VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS
My companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging, dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps. No ribald songs, now, of tramping days—but as if hushed by the hills he croons ever to himself—
O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand,
and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward.
By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back. In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge above us and losing themselves in thin air.
It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein. “The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel sotto voce. “Seventh reel.”
A mighty final effort brought us to the top. I shall not soon forget the dramatic sensation of seeing the new sky which suddenly began to lift itself into our view from out the other side of the mountain, a sky with more light, for it lay in the West. It was as if the prison-wall of the mountain had been thrown down and that which prisoners dream about and rave about had been given us.
And there was a way down. It was night and nothing, but we found a narrow gully on the other side, five or six feet broad, two or three thousand feet down, and an appalling steepness. This gully was all loose stones and boulders which the slightest touch sent clattering or thundering to the bottom. We were nerved to the descent by what we had gone through and by our joy at finding a way out.
I took the lead, clutched the rock wall for support, and began to slip downward, tentatively and cautiously. But directly I started, a wonderful thing occurred. I found the whole body of loose stones under my feet moved with me, and I began a progress as on a moving staircase, down, down, down, as in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth—easily, steadily. Pleasure in this was, however, rudely disturbed. Lindsay had started downward behind me and was naturally starting a movement of rocks on his own, and suddenly a leg-breaking boulder flew past on my track with dumfounding acceleration. I climbed, therefore, away from the moving staircase into a cleft of the rock and waited for the poet to draw level.
It was dark night now, and as the rocks from Lindsay’s feet rushed past they struck bright sparks in the gloom. How they crashed! How they thundered and lurched and thumped, and thumped again, and thudded into the abyss below, and how the little stones rattled after them! We agreed to go downward in short spells, one at a time, and then go into shelter and wait till we drew level again. And as we sat side by side in the gloom we looked to the great mountains on the other side of the new valley and discerned a colossal figure nine in snow, staring at us out of the darkness. It was eerie. It needed a deal of nerve to go on.
And we did not go much further. At one point I thought I saw two human beings, or they might have been bears, struggling slowly upward toward us. I shouted to them and they stopped. But they made no reply and just glowered menacingly upward. That was the end for me. I would go no further. I gave the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter. He came down the way I had come, laboriously, cautiously, like some weather-beaten old soldier, a skulker from beyond human ken. And he also desired to do no more that night. So we lay in a lair of a beast on the brink of a sheer cliff, far, as it happened, above mist and cloud and a rain that was falling below, and slumbered the night away.
The Guardsman and the Western Bard[1]
Went hiking hand in hand.
They felt uplifted much to see
The prospects wide and grand.
“A thousand leagues,” said one, “Oh Steve,
From any boardwalk band.”
“How fine the air, immense the view!
The trees are large and green.
See! Here are glades and crystal rills,
And every scent and petal fills
Our souls with pure ecstatic thrills.
Afflatus holds the scene!”
The Guardsman pointed to the sun.
“It’s supper time, I mean.”
And as they munched the cracker thin
And quaffed eau naturel,
The gates of heaven were oped—and all
Its liquid contents fell.
They felt the truth that bards have sung:
Heaven is a limpid well.
Then night came on, that covers all
Of high and mean degree,
The king, the clown, the russet gown,
The land, the clouds, the sea.
“And yet I scarcely feel,” said one,
“It really covers me.”
Long time they sought sweet slumber’s balm,
Kind antidote to care.
“O soft embalmer,” was their psalm
That filled the mountain air.
Embalmer! Something rough in pine
Was as all they wanted there.
A chilly dawn illumed the East,
Most wonderfully wet.
And evermore their pangs increased,
Nor heaven’s libations ever ceased ...
(No further messages released
They’re on that mountain yet).
[1] Contributed by “Rusticus” to the New York Evening Post at this point in our adventures.
WHEN HE IS IN PAIN HE CALLETH FOR THE BOTTLE