_The greedy old mountains have been to our knapsacks And eaten up most of our food. They’ve swallowed our breath and silenced our speech. But they haven’t broken our hearts. It takes more than a mountain to do that!_ [Illustration: IMPRISONED IN THE VIEWLESS WINDS] VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS MY companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging, dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps. No ribald songs, now, of tramping days--but as if hushed by the hills he croons ever to himself-- O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land, Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand, and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward. By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back. In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge above us and losing themselves in thin air. It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein. “The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel _sotto voce_. “Seventh reel.” * * * * *