work and the stress of thinking
about large subjects in little scraps of time. But I know that a kind of
despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly
and heard in succession the heavy platitudes of white men, the slick,
thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid rhetoric of negroes. I
lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and
saw all too plainly the vanity, the jealousy, the self-interests that
show up so harshly against the professions of every altruistic movement.
It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the
vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no
common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us
together. So much of it was like bleating on a hillside....

I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt
unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me
was better than acquiescence in a crime against humanity. So to get
heart to bleat at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en
route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs
and glacier excursions seemed the best way of recuperating. I had never
had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I
took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget--if ever I
knew it, a dark man with a scar--and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above
Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up
into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed
and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those
interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there.
But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay;
one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has
ever taken an arctic equipment up into that wilderness, and had a good
healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the
Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour
we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a
slightly inclined precipice....

From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka
Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming frankly a pedestrian, I
made my way round by the Schoellenen gorge to Goeschenen, and over the
Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to descend to
Meiringen.

But I stil