This picture of human indignity tortured Benham’s imagination much more than it tortured the teller of the tale.  It filled him with shame and horror.  For three or four years every detail of that circumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable.  A little lapse from perfect health and the obsession returned.  He could not endure the neighing of horses:  when he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still.  And all his life thereafter he hated horses.

6

A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places.  There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and the pitifully discreet.

He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin.  This happened in his adolescence.  He had had a bad attack of influenza and his doctor had sent him to a little hotel—­the only hotel it was in those days—­at Montana in Valais.  There, later, when he had picked up his strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering, that second-rate mountaineering which is so dear to dons and schoolmasters.  When the time came he was ready for that, but he had had his experiences.  He had gone through a phase of real cowardice.  He was afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid of the steepness of the mountains.  He had to drive ten or twelve miles up and up the mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over. . . .

“And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices.  I made strides over precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crumbled away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing.”

The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which bring water from some distant source to pastures that have an insufficient or uncertain supply.  It is a little better known than most because of a certain exceptional boldness in its construction; for a distance of a few score yards it runs supported by iron staples across the front of a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half a mile it hangs like an eyebrow over nearly or quite vertical walls of pine-set rock.  Beside it, on the outer side of it, runs a path, which becomes an offhand gangway of planking at the overhanging places.  At one corner, which gives the favourite picture postcard from Montana, the rocks project so sharply above the water that the passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon the bending plank as he walks.  There is no hand-hold at all.