But when these goddesses saw Actaeon and Tiresias
A-bathing,
They laughed.
We meant nothing to them
Compared with what they knew they meant to us.
FROM THE FIRE TO THE DARK GOES THE TINY SPARK
XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD
We lunched on ham and peas and caramel cake, and lay in a natural cradle among the roots of giant firs, and slept for an hour of a perfect afternoon. After the ice-cold dip and scalding coffee and a good feed and a self-indulgent snooze, we knew ourselves to be well and certainly happy. What a thing is physical well-being—to be hard, to be fit, to be cool, to be clear-headed, to know there’s a live spring in every muscle, and then to be care-free and able to sleep in the afternoon!
Vachel’s ankle went very well, the danger was that he might do too much on it. We walked three or four miles up stream and then camped for the night on a wild triangle alongside a mighty barricade of the jetsam of broken water-washed tree trunks, some as long as fifty feet. We lodged in the profound trough of a characteristic Western canyon. Night came quickly, and our camp-fire light obscured the stars. The giant trees with shadowy bases climbed sheer out of sight into the murky sky above. The brown and white foaming river, like hundreds of swimming beavers, rolled onward past us all the while. We boiled from it, washed clothes in it, made soap-foam over it, but the ever-freshening waves purified our margins faster than we could sully them. We paddled about in bare feet on the shore and gathered wood whilst the firelight played on the stones, and we heaped high the bonfire. I stood on a mighty chief of the forest and flung lesser logs from the water-washed wood barricade right to the fire, and they landed one after another with a thud and a roar in the midst of the flames. Then we lay flat on our backs on our blankets and watched our sparks fly up and die in scores, in thirties, in fives, in thirty-fives, in hundred and fives. What a giddy and wild life some of them had! How they whirled! How impetuous were some, how serpentine others! We saw how all of them trailed their light as the first escaped from the fire, and were like serpents of flame.