Seldom is there space on summits for an encounter with Adventure. Here, however, a flat-topped balustrade runs round the top; this, on a second visit, we thought should be perambulated, and perambulation was in progress when suddenly the leader stopped short--another step and he would have been plunged in a crevasse. True, it was so narrow that he could not have fallen past his arms; but then this was none of your smooth cold ice-cracks. It belonged to the volcano rather than the glacier--a square pipe leading down twistingly to red-hot fires below. Lucky for him he had not stepped unwarily, now to be wedged in it, his helpless body fast, suffering a double and simultaneous metamorphosis, into frozen mutton above, smoked ham below.
It was only a chimney really, but you have no idea how curious a chimney looks from above, especially a big square one like this, without vestige of chimney-pot, and edge flush with the balustrade in the centre of which it had taken it into its head to debauch. And then its position, thus in the very chapel--that was strange. With the poet we asked:
‘What occupation do you here pursue? This is a lonesome place for one like you’;
but we got no answer--the embers did not even give one ‘flash of mild surprise,’ and we never knew what manner of man was warmed at the blaze we had seen dying.
So much for Adventure; now let us seek Romance.
Wadham Gardens are beautiful--but usually only to be seen as setting to a flower show, to the accompaniment of a band, and upon payment of a shilling. The Climber sees them free of charge, in their own self-sufficient beauty (not decreased by the moonlight), and solitary. Even the owls are almost silent--birds of the twilight more than of the midnight. The squirrels (for there are still squirrels, even here, far within the brick-and-mortar girdle)--they are long asleep. The Warden is safe in bed. The Climber, who is here partly for the garden’s sake, partly to prospect for a route up the College, swishes through the soaking grass along by the shadow of the pines and cedars. Ha!--‘Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?’--What is that dark form that he sees ‘cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green’? The Climber, cautiously approaching, greets with joy a hedge-pig (hedgehog, called by the general name--illogical and less euphonious). He is very tame; even permits a finger to stroke the only strokeable part of him, his soft furry stomach, before rolling up into a pin-cushion. Leaving him thus defensive and spherical, the Climber passes on, only by the next tree to find another; and the performance is repeated.