Tramp, tramp, tramp, plod, scramble, slither, advance one, slip back
two. . . . How detestable is this deliberate mountaineering ! I. said last time, quite emphatically enough, that I should never climb another mountain—never ; and I say so again. Let the lunatics go ahead and conquer these summits : personally I'm off home. But it won't do. I believe even were I alone it wouldn't do : I should go crashing on. It is the air's fault ; as it thins it sparkles and dances like the air above tropic seas. Then you get light-headed and your legs begin to skip along like a chamois'. Up, up, through the crocus meadows, through the bell-haunted pinewoods, by the charcoal burners' camp, out on to the open mountain face where no trees grow : along goat-tracks, over rock- mazes, at last into a region that had looked from beneath flowerless and as blasted as the mountains of the moon. Strange and unfriendly it is : a realm of chasms• and vast threatening boulders, utter silence and a sun that blazes with a scorching heat all daylong. But now there are sea-blue flowers growing on the edge of the ice ; and no drink one has known is to be compared with that glass of vermouth and spring water when, in mid-afternoon, we stagger into the first rest-hut above the woods.
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