We climbed Jehu mountain on the evening that we arrived in camp. We thought it would be the proper thing to do, so we dug our toe-nails into the prehistoric granite and the micacious what's-his-name and climbed to the top.
For a few minutes we didn't mind it much and got along first-rate, trying to make each believe that climbing mountains was our regular business.
I began to tell the Professor a little harmless lie about how I had travelled among the Alps, but I didn't finish it. Somehow I felt like breathing in what atmosphere was not in actual use, but I didn't have any place to put it.
The air at Jehu Mountain is good enough what there is of it, but it is too rare. If a man could let out the back straps of his vest and breathe in the unoccupied atmosphere lying between the Laramie river and the Zodiac it would be all right, but he can't do it. His intentions are good, but his skin isn't elastic enough to hold the diluted fluid.
We climbed up to where we could see the silvery moon rising like a pale schoolma'am and looking sadly across the dark valley asleep in night's embrace. I thought it was time to say something.
"Professor," said I, as my brow lighted up like a torchlight procession, and my voice broke upon the hush and solitude of evening like the tremulous notes of the buzz saw, "do you not think that far away amid the unknown worlds which drift through space and along whose track the drifting systems of planets wheel and circle through countless ages, while man, clothed in a little brief authority, cuts such fantastic tricks Before high heaven as makes the angels weep, regarding himself as the center of the solar system, planning to frustrate the immutable laws of nature, violating the prime and co-ordinate common law of universes, going behind the returns, as it were, trying to peer behind the veil, as I might say, prognosticating the unprognosticatable, evading the axioms and by-laws which not only regulate worlds and their creation, but link the phantasmagoria of diagonal animalculæ and cast broadcast the oleaginous incongruity of prehistoric usufruct?"
The Professor didn't say anything. He didn't seem to have followed me. Somewhere the thread had been broken, and the glowing truths couched in such language as would light up the pages of history and astronomy, were lost upon the silent air.
The Professor seemed sad and anxious and preoccupied. There was a look of apprehension and doubt and distrust in his eye, and he moved about uneasily. I asked him if there were any last words that I could carry to his friends, and ii there were any little acts of humanity and friendship which I could perform to render his last moments more pleasant.
He said there were.