Anabasis

During the French anabasis to Moscow he entered our service, made himself a prodigious favorite with the whole imperial family, and even now is only in his twenty−second year.

‘I have a feeling that if we follow a scent of spring on the air with sufficient eagerness we’ll come to a south without snow more quickly than we think. Thalassa, thalassa. This is what the Greeks called an anabasis.’ They looked at him as if he were barmy.

The Wordsworthian journey to the source […] is more of an amble than an anabasis or strenuous heroic quest.