Diary of a Drug Fiend

At Telepylus 331 of this is an aqueduct across the road, and both Lou and I were too nervous to walk along the narrow causeway. We had to go round, feeling more and more ashamed of ourselves with every incident. On the other side, the hill rises steeply. A tongue of grass leads to a gully which is filled by the wall of the old city which crowned the rock two thousand years or more ago, when the world was less arid and the population could depend on rainfall instead of having to cluster in the neighbourhood of springs and streams for its water. King Lamus tied himself on the middle of a rope with Dionysus at one end and Hermes at the other; while we, under the guidance of Cypris and Athena, toiled up the goat track which made a zigzag on the grassy tongue. Their party attacked the rock buttress on our right. King Lamus made Hermes lead up the most astonish- ingly precipitous crags, with little advice and no assistance. But his hand was always within reach of the boy; so that if he made a mistake and fell, he could immediately be caught without hurting himself. But the child himself did not know how carefully he was being watched and guarded. Basil treated him In every way as a responsible leader. Their progress was necessarily slow; but so was ours. Both Lou and I found it impossible to go more than twenty paces or so without a rest. We had plenty of time to watch them, and it was amazing to see the working of the mind of Hermes as problem after problem presented itself to him. There were many occasions on which it would have been easy for him to go around an obstacle, but he never attempted to do so. King Lamus had already implanted in his mind the idea that the fun of rock- climbing consisted in tackling the most difficult passages. The child would occasionally stop at the foot of a pitch, and contemplate it as if it were a mathematical problem. Once or twice he decided that it was too