Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus.djvu/269

224 Immediately on our arrival at the Montonvers last year we engaged a porter, and early the next morning we stretched our cramped and railway stiffened legs in a slow and decorous march to the Couvercle. Though the early climbers used to start from Chamonix or other equally low-lying valleys, and walk steadily, and so far as one can learn without any symptom of fatigue, to the top of their peaks, we moderns are cast in a less robust mould—at least some of us are—and I freely confess that as I floundered and slipped on the last slope of loose stones leading to the Couvercle, exhaustion had laid hold of me as its victim, and even Hastings. . . . But the love of veracity must not be pushed too far. Truth, at all events outside its symbolical representations, requires decorous garments and drapiBries; even one's belief in an overruling Providence is strengthened and upheld by the wise ordinance that not merely is Truth ever appropriately habited and veiled, but usually compelled to lie hidden at the bottom of deepest wells. Moreover, it is always unwise to excite retort. Hastings, raging at the shameless goddess, might even hint that a few days later, as we were slowly plodding up the calotte of Mont Blanc, weary with a long struggle amid the mazes of the Brenva slopes, the rope tightened between us till its function seemed rather that of a tow-line than a mere protection against concealed crevasses. But these are