I walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd
streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte.
And while I walk I think.
I think things of a great many kinds--potent and magic and mad.
The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind.
And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of
my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me
along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and
uncomplaisant to my soles.
And then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and
their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against
evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s
surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish
brain and the world-hardness beneath them.
To-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful
Anaconda Hill--a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and
scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands
of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy
mulberry-toned mountains at the north-east. They were tragic,
triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds
hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at
those--it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human
gray eyes.
Presently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A
toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it
is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking.
The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best
that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I
looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many
things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and
of Me.
I leaned against a yellow ledge of rock with a subtle sickening
faintish feeling. ‘I am afraid,’ I said inside me, ‘of this world and
this life, and of all things little and large--nerves and Christmas
days and poetry: toy deserts and all. How can I cope with it--I
alone?’
Then I looked down at my Shoes of black soft dull leather and cloth,
buttoned snugly around my ankles and with tough supple soles fit to
take me to Jericho and back. Thus neatly armored I felt suddenly my
blue-veined feet need fear nothing from sand and stone and hardness
of ground. And if my feet are not afraid--my feet which bear weights
of all-of-me--why should afraidness touch my spirit which is proud?
There will be always Shoes in the world: stout stylish serviceable
boots, and pale delicate rat-skin pumps, and satin mule-slippers.
And always I shall have Shoes: in toy deserts I shall have black
strong snug-buttoned ones.