y slopes of Olympus, impatient to go the rest of the way.

"Shall we be off?"

"By all means," Waram said.

They found the body where they had hidden it the night before, and in
the shelter of a little grove of larches Grimshaw stripped and then
reclothed himself in the pedlar's coarse and soiled under-linen, the
worn corduroy trousers, the flannel shirt, short coat, and old black
velvet hat. Waram was astounded by the beauty and strength of
Grimshaw's body. Like the pedlar, he was blonde-skinned, thin-waisted,
broad of back.

Grimshaw shuddered as he helped to clothe the dead pedlar in his own
fashionable garments. "Death," he said. "Ugh! How ugly. How
terrifying. How abominable."

They carried the body across the plateau. The height where they stood
was touched by the sun, but the valley below was still immersed in
shadow, a broad purple shadow threaded by the shining Rhone.

"Well?" Waram demanded. "Are you eager to die? For this means death
for you, you know."

"A living death," Grimshaw said. He glanced down at the replica of
himself. A convulsive shudder passed through him from head to foot;
his face twisted; his eyes dilated. He made a strong effort to control
himself and whispered: "I understand. Go ahead. Do it. I can't. It is
like destroying me myself.... I can't. Do it--"

Waram lifted the dead body and pushed it over the edge. Grimshaw,
trembling violently, watched it fall. I think, from what Doctor Waram
told me many years later, that the poet must have suffered the
violence and terror of that plummet drop, must have felt the tearing
clutch of pointed rocks in the wall face, must have known the leaping
upward of the earth, the whine of wind in his bursting ears, the dizzy
spinning, the rending, obliterating impact at last....

The pedlar lay in the valley. Grimshaw stood on the brink of the
"wall." He turned, and saw Doctor Waram walking quickly away across
the plateau without a backward glance. They had agreed that Waram was
to return at once to the village and report the death of "his friend,
Mr. Grimshaw." The body, they knew, would be crushed beyond
recognition--a bruised and broken fragment, like enough to Cecil
Grimshaw to pass whatever examination would be given it. Grimshaw
himself was to go through the wood to the highroad, then on to Finhaut
and Chamonix and into France. He was never again to write to Dagmar,
to return to England, or to claim his English property....

Can you imagine