Diary of a Drug Fiend

332 The Diary of a Drug Fiena hard for him. On these occasions, King Lamus would go up first, calling out instructions to note the exact places where he put his hands and feet ; and when it was the turn of Hermes to follow, as often as not he did so on a slack rope. His leader’s example had taught him how: to negotiate the difficulty. As for Dionysus, his methods were entirely different. He had neither the intellectual power of the elder boy nor his prudence, and he climbed with a sort of tem- pestuous genius. | At the top of the tongue, the goat track bends suddenly to the right, under the wall, to a point where there is a breach where one can crawl through very comfortably. Here we rejoined the climbers. “To-morrow,” said Hermes, “I shall take you up the Great Gully,” with the air of a full-fledged alpine guide. Dionysus shook his little head. ‘I don’t know if he tan det through the hole,” he lamented. | King Lamus had taken off the rope and made it into a coil by winding it around his knee and foot. We plodded painfully over very rough ground to the top of the rock. It was both exhilarating and disheartening to see the way the two boys scrambled from boulder _ to boulder. _ At last we reached the top. The two brethren who had carried up the provisions in knapsacks had already begun to spread them out on a level patch of grass.