We camped then under an overhanging crag of Mt. Justinian and watched the moon, half eclipsed by a cliff, creep and crawl like a golden turtle over the mountains, over the mighty tops, over the ... over the world, whilst bright silver cloudlets in ball-robes danced lightly amongst the stars. And we climbed next day by twenty-four zigzags to the jagged summit, and rested in a grand snow-cavern as large as a church, made by the winds and the drifts in dread mid-winter, and we saw the clouds blow off the glaciers like washing-day steam out of a kitchen door. The poet lifted his mighty voice to the rocks, and they sent a kindred answer back to him. He called the snow-cavern Brand’s Church, and it was a strange and thrilling place in which to abide.
They call the ridge of the mountain the “Garden Wall,” but it is not very felicitously named. But it is wall-like. It is like an enormous exaggeration of the Roman wall built to keep out the Picts and Scots from England, but it is a rampart against the Martians rather than against man.
We came at last to a joyous company in an old-fashioned inn, and made happy acquaintance with a band of hikers and sportsmen and mountaineers. Girls with riding-switches in their hands were dancing with one another, and a tall dark striking one whom I called the Spaniard chummed in with us and brought her friend and made Vachel promise to recite. We had a mountain-climbers’ supper, and when this was cleared away the bears came down the mountain toward us for the leavings, and watched us eagerly and ate the sweets we threw them, and when the bears were gone we built a huge bonfire and sat around and watched the sparks fly upward, and told stories and chaffed one another. And Vachel talked to us all of the virtue of the West and read to us his poem of the hour—the story of Johnny Appleseed, who in the days of President Washington made for us all—great medicine.
Thackeray advised us—
How to live on nothing a year.
“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;
Order everything and pay nothing.”
We can go one better than that.
Take over the Rocky Mountains