"Not of my own. But when I go among snows and desolations--and usually I take my pilgrimage in mountains or the north--I think very much of the Night of this World--the time when our sun will be red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where now the forests of the tropics are steaming.... I think very much of that, and whether it is indeed God's purpose that our kind should end, and the cities we have built, the books we have written, all that we have given substance and a form, should lie dead beneath the snows." "You don't believe that?" "No. But if it is not so----. I went threading my way among gorges and precipices, with my poor brain dreaming of what the alternative should be, with my imagination straining and failing. Yet, in those high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes to men.... I remember that one night I sat up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how they should not escape us in the end." He glanced at me for a moment as though he doubted I should understand. "One becomes a personification up there," he said. "One becomes the ambassador of mankind to the outer world. "There is time to think over a lot of things. One puts one's self and one's ambition in a new pair of scales.... "Then there are hours when one is just exploring the wilderness like a child. Sometimes perhaps one gets a glimpse from some precipice edge of the plains far away, and houses and roadways, and remembers there is still a busy world of men. And at last one turns one's feet down some slope, some gorge that leads back. You come down, perhaps, into a pine forest, and hear that queer clatter reindeer make--and then, it may be, see a herdsman very far away, watching you. You wear your pilgrim's badge, and he makes no sign of seeing you.... "You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the same queer disinclination to go back to the world of men that I feel when I have to leave it. I think of dusty roads and hot valleys, and being looked at by many people. I think of the trouble of working with colleagues and opponents. This last journey I outstayed my time, camping in the pine woods for six days. Then my thoughts came round to my proper work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I came back into the world. You come back physically clean--as though you had had your arteries and veins washed out. And your brain has been cleaned, too.... I shall stick to the mountains now until I am old, and then I shall sail a boat in Polynesia. That is what so many old men do. Only last year one of the great leaders of the samurai--a white-haired man, who followed the Rule in spite of his one hundred and eleven years--was found dead in his boat far away from any land, far to the south, lying like a child asleep...." "That's better than a tumbled bed," said I, "and some boy of a doctor jabbing you with injections, and distressful people hovering about you."