332 The Diary of a Drug Fiena
hard for him. On these occasions, King Lamus would
go up first, calling out instructions to note the exact
places where he put his hands and feet ; and when it
was the turn of Hermes to follow, as often as not he
did so on a slack rope. His leader’s example had taught
him how: to negotiate the difficulty.
As for Dionysus, his methods were entirely different.
He had neither the intellectual power of the elder boy
nor his prudence, and he climbed with a sort of tem-
pestuous genius. |
At the top of the tongue, the goat track bends
suddenly to the right, under the wall, to a point where
there is a breach where one can crawl through very
comfortably. Here we rejoined the climbers.
“To-morrow,” said Hermes, “I shall take you up
the Great Gully,” with the air of a full-fledged alpine
guide.
Dionysus shook his little head. ‘I don’t know if
he tan det through the hole,” he lamented. |
King Lamus had taken off the rope and made it into
a coil by winding it around his knee and foot. We
plodded painfully over very rough ground to the top
of the rock. It was both exhilarating and disheartening
to see the way the two boys scrambled from boulder
_ to boulder.
_ At last we reached the top. The two brethren who
had carried up the provisions in knapsacks had already
begun to spread them out on a level patch of grass.