We stood up in the clear and happy light and found that everything was changed.  We poured water upon our faces and our hands, strode out a hundred yards and saw again the features of a man.  He had a kind face of some age, and eyes such as are the eyes of mountaineers, which seem to have constantly contemplated the distant horizons and wide plains beneath their homes.  We heard as he came up the sound of a bell in a Christian church below, and we exchanged with him the salutations of living men.  Then I said to him:  “What day is this?” He said “Sunday,” and a sort of memory of our fear came on us, for we had lost a day.

Then I said to him:  “What river are we upon, and what valley is this?”

He answered:  “The river and the valley of the Aston.”  And what he said was true, for as we rounded a corner we perceived right before us a barrier, that rock of Guie from which we had set out.  We had come down again into France, and into the very dale by which we had begun our ascent.

But what that valley was which had led us from the summits round backward to our starting-place, forcing upon us the refusal of whatever powers protect this passage of the chain, I have never been able to tell.  It is not upon the maps; by our description the peasants knew nothing of it.  No book tells of it.  No men except ourselves have seen it, and I am willing to believe that it is not of this world.

ON ELY

There are two ways by which a man may acquire any kind of learning or profit, and this is especially true of travel.

Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going inwards and inwards.  There is no goal to either of these directions, nor any term to your advantage as you travel in them.

If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infinite is always well ahead of you, and its symbol is the sky.

If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you like you will never exhaust the complexity of things; and the truth of this is very evident in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so angrily at evening.

You may travel for the sake of great horizons, and travel all your life, and fill your memory with nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet not have seen a tenth of the world.  Or you may spend your life upon the religious history of East Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon it, and yet find that you have continually to excise and select from the growing mass of your material.

* * * * *