And as in going up the mountain the winning of the summit was continually deferred, so in descending to the valley we only conquered one steep mountain slope to be presented with another steep mountain slope and another series of terraces and another impossibility.
Perhaps no one ever came this way over the mountains unless it was some adventurous Indian, but even Indians do not venture where horse cannot go. I remember as one of the most remarkable passages of our descent an hour we spent in a subarboreal channel shut out from the light of day, a jagged downward plunge where the stream fell away in darkness while in voluminous curves the thick sallow roofed it in. We made a hanging descent, clinging to handfuls of branches of sallow and swaying and sagging and dropping, and then touching rock with a dangling foot, and then clutching another lower bunch of branches and letting ourselves down again, downward, downward.
But it all ended well, for we came at last to sheets of sliding shale and then to a spacious forest. And we had been saved from all mischance, and the silence which danger had gradually imposed on us was broken.
“Bread, beauty, and freedom is all that man requires,” cried Vachel, “and now I’ll translate it into fire, water, and a place to sleep.”
These we found, and one by one the stars discovered us when they peeped through the branches of the lofty pines. They saw us where we lay now far away below, stretched out beside the embers of our fire and luxuriating in its warmth like cats.
We boiled a pot of black currants and wild gooseberries and we ate it to the last berry, though, as the poet said afterwards, it was a quart of concentrated quinine. And we made a rosy layer of wild black-currant candy in the frying-pan which was not allowed to remain long unconsumed. We had no food in our knapsacks, only a little sugar, but we counted ourselves happy though hungry because we had been up on top of a great mountain and had come down.
“A joy to the heart of a man is a goal that he may not reach,” says Swinburne. And a greater joy still is the joy of reaching it. That is what we have been doing all day.
“Call it ‘Doing the Impossible’ and thinking well of ourselves,” adds the poet when I read this to him:
