However, the sensation is passing, and my thoughts have flown back naturally to the subject of dinners. Yes, many dinners—what a subject!—glorious, unapproachable, exhaustless dinners! I could write pages, volumes, in praise of dinners; but not for the vulgar, not for the uninitiated—that surely were sacrilege. Dinners that with subtle and insinuating address came and went, leaving behind them fascinating and precious memories, even though 'good digestion did not wait on appetite.' Dinners, too, eaten under the stars. Yes, now I think of it, that was a dinner! when four of us ate a whole sheep, after two weary days and nights spent starving on the icy slopes of Nanga Parbat.
Mountaineering, truly thou art a marvellous and goodly provoker of hunger! Those mortals who may be in search of sensations—big, boisterous, blustering sensations not to be denied—should sacrifice often on thy altars, O Goddess of the Hills!
In the mountains, however, these sensations, these inspired ecstasies of mind and body, may be pushed sometimes rather far; then the recoil comes, and with it contrast, which however is often agreeable. But these memories of unpleasant Alpine half-hours grow faint as one sits in a satisfying arm-chair—they are easily discounted in a process of mental dissipation, by which one cheats oneself; and finally, it is easy to believe that there is no sport like mountaineering. Of course this conclusion is fallacious—conclusions sometimes are. Again my thoughts are interrupted. Outside in the cold, the rain, and the darkness some poor wretch is making night hideous by attempting to sing—
'There is a 'appy land, for for awye.'
Most true! most philosophical! The Islands of the Blest usually are some distance away. We have been told by the poet that neither are they to be attained by omnibuses, nor to be approached by
'A ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws.'
Therefore why disturb the darkness, O most miserable one, by dismal reiteration of a well-known fact? But still the song moans out its Cockney dialect, false notes, and falser sentiment; and the singer, drenched to the skin, possibly starving, with probably only one desire, and that for drink, goes his way. I hear the melancholy music die into the distance. Of a truth his sensations cannot be pleasant; but with these few coppers changed into the equivalent of alcohol perhaps he also may
'Life's leaden metal into gold transmute,'
and cheat himself into the belief that life is worth living. That last sentence, now I come to read it over again, seems perhaps a trifle cynical; seems, certainly, but are we not told that things often 'are not what they seem'? I have heard the late poet laureate accused (and by a Scotchwoman, too!) of writing slang.
'Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly towards the west.'