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A COLLECTING DAY ABOVE AROLLA 85 
terrible a thing for little mundane man. In the high 
valleys of the Alps, where the silence is so vast that 
it seems as if a single uttered word would shatter the 
roof of the world, the nearness of the Gods is either 
purifying or appalling, according to one’s strength of 
mood. All the Lords of Life and Death, all Gods and 
Saints, all Buddhas and Bodhisattas out of the infinite past 
and the infinite future, they are all there, making part of 
that immeasurable beauty, chanting in the choir of that 
eternal silence, incarnate in the radiance of that un- 
stained mountain sunlight. They are the irresistible 
Powers of the air; the lucid diamond air is THEM. So 
that, if one be strong enough, from hours of solitude in 
upmost Alps, one can drink big draughts of immortality, 
can leave behind for a wholesome hour the unrealities of 
earthly life, and lose consciousness of the phantom daily 
self in reunion with the divine eternal Self. 
However, if such a mood be not upon you, be careful 
how you venture into the mountains. Be careful how 
you go there accompanied by unworthy thoughts, petty 
ambitions, hopes and fears. For the pure Spirits of the 
hills are not patient of such affronts, and they will have 
none of such thoughts in their presence, nor of you that 
bring them. You will be unhappy in such august 
neighbourhood—feel ill-attuned, unwanted, disliked. In 
such a mood, or when weakness and the love of human 
comradeship is upon one, let us stay happily at the 
Schweizerhof, or parade the streets of Zermatt. For the 
terror of the hills is dreadful, cold, annihilating. It 
strips man of his dignity, denies his existence, reduces 
him to an ineffectual ghost, a mere duaupov eidwdor of his 
decent Bond Street entity. On level lawns in the Alps I 
have felt a spiritual terror so glacial and overpowering 
that I have scarcely been able to put one trembling foot 
before the other. Not, for a moment, that there was 
