finding. I hated everything I had ever seen or known;
recollections of old lives and of the quiet garden I had left came upon
me with a sort of mental nausea. This was very different from the
amiable and easy-going treatment I had expected. Yet I did struggle on,
with a hideous faintness and weariness--but would it never stop? It
seemed like years to me, my hands frozen and wetted by snow and dripping
water, my feet bruised and wounded by sharp stones, my garments
strangely torn and rent, with stains of blood showing through in places.
Still the hideous business continued, but progress was never quite
impossible. At one place I found the rocks wholly impassable, and
choosing the broader of two ledges which ran left and right, I worked
out along the cliff, only to find that the ledge ran into the
precipices, and I had to retrace my steps, if the shuffling motions I
made could be so called. Then I took the harder of the two, which
zigzagged backwards and forwards across the rocks. At one place I saw a
thing which moved me very strangely. This was a heap of bones, green,
slimy, and ill-smelling, with some tattered rags of cloth about them,
which lay in a heap beneath a precipice. The thought that a man could
fall and be killed in such a place moved me with a fresh misery. What
that meant I could not tell. Were we not away from such things as
mouldering flesh and broken bones? It seemed not; and I climbed madly
away from them. Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of
rock, where I fell prostrate on my face and groaned.

"Yes, that was an ugly business," said the voice of Amroth beside me,
"but you got through it fairly well. How do you feel?"

"I call it a perfect outrage," I said. "What is the meaning of this
hateful business?"

"The meaning?" said Amroth; "never mind about the meaning. The point is
that you are here!"

"Oh," I said, "I have had a horrible time. All my sense of security is
gone from me. Is one indeed liable to this kind of interruption,
Amroth?"

"Of course," said Amroth, "there must be some tests; but you will be
better very soon. It is all over for the present, I may tell you, and
you will soon be able to enjoy it. There is no terror in past
suffering--it is the purest joy."

"Yes, I used to say so and think so," I said, closing my eyes. "But this
was different--it was horrible! And the time it lasted, and the despair
of it! It seems to have soaked into my whole life and poisoned it.