性菲丽西提·阿什顿(Felicity Aston)说。“对这个问题，我深思熟虑之后的回答是：没有。”

The rest of Marquis’s trip was not all Zen bliss⁶⁵. 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 evacuated⁶⁶ from Mongolia. Marquis returned to the precise G.P.S. coordinates⁶⁷ 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 dealers⁶⁸ descended⁶⁹ 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 delirium⁷⁰ and drown herself in a river.

马奎斯苦旅的剩下部分并不全是禅意的福祉。启程七个月之后，她掉了一颗臼齿。她的牙床溃疡了，伴随的感染连抗生素都无法控制，开始下行到颈部，她只好从蒙古返回到她根据GPS坐标精确定位的起点，又进入中国。在那里，某一天几个小孩一直跟着她，她带他们一起唱歌，教他们搭帐篷——后来他们偷走了她的黑莓手机。在老挝，一天夜里，毒贩突袭了她的宿营地，拿着自动武器对空鸣响。之后没多久，马奎斯又感染了登革热。她把自己的左腿绑到一棵树上，以免自己在谵妄中乱走，掉进河里淹死。

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 cramped⁷¹ 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 anticlimactic⁷². “I have arrived,” Marquis writes. “I touch the back of the tree with my right hand. ‘I’m back, darling.’ I sit down.”

这场旅行的最后一年渐渐顺利起来。泰国之行波澜不惊。澳大利亚十分可爱，尽管酷热难当，最后两百英里时，马奎斯的双腿严重抽筋，几乎无法行走。她把这段经历写成了一本书——《生来狂野》（Wild by Nature，只有法语版）。最后一页如此淡然。“我到达了，”马奎斯写道。“我用右手的手背触摸着树干。‘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 mainstream⁷³ 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，马奎斯在华盛顿与国家地理演讲局(National Geographic Speakers Bureau)的工作人员见面，因为探险家就是这样（他们基本都试过）：回家，把自己的故事写成书卖掉。当时，她再次进入主流生活已经9个月了，很开心身体能重新体验舒适的感觉：睡在床上，每天洗两次澡。但她发现，身处人群让她感觉压抑，因为她的感官仍是如此敏锐，仅仅是坐在餐厅里，都感觉是种折磨。“你听见洗碗机的声音了吗？”马奎斯问我，指着视野之外的厨房。我摇摇头。马奎斯无奈放弃了，说：“那里面还有广播的声音。”

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 weirdly⁷⁴ 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.”

马奎斯打算2016年回到澳大利亚西北部。她说她的梦想是只穿一件纱笼、带一把旅行刀去澳洲，那将是生存实验的终极挑战。人们很难不好奇，这种冲动究竟从何而来。这个问题遗传学家、生理学家、心理学家和宗教学者都曾试图回答，结果却都不令人满意。但是，一个受虐狂去探索或冒险，真正的原因或许是——那会让他们感到自己活着。历险主题的文学作品总是奇特而积极向上的。1912年，罗伯特·法尔康·司各特去世之前的几天，写了一封信，告诉朋友他希望对方和自己在一起，“聆听我们的欢声笑语”。去世那天，司各特说起这场旅行，“这种感觉，比呆在家里要美好得太多太多了啊！”

Of course, if you don’t die — well, then the experience of extreme travel is fantastic. After swimming across a river infested⁷⁵ 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. Desperately⁷⁶ 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 zinc⁷⁷ ointment⁷⁸. Then he starts screaming: “YEAAAAA! AAAAHHH! HAHA! YEAA! WHOOOWHOOO.” His elation⁷⁹ 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——那么，这场极限旅行的经历是极其精彩的。游过鳄鱼肆虐的河流之后，马奎斯写道，每当她发现自己置身丛林，“我的欢愉就会十倍地增长。”也许，在有记录的对纯粹喜悦的描述中，最鲜明的是挪威探险家亚历山大·嘉莫(Aleksander Gamme)的版本。2012年，他从大力湾出发前往南极，开始了一场无人支持的长达1410英里的旅行，在第86天，他极度饥饿，蓬头垢面，来到了一个藏身之处，是他几个月前孤身一人埋藏在雪下的。他从冰冷的粗呢旅行袋中掏出火柴、凡士林油和氧化锌药膏，然后开始欢呼：“耶~~~！啊~~！哈哈！耶！乌呼！”他因发现两盒芝士面条而产生的极大狂喜，或许要比我们之中任何人整整一生所感受到的欢愉都要强烈。