ckets would be awake and
guarding the northward road for at least a league beyond, and to
avoid them we must cross the high mountain spurs, using where we
could their patches of forest and our best speed where these left the
ridges bare.

The way was hard--harder by far than I had deemed possible--and kept
us too busy for talk. Our silence was not otherwise constrained at
all. Passion fell away from us as we climbed; fell away with its
strife, its confusion, its distempered memories of the night now
past; and was left with the vapours of the coast where the malaria
brooded. Through the upper, clearer atmosphere we walked as gods on
the roof of the world, saw with clear eyes, knew with mind and spirit
untroubled by self-sickness. We were silent, having fallen into an
accord which made all speech idle. Arduous as the road soon became,
and, while unknown to both of us, more arduous to me because of my
inexperience, we chose without hesitating, almost without consulting.
Each difficulty brought decision, and with decision, its own help.
Now it was I who steadied her leap across a chasm; now came her turn
to underprop my foothold till I clambered to a ledge whence I could
reach down a hand and drag her up to me. As a rule I may call myself
a blundering climber, my build being too heavy; but I made no mistake
that day.

In the course of a three hours' scramble she spoke to me (as I
remember) once only, and then as a comrade, in quiet approval of my
mountaineering. We had come to a crag over which--with no word
said--I had lowered her by help of my bandolier. She had waited at
the foot while I followed her down without assistance, traversing on
the way an outward-sloping ledge of smooth rock which overhung a
precipice and a sheer fall of at least three hundred feet. The ledge
had nowhere a notch in it to grip the boot-sole, and was moreover
slippery with the green ooze of a mountain spring. It has haunted my
dreams since then; I would not essay it again for my weight in money;
but I crossed it that day, so to speak, with my hands in my pockets.

The most curious (you might call it the most uncanny) part of the
whole adventure, was that from time to time we came out of these
breathless scrambles plump upon a patch of cultivated ground and a
hill-farm with its steading; the explanation being that these farms
stand each at the head of its own ravine, and, inaccessible one to
another, have communication with the worl