So I addressed myself, like a dog who hears the crack of a whip, to the rocks.
It would be tedious to relate how I clambered and stumbled and agonised. There did not seem to me the slightest use in making the attempt, or the smallest hope of reaching the top, or the least expectation of finding anything worth finding. I hated everything I had ever seen or known; recollections of old lives and of the quiet garden I had left came upon me with a sort of mental nausea. This was very different from the amiable and easy-going treatment I had expected. Yet I did struggle on, with a hideous faintness and weariness—but would it never stop? It seemed like years to me, my hands frozen and wetted by snow and dripping water, my feet bruised and wounded by sharp stones, my garments strangely torn and rent, with stains of blood showing through in places. Still the hideous business continued, but progress was never quite impossible. At one place I found the rocks wholly impassable, and choosing the broader of two ledges which ran left and right, I worked out along the cliff, only to find that the ledge ran into the precipices, and I had to retrace my steps, if the shuffling motions I made could be so called. Then I took the harder of the two, which zigzagged backwards and forwards across the rocks. At one place I saw a thing which moved me very strangely. This was a heap of bones, green, slimy, and ill-smelling, with some tattered rags of cloth about them, which lay in a heap beneath a precipice. The thought that a man could fall and be killed in such a place moved me with a fresh misery. What that meant I could not tell. Were we not away from such things as mouldering flesh and broken bones? It seemed not; and I climbed madly away from them. Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of rock, where I fell prostrate on my face and groaned.
"Yes, that was an ugly business," said the voice of Amroth beside me, "but you got through it fairly well. How do you feel?"
"I call it a perfect outrage," I said. "What is the meaning of this hateful business?"
"The meaning?" said Amroth; "never mind about the meaning. The point is that you are here!"
"Oh," I said, "I have had a horrible time. All my sense of security is gone from me. Is one indeed liable to this kind of interruption, Amroth?"
"Of course," said Amroth, "there must be some tests; but you will be better very soon. It is all over for the present, I may tell you, and you will soon be able to enjoy it. There is no terror in past suffering—it is the purest joy."
"Yes, I used to say so and think so," I said, closing my eyes. "But this was different—it was horrible! And the time it lasted, and the despair of it! It seems to have soaked into my whole life and poisoned it."
Amroth said nothing for a minute, but watched me closely.
Presently I went on. "And tell me one thing. There was a ghastly thing I saw, some mouldering bones on a ledge. Can people indeed fall and die there?"