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read the book?’
    â€˜No, not let you go!’
    It was the same stern voice, but this time I thought it coldly authoritative, not wanting any argument or humour from me.
    That night I thought about McCandless and his fatal exile in the wilderness. He was a highly intelligent and committed young man inspired by Jack London and the great nineteenth-century Russian writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gogol. Asceticism and moral rigour would certainly have been principal psychological characteristics of a young man steeped in such literature, and such qualities could, to a mind so disposed, be perfectly suited to the wilderness landscape. The lure of such a place could become irresistible, and if the young man were such an athlete then the challenge would be doubly hypnotic.
    As a young man I suppose I had drunk from the same cup as young McCandless, but I was older now, if not wiser, and I had brought my bonds of love and affection with me. I had burned no bridges in the fires of renunciation – quite the reverse. I hadn’t intended to leave Audrey, Jack and Cal for any longer than I had to. But at the same time I’m sure I both sensed and was looking for what McCandless was seeking – self-affirmation, a new compass bearing from which to set out on life, something profoundly fulfilling and maybe even life-altering.
    The Alaskan wilderness is just another desert, and like the desert it is an environment of extremes. In substance and in form it is alien and austere, inimical to human presence. In such a wilderness the mind expands in new vistas of light and space. The northern sky is enormous, awesome and threatening, yet intoxicating. The architecture of the earth and the expansive heavendiminishes you, yet allows you to see further than is possible for the human eye. In this landscape you may discern more clearly that map imprinted on your nervous system. In such places men can be caught up in strange rhapsodies, and may be transformed. Such places have spawned the leaders of great religions. But, I told myself, those who choose the wilderness retreat do so not to escape reality but to find it. I think it was Dostoevsky who wrote that to fall into the hands of the living god was a powerful and dreadful thing, and maybe that is what happened to Chris McCandless. For had he kept his eyes firmly on reality, however flawed, he might have made the journey back, for that is the important one!
    I thought again of the words carved on the scrap of wood, the word ‘King’ underlined, and wondered what that meant. It was an exuberant statement from such a well-trained and disciplined mind. What did he mean? Was London the king because he understood the dreadful nature of the world he had entered into? In
White Fang
he wrote:
    Dark spruce forest groaned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, into the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was desolation, lifeless, without movement, so alone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a tinge of laughter, but laughter more terrible than any sadness. A laughter cold as the frost, and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort to life. It was the wild, the savage, frozenhearted Northland Wild.
    That dark spruce forest remains on the hills around Fairbanks, and even in the first days of summer there was nothing pretty about it. It was old and unsightly, and the trees looked more dead than alive. They could have been fifty or sixty years old, but theylooked like saplings. Because the ground they grow out of is permanently frozen there are insufficient nutrients to allow them to gain any real bulk or to spread. I was told that only the black spruce can grow on such