ance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy
remnant of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what
was happening....

This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much more
than it tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and
horror. For three or four years every detail of that circumstantial
narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from perfect health and
the obsession returned. He could not endure the neighing of horses: when
he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still. And
all his life thereafter he hated horses.

6

A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a
certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places.
There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and
the pitifully discreet.

He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a
certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This
happened in his adolescence. He had had a bad attack of influenza and
his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only hotel it was in
those days--at Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had picked up
his strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering,
that second-rate mountaineering which is so dear to dons and
schoolmasters. When the time came he was ready for that, but he had had
his experiences. He had gone through a phase of real cowardice. He was
afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid of
the steepness of the mountains. He had to drive ten or twelve miles
up and up the mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and
precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to
shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated
how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over....

"And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. I made strides over
precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crumbled
away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing."

The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which bring
water from some distant source to pastures that have an insufficient
or uncertain supply. It is a little better known than most because of
a certain exceptional boldness in its construction; for a distance of a
few