f I should tell you
that it bubbles, like a caldron over the bottomless pit, with griefs
and sins!--that in lives condemned to perpetual imprisonment on
these bare rocks, feeding on themselves, traits intensifying, the
loneliness, the labor, the negation, slowly extract the juices of
humanity, and make crime a matter to be whispered of among them? If
they feel they are forgotten by God, what matters the murder or the
suicide more or less that gives release? It is hell here or hell
there: they are sure of this--they have it; the other may not come to
pass."

"What do you mean?" I said, with white lips; for as he spoke it seemed
as if I had come into a land of lepers. "Here in this white solitude,
among lives fed from the primitive sources of nature and the dew of
the morning--"

"I mean," he said, "that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your
thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural
senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit
whiter than those born in the purlieus of the police stations of the
cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it
must be for no idle fancy, but for my own identity."

"Well," I said, "I do not believe you."

"Ah!" he replied, "have I gained a point, and found an advocate in an
ideal of me? That would be as romantic as any of the romance of the
hills. And there _is_ romance here, whether it is born of crime, or of
joy, or of sorrow. There is romance enough on that old Mount of Sorrow
that you see when the storm opens and strips it in that sudden white
glory. Keep your eye, if you please, on a spot half-way up the sky,
and when the apparition comes again you will find the dark outline of
a dwelling there. It was a dwelling once; now it is only a ruin, hut
and barn and byre. Why do you shudder? Do you see it? It is only a
shadow. But a shadow with outlines black enough to defy the whitest
blast that ever blew. Sometimes it seems to me as though that old ruin
were itself a ghostly thing, a spectre of tragedies that will not
down; for the avalanches divide and leave it, and the storms whistle
over and beat against it, and it is always there when the sun rises. I
don't know what it has to do with my fortunes; I don't know why it is
a blotch upon the face of nature to me; but if ever I grow sad or sick
at heart I feel as though I should be made whole again could that evil
thing be removed."

"Why not remove it?"