"All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a 'wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world' - the words are of Dostoevsky's Great Inquisitor - and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road."

"One commonly held delusion is that men are the wanderers and women the guardians of hearth and home. This can, of course, be so. But women, above all, are the guardians of continuity: if the hearth moves, they move with it."

"The Bushmen, who walk the distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul's survival in another world. 'When we die, we die' they say. 'The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.'

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians - with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds - project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one."

Bruce Chatwin, "The Songlines"