WHERE THE ANTELOPE WILLGO THE BEAR WILL FOLLOWXIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE
WHERE THE ANTELOPE WILLGO THE BEAR WILL FOLLOW
Blessingsfor dawn and the rosy lights and for the cloudlessness of the morning! Had mist enshrouded us we should have had to have remained high up on the slippery knife-edge of the mountain till the mist had passed. We were able to descend, cautiously, cautiously, for three hours in a trackless precipitous zig-zag to the red peak of a lower mountain and a high snow-bound lake, where we made agood fire and made coffee with our last coffee, and lay down again and slept. Then we washed in the snow and ceased to be old weather-beaten tramps and recaptured our yesterdays and our youth, and Vachel began to sing again and our knapsacks felt lighter, as indeed they were, for we had eaten up all the rations, even the iron rations.
Then we walked to the valley of the Sun Mountain adown the rocks of a continuous cascade. The descent to the snow-bound lake and the red peak had seemed impossible, and we essayed the impossible again. It was not merely a polite walk downstairs. Every step that we took was a problem. We used our hands and the strength of our wrists as much as our feet and the tension of our ankles. Constantly were we faced with fifteen to twenty-foot drops on to narrow ledges, where a balance must be kept when we alighted.
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 theantelope 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!
Timidityfought 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.
Butit 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.
We boiled a pot of black currants and wild gooseberries and we ate it to the last berry, though, as the poet said afterwards, it was a quart of concentrated quinine. And we made a rosy layer of wild black-currant candy in the frying-pan which was not allowed to remain long unconsumed. We had no food in our knapsacks, only a little sugar, but we counted ourselves happy though hungry because we had been up on top of a great mountain and had come down.
“A joy to the heart of a man is a goal that he may not reach,” says Swinburne. And a greater joy still is the joy of reaching it. That is what we have been doing all day.
“Call it ‘Doing the Impossible’ and thinking well of ourselves,” adds the poet when I read this to him:
“My master builder!” said the ladyWhen she made the master builderClimb to the top of his new building,Risking his life and doing the impossible a second time.She made him do it, but he doing it was a hero.He showed his manhood to herBy doing something that could not be done.“The impossible or nothing” be our cry.Don’t you loathe the perfectly possible?I do.
“My master builder!” said the ladyWhen she made the master builderClimb to the top of his new building,Risking his life and doing the impossible a second time.She made him do it, but he doing it was a hero.He showed his manhood to herBy doing something that could not be done.“The impossible or nothing” be our cry.Don’t you loathe the perfectly possible?I do.
“My master builder!” said the lady
When she made the master builder
Climb to the top of his new building,
Risking his life and doing the impossible a second time.
She made him do it, but he doing it was a hero.
He showed his manhood to her
By doing something that could not be done.
“The impossible or nothing” be our cry.
Don’t you loathe the perfectly possible?
I do.