Gay & Son, Strand, London; he was formerly
a conductor of Gay's tourist parties.
Excellent couriers
are somewhat rare; if the reader is about to travel,
he will find it to his advantage to make a note of this one.
CHAPTER XXXIII
[We Climb Far - by Buggy]
The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the
other side of the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated
every night with those gorgeous theatrical fires whose
name I cannot call just at this moment. This was said
to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means
to miss. I was strongly tempted, but I could not go
there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.
The task which I had set myself was to walk over Europe
on foot, not skim over it in a boat. I had made a tacit
contract with myself; it was my duty to abide by it.
I was willing to make boat trips for pleasure, but I could
not conscientiously make them in the way of business.
It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight,
but I lived down the desire, and gained in my self-respect
through the triumph. I had a finer and a grander sight,
however, where I was. This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau
softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by
the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence
of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed
to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal,
face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature
of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.
One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation
of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice - a spirit
which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages,
upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them;
and would judge a million more - and still be there,
watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life
should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.
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