steep path side by side, the Boy stepping out
bravely, the top of his panama on a level with my ear.

Some magnetic cord of communication between his brain and mine
telegraphed back and forth, without personal intervention on either
part, my keen enjoyment of the scene, and his. We did not talk much,
but each knew what the other was feeling. Most people disappoint you
by their lack of capacity to enjoy nature, in moments which are
superlative to you--moments which alone would repay you for the whole
trouble of living through blank years. But this boy's spirit responded
to beauty, up to an extreme point which was highly satisfactory. I saw
it in the exaltation on his little sunburned face.

Joseph and Innocentina were ostentatiously delighted to greet us at
the Hospice. They and the animals had had their evening meal, and were
ready to start when we wished. We went to the refectory and dined in
company with many persons of many nationalities, who had just arrived
from the Swiss and Italian valleys. Some of them manipulated their
food strangely, as I had noticed here before; and Boy confided to me
his opinion that it was a pity human beings were still obliged to eat
with their mouths, like the lower animals. "It's a disgrace to one's
face, which ought to be exclusively for better things. It's really too
primitive, this penny-in-the-slot sort of arrangement. There ought to
be a tiny trap-door in one's chest somewhere, so that one could just
slip food in unobtrusively, at a meal, and go on talking and laughing
as if nothing had happened."

We were not long in dining, but by the time we came out again into the
biting cold, late afternoon had changed to early evening.

It was sunset. The great mountain shapes of glittering, red gold were
clear as the profiles of goddesses, against a sky of rose. One--the
grandest goddess of all--wore on her proud head a crown of snow which
sparkled with diamond coruscations, rainbow-tinted in the pink light.
Below her golden forehead hovered a thin cloud-veil, of pale lilac;
and we had gone a long way down the mountain before the ineffable
colour burned to ashes-of-rose. Then darkness caught and engulfed us,
in the Valley of Death. The rushing of the river in its ravine was
like the voice of night, not a separate sound at all, for hearing it
was to hear the silence.

By-and-bye we grew conscious of a faint, gradual revealing of the
mountain-tops, which for a time had been black, jagged