Whither in these littered and overcrowded islands should one flee to
escape the spectacle of outworn and discarded boots? I should go to a
mountain-top and amongst mountain-tops I should choose the highest. I
should scale the summit of Ben Nevis.
Yet it is but a few days since I saw on that proud eminence the
unmistakable remains of an ordinary walking boot.
It reposed on the perilous edge of a snowdrift that even in summer
curves giddily over the lip of the dreadful gulf over which the
eastern precipice beetles. There is ever a certain pathos about
discarded articles of apparel: a baby's outgrown shoe, a girl's
forgotten glove, an abandoned bowler; but the situation of this boot,
thus high uplifted towards the eternal stars, gave to it a mystery, a
grandeur, a sublimity that held me long in contemplation.
How came it there?
The path that winds up that grey mountain is rough; its harsh stones
and remorseless gradients take toll of leather as of flesh. Yet half a
sole and a sound upper are better than no boot; and what climber but
would postpone till after his descent the discarding of his damaged
footgear?
Could it be, I asked myself, the relic and evidence of an inhuman
crime? Was it possible that some party of climbers, arriving at the
top lunchless and desperately hungry, had sacrificed their plumpest,
disposing of his clothes over the cliff, but failing to hole out with
this tell-tale boot?
But no, I bethought me of the price of leather. They would have
reserved the boots, even at the risk of suspicion. Moreover, no one
would ever reach that exacting altitude in a state of succulence.
A glow of sympathy, a thrill of appreciation swept through me as I
realised what was at once the worthiest and the likeliest explanation.
Who shall plumb the depths of the affection of a true pedestrian for
his boots, the companions and comfort of so many a pilgrimage? Who but
the climber, the hill-tramp, knows the pang of regret with which he
faces at last the truth that his favourite boots are past repair, the
sorrow and self-reproach with which he permits them to be consigned to
Erebus?
I saw it all. As the Roman veteran hung upon the temple wall of Mars
the arms he might no longer wield, so hither came some lofty-minded
climber, bearing in devoted hands his outworn and faithful boot, to
leave it sadly and with reverence in this most worthy resting-place,
here to repose at the end of all the roads it had trod, on the highest
of all the native hills it had climbed.