298 THE LAND OF THE BION 
that dear blue slope of curving Irish mountain land and take 
myself and my patient reader across the Quasi Nyiro and 
so back to the civilization of Nairobi and the iron road to a 
distant coast. 
I have lingered so long at the foot of Kenia that I have 
come to feel as though this great mountain was henceforth 
to be a partof me. It makes one sad to turn one’s back on 
it, as I must, to-day. I think it is Kenia whose majesty 
and wonder are responsible for the dreaming in which I 
have again seen so clearly those dear Irish sea-girdled hills 
that are a real part of myself. 
Arthur Hugh Clough says somewhere: 
“Oh ye whose eyes with constant toil are tired, 
Come rest them on the wideness of the sea.” 
Sea has never rested me as have the mountains. The 
seas to me always seems relentless, cruel, estranging, as 
Matthew Arnold calls it, while the mountains carry me back 
and make me live over again the transfigured days of 
boyhood. 
Then, somehow, mountains seem to call forth anew the 
nopes and yearnings which, if we did but speak out the whole 
truth, if we resisted the slavery of convention, we all should 
confess are woefully apt to suffer abatement and decay, and 
yet are more precious to us than any mere earthly possession. 
Brown has put what I want to say into beautiful verse. 
His peasant muses: 
“I suppose it is God that makes when He wills 
Them beautiful things, with the lift of His hills 
And the waft of His winds; His calms and His storms 
And His work — and the rest 7 
So true men, wearied in the unending battle, have in all 
the ages turned, as did the Psalmist of old, “‘to the hills 
whence cometh our help.” Bedford gaol wall could not 
shut out from John Bunyan’s eyes those “delectable moun- 
tains”? which he‘has helped millions to see, and Wordsworth 
