He left believing that ‘human beings were compounded of both heavenly and hellish elements, with infinite possibilities of sorrow and joy. In consequence I had an acute sense of sin and a strong hatred of whatever debased human nature.’ 

Buchan’s next two years were described both in his autobiography and by his most recent biographer as a ‘London Interlude’. Although he read for and was called to the Bar, his main interests remained literary, and he soaked up the atmosphere of a city he later recalled as still having a Dickens flavour, where ‘every street corner was peopled by ghosts from literature and history’. He supplemented his income by articles in the Spectator and for Blackwood’s Magazine. Buchan was, as he wrote to a friend in June 1901, settling down to be a responsible member of society. However, within four months he was in South Africa, a member of the British High Commissioner’s staff recruited to help in the reconstruction in the aftermath of the Boer War. From the first, Buchan fell under the country’s spell. In addition to routine travels, he took four longer treks into the heart of the country, including the Wood Bush, an elevated plateau in the Zoutpansberg mountains—‘a kind of celestial Scotland’. He wrote years later, ‘I seemed to be crossing the borders of a temenos, a place enchanted and consecrate. I resolved to go back in my old age, build a dwelling, and leave my bones there.’

Buchan called the period of his life, between his return from South Africa in October 1903 and the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, as ‘The Middle Years’. He had fully expected to return, whether to South Africa or Egypt, to serve another decade in the Empire. Instead, three years of ‘restlessness and distaste’ saw him practising at the Bar, unsettled in a London that, to him, had lost its glamour. He turned to other pursuits. In 1904 he paid his first visit to the Alps and two years later became a member of the Alpine Club. Mountaineering brought him again into touch with the wild nature with which he had lived intimately in South Africa. He never had an accident mountaineering, but one experience he never forgot. In 1910, he was returning from a successful climb in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge with a young local forester. Six miles lay between them and their homecoming:

It was a brilliant summer day with a promise of great heat, but our road lay through pleasant shady pine woods and flowery meadows. I noticed that my companion had fallen silent, and, glancing at him, was amazed to see that his face was dead-white, that sweat stood in beads on his forehead, and that his eyes were staring ahead as if he were in an agony of fear, as if terror were all around me so that he dared not look one way rather than another. Suddenly he began to run, and I ran too, some power not myself constraining me. Terror had seized me also . . . we ran like demented bacchanals . . . and all the time we never uttered a sound. . . .