ou may
imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling,
gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old
man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my
staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the
road again with my face towards Rome.

I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will
not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to
me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot
seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all
the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going
to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.

Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing--

Can fix the high elusive hour
And stand in things divine.

And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.

So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
in a ring and singing songs. The sight so cheered me that I
determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for
the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of
an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers,
beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was
the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross
right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was
an inn between me and that vast barrier.

The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out,
but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist th