“Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and, because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two high, they were become something different from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds belong, and birds, and the last trembling colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky.... “These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one’s immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.... That it is also which leads some men to climb mountain tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.” That is subjective enough, with a vengeance; for those few lines one would gladly sacrifice a whole shelf full of climbing literature dealing with the objective facts that do not vary with the individual observer. Mr. Kipling again, though no mountaineer, has struck out one message which most mountaineers would sacrifice a season’s climbing to have written. A brief quotation gives only a faint impression of its beauty-- “At last, they entered a world within a world--a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains. Here, one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast table-land running far into the valley. Three days later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward. “‘Surely the Gods live here,’ said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. ‘This is no place for men!’