The six days’ walk

Text 1: The Great Walking Match, by Edwin Marlowe

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

By the fifth day of the great walking match at the Agricultural Hall, the sawdust track had been beaten so hard by the feet of the competitors that it rang beneath them like a floor of slate. Round and round they went, eleven men at the start of the week and four of them now, beneath a roof hung with flags and choked with the smoke of a thousand pipes.

The crowd was immense and of every description. Clerks who ought to have been at their desks, ladies in fine bonnets, costermongers with oranges, a bishop, or a man very like one: all had paid their shilling to watch human beings walk until they could walk no more. Bets were shouted from the galleries. A brass band played the same three tunes, over and over, until the music itself seemed footsore.

The leader, a lean Yorkshireman named Crowther, had covered four hundred and sixty miles. I watched him for an hour. His face was grey; his lips were cracked; his eyes, fixed upon some point a long way beyond the hall, seemed to belong to a sleepwalker. Twice he staggered. Twice his trainer ran beside him with a sponge and a flask of beef tea, murmuring as one might to a frightened horse. And twice, to a roar that shook the iron girders, he straightened and walked on.

Behind him the others suffered in their own fashions. One limped. One wept openly. One, an American, chewed steadily upon a lump of tobacco and appeared to feel nothing whatsoever.

At midnight I went out into the cold street, and the noise of the hall fell away behind me. I walked home, a matter of two miles, and was tired when I arrived.

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