ched the
end of our climb and found ourselves on a level green plain with rolling
green downs around us, the sort of homely gentle scene that meets you
when, for instance, you cross the border between England and Scotland,
or pass on the railway the lower fells of Cumberland--a scene suggestive
of sheep grazing on rich close turf, and of comfortable homesteads
hidden away in the folds of the hills. This abrupt transition brought to
the mind the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. It seemed that we had
climbed to the top of the world that had hitherto been ours, and were
starting afresh on a new level.

This sensation was chiefly illusory; for that level green plain and
those rolling green downs deceived one with their greenness, and proved
on closer inspection to be but indifferent pastures, while after a mile
or two the plain bent round a corner, and we came in view of such mighty
irregularities of the earth's surface as left no doubt as to our being
still in the very heart of the mountains. For as we turned that corner,
suddenly, as with a sudden flash, and all lit up with the sunlight that
had just dispelled the clouds, Chumalari stood before us, his white top
only a few miles away, but many thousand feet above us, and so reaching
to a height in the sky that to the stranger's eye was almost appalling.

To us men the romance of scenery is very elusive. I have known nice old
ladies to whom a fine sunset was a real substantial joy, giving them the
same nocturnal exhilaration that baser clay can only acquire by
absorbing a bottle of champagne. Given a male mind properly swept and
garnished for the time being by some potent influence--preferably of
course a sweet influence of the feminine gender--even the most
businesslike and prosaic of us can, if only for short intervals at a
time, empty ourselves of the things of this ugly world and assimilate a
little of nature's beauty. But in ordinary humdrum life, when that
sweet feminine influence is no longer at his side (or, if still at his
side, has lost much of its old magic by having been so foolish as to be
now his mere wife), the ordinary brutal humdrum man regards the finest
waterfall in the world as merely a good place at which to dilute his
whiskey, finds blue sunlit waters rather trying to the eyes, and
execrates the glorious sweep of the mountain in front of him as
conducive to perspiration and shortness of breath as he climbs it. We
can't help it, we men; we are built th