Hallelujah, on the bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out
To revive us again!
“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees, old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your eyes.”
We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,” as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum. Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “Let Samson be a-coming in to your mind.”
This mountain was our first ne plus ultra, for having got to the top of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again. Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “Rah for Bryan!” apparently his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on. He passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.
“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay. “Millions of flowers—and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d like to write a song on it.”
But the poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and sheltered under a blanket.