houghts beyond getting up steep rocks.

"It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matter
that was filling his mind. We had been taking an off-day, and were
sitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple in
the twilight. Chamonix always makes me choke a little-it is so crushed
in by those great snow masses. I said something about it--said I liked
the open spaces like the Gornegrat or the Bel Alp better. He asked me
why: if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon?
I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an empty
world. He repeated the word 'empty' and laughed.

"'By "empty" you mean,' he said, 'where things don't knock up against
you?'

I told him No. I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank aether.

"You don't knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you
want. It can't be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel."

"I agreed that the word needed explaining. 'I suppose it is mental
restlessness,' I said. 'I like to feel that for a tremendous distance
there is nothing round me. Why, I don't know. Some men are built the
other way and have a terror of space.'

"He said that that was better. 'It is a personal fancy, and depends on
your KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent
Blanche. And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing.
Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent
matter. Blind men often have it. But in any case, whether got from
instinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.'

"Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see
little point. I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I am
very clear myself. But yes--there IS a point. Supposing you knew-not
by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know
the truth of a mathematical proposition--that what we call empty space
was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills
and houses, but with things as real--as real to the mind. Would you
still feel crowded?'

"'No,' I said, 'I don't think so. It is only what we call matter that
signifies. It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other
thing, for there would be no escape from it. But what are you getting
at? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?'

"He said he wasn't thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk
of another subje