At Telepylus 331
of this is an aqueduct across the road, and both Lou
and I were too nervous to walk along the narrow
causeway. We had to go round, feeling more and more
ashamed of ourselves with every incident.
On the other side, the hill rises steeply. A tongue of
grass leads to a gully which is filled by the wall of the
old city which crowned the rock two thousand years
or more ago, when the world was less arid and the
population could depend on rainfall instead of having
to cluster in the neighbourhood of springs and streams
for its water.
King Lamus tied himself on the middle of a rope with
Dionysus at one end and Hermes at the other; while
we, under the guidance of Cypris and Athena, toiled
up the goat track which made a zigzag on the grassy
tongue. Their party attacked the rock buttress on our
right.
King Lamus made Hermes lead up the most astonish-
ingly precipitous crags, with little advice and no
assistance. But his hand was always within reach of
the boy; so that if he made a mistake and fell, he
could immediately be caught without hurting himself.
But the child himself did not know how carefully
he was being watched and guarded. Basil treated him
In every way as a responsible leader.
Their progress was necessarily slow; but so was
ours. Both Lou and I found it impossible to go more
than twenty paces or so without a rest. We had plenty
of time to watch them, and it was amazing to see the
working of the mind of Hermes as problem after
problem presented itself to him.
There were many occasions on which it would have
been easy for him to go around an obstacle, but he
never attempted to do so. King Lamus had already
implanted in his mind the idea that the fun of rock-
climbing consisted in tackling the most difficult passages.
The child would occasionally stop at the foot of a
pitch, and contemplate it as if it were a mathematical
problem. Once or twice he decided that it was too