The way was hard—­harder by far than I had deemed possible—­and kept us too busy for talk.  Our silence was not otherwise constrained at all.  Passion fell away from us as we climbed; fell away with its strife, its confusion, its distempered memories of the night now past; and was left with the vapours of the coast where the malaria brooded.  Through the upper, clearer atmosphere we walked as gods on the roof of the world, saw with clear eyes, knew with mind and spirit untroubled by self-sickness.  We were silent, having fallen into an accord which made all speech idle.  Arduous as the road soon became, and, while unknown to both of us, more arduous to me because of my inexperience, we chose without hesitating, almost without consulting.  Each difficulty brought decision, and with decision, its own help.  Now it was I who steadied her leap across a chasm; now came her turn to underprop my foothold till I clambered to a ledge whence I could reach down a hand and drag her up to me.  As a rule I may call myself a blundering climber, my build being too heavy; but I made no mistake that day.

In the course of a three hours’ scramble she spoke to me (as I remember) once only, and then as a comrade, in quiet approval of my mountaineering.  We had come to a crag over which—­with no word said—­I had lowered her by help of my bandolier.  She had waited at the foot while I followed her down without assistance, traversing on the way an outward-sloping ledge of smooth rock which overhung a precipice and a sheer fall of at least three hundred feet.  The ledge had nowhere a notch in it to grip the boot-sole, and was moreover slippery with the green ooze of a mountain spring.  It has haunted my dreams since then; I would not essay it again for my weight in money; but I crossed it that day, so to speak, with my hands in my pockets.

The most curious (you might call it the most uncanny) part of the whole adventure, was that from time to time we came out of these breathless scrambles plump upon a patch of cultivated ground and a hill-farm with its steading; the explanation being that these farms stand each at the head of its own ravine, and, inaccessible one to another, have communication with the world only by the tracks which lead down their ravines.  Here, three thousand feet and more above the sea—­upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of fishing-villages on the edge of the blue—­lived slow, sedate folks, who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave us goat’s-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered.  The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we should say) without patriotism.  We came to them as gods from the heights, and they received and sped us as gods.  They were too slow of speech to question us, or even to express their astonishment.