No doubt I am by nature a mountaineer and hillsman, half a Highlander, at least, and Vachel’s genius is the genius of the plains. I am an antelope and he is a bear, we tell each other. “You lead,” says Vachel. “Where the antelope will go the bear will follow after him, but the antelope will not follow the bear.” So he followed downward, and we took the most abominable chances of breaking our legs or our necks--we had to take them. Then presently we came to what seemed a full forty-foot sheer drop of foaming water--an impossible descent, you would say, for all the grasp and grip in it was water-washed and water-smoothed by ages of water--impossible, impossible. But no, face it, think it over, it can be managed. O caution, caution! Trust yourself to the Almighty Protector and grit your teeth! * * * * * TIMIDITY fought daring all the way down. We sat once or twice, and regarded the view. One thing was certain: we could not climb back to the places we had come from. If we did not continue downward we had to remain where we were. We did things which one does not do without guides and ropes and the paraphernalia of mountaineering, and when we got down to the tortured fissured rocks below the cataract we looked up whence we had come and said again to ourselves, “Impossible, impossible!” And as in going up the mountain the winning of the summit was continually deferred, so in descending to the valley we only conquered one steep mountain slope to be presented with another steep mountain slope and another series of terraces and another impossibility. Perhaps no one ever came this way over the mountains unless it was some adventurous Indian, but even Indians do not venture where horse cannot go. I remember as one of the most remarkable passages of our descent an hour we spent in a subarboreal channel shut out from the light of day, a jagged downward plunge where the stream fell away in darkness while in voluminous curves the thick sallow roofed it in. We made a hanging descent, clinging to handfuls of branches of sallow and swaying and sagging and dropping, and then touching rock with a dangling foot, and then clutching another lower bunch of branches and letting ourselves down again, downward, downward. * * * * * BUT it all ended well, for we came at last to sheets of sliding shale and then to a spacious forest. And we had been saved from all mischance, and the silence which danger had gradually imposed on us was broken. “Bread, beauty, and freedom is all that man requires,” cried Vachel, “and now I’ll translate it into fire, water, and a place to sleep.” These we found, and one by one the stars discovered us when they peeped through the branches of the lofty pines. They saw us where we lay now far away below, stretched out beside the embers of our fire and luxuriating in its warmth like cats.