– You are as uncomfortable company as an old friend of mine who asked for spiritual heroism in another way. "God is here and Christ is now," he would say, and ask you to live as if it were true.

– It is true. But it's equally true to say "Odin is here and Loki is now." The heroic world is all around us, waiting to be known.

– But we don't live like that, now.

– Who says so? A few do. Be the hero of your own epic. If others will not, are you to blame? One of the great follies of our time is this belief in some levelling of destiny, some democracy of Wyrd.

– And you think I should go it alone?

– I don't think: I feel that you ought at least to consider the possibility, and not cling to Jo like a sailor clinging to a lifebelt.

– I wouldn't know how to start.

– Perhaps if you felt something powerfully enough it would set you on the path.

– But what?

– Awe is a very unfashionable, powerful feeling. When did you last feel awe in the presence of anything?

– God, I can't remember ever feeling what I suppose you mean by awe.

– Poor Davey! How you have starved! A real little work-house boy, an Oliver Twist of the spirit! Well, you're rather old to begin.

– Dr. von Haller says not. I can begin the second part of this exploration with her, if I choose. But what is it? Do you know, Liesl?

– Yes, but it isn't easily explained. It's a thing one experiences – feels, if you like. It's learning to know oneself as fully human. A kind of rebirth.

– I was told a lot about that in my boyhood days, when I thought I was a Christian. I never understood it.

– Christians seem to have got it mixed up, somehow. It's certainly not crawling back into your mother's womb; it's more a re-entry and return from the womb of mankind. A fuller comprehension of one's humanity.

– That doesn't convey much to me.

– I suppose not. It's not a thinker's thing.

– Yet you suggest I go it alone?

– I don't know. I'm not as sure as I was. You might manage it. Perhaps some large experience, or even a good, sharp shock, might put you on the track. Perhaps you are wrong even to listen to me.

– Then why do you talk so much, and throw out so many dangerous suggestions?

– It's my metier. You thinkers drive me to shake you up.

Maddening woman!

Dec. 24, Wed. and Christmas Eve: Was this the worst day of my life, or the best? Both.

Liesl insisted this morning that I go on an expedition with her. You will see the mountains at their best, she said; it is too cold for the tourists with their sandwiches, and there is not enough snow for skiers. So we drove for about half an hour, uphill all the way, and at last came to one of those cable-car affairs and swayed and joggled dizzily through the air toward the far-off shoulder of a mountain. When we got out of it at last, I found I was panting.

– We are about seven thousand feet up now. Does it bother you? You'll soon get used to it. Come on. I want to show you something.

– Surely the view elsewhere is the same as it is here?

– Lazy! What I want to show you isn't a view.

It was a cave; large, extremely cold as soon as we penetrated a few yards out of the range of the sun, but not damp. I couldn't see much of it, and although it is the first cave I have ever visited it convinced me that I don't like caves. But Liesl was enthusiastic, because it is apparently quite famous since somebody, whose name I did not catch, proved conclusively in the nineties that primitive men had lived here. All the sharpened flints, bits of carbon, and other evidence had been removed, but there were a few scratches on the walls which appear to be very significant, though they looked like nothing more than scratches to me.

– Can't you imagine them, crouching here in the cold as the sun sank, with nothing to warm them but a small fire and a few skins? But enduring, enduring, enduring! They were heroes, Davey.

– I don't suppose they conceived of anything better. They can't have been much more than animals.

– They were our ancestors. They were more like us than they were like any animal.

– Physically, perhaps. But what kind of brains had they? What sort of mind?

– A herd-mind, probably. But they may have known a few things we have lost on the long journey from the cave to – well, to the law-courts.

– I don't see any good in romanticizing savages. They knew how to get a wretched living and hang on to life for twenty-five or thirty years. But surely anything human, any sort of culture or civilized feeling or whatever you want to call it, came ages later?

– No, no; not at all. I can prove it to you now. It's a little bit dangerous, so follow me, and be careful.

She went to the very back of the cave, which may have been two hundred feet deep, and I was not happy to follow her, because it grew darker at every step, and though she had a big electric torch it seemed feeble in that blackness. But when we had gone as far as seemed possible, she turned to me and said, "This is where it begins to be difficult; so follow me very closely, close enough to touch me at all times, and don't lose your nerve." Then she stepped behind an outcropping of rock which looked like solid cave wall and scrambled up into a hole about four feet above the cave floor.

I followed, very much alarmed, but too craven to beg off. In the hole, through which it was just possible to move on hands and knees, I crept after the torch, which flickered intermittently because every time Liesl lifted her back she obscured its light. And then, after perhaps a dozen yards of this creeping progress over rough stone, we began what was to me a horrible descent.

Liesl never spoke or called to me. As the hole grew smaller she dropped to her knees and crawled on her belly, and there was nothing for me but to do the same. I was as frightened as I have ever been in my life, but there was nothing for me to do but follow, because I had no idea of how I could retreat. Nor did I speak to her; her silence kept me quiet. I would have loved to hear her speak, and say something in reply, but all I heard was the shuffling as she crawled and wriggled, and now and then one of her boots kicked against my head. I have heard of people whose sport it is to crawl into these mountain holes, and read about some of them who had stuck and died. I was in terror, but somehow I kept on wriggling forward. I have not wriggled on my belly since I was a child, and it hurt; my shoulders and neck began to ache torturingly, and at every hunch forward my chest, privates, and knees were scraped unpleasantly on the stone floor. Liesl had outfitted me in some winter clothes she had borrowed from one of the workmen at Sorgenfrei, and though they were thick, they were certainly not much protection from the bruises of this sort of work.

How far we wriggled I had no idea. Later Liesl, who had made the journey several times, said it was just under a quarter of a mile, but to me it might have been ten miles. At last I heard her say; Here we are, and as I crawled out of the hole and stood up – very gingerly because for some reason she did not use her electric torch and the darkness was complete and I had no idea how high the roof might be – there was the flash of a match, and soon a larger flame that came

from a torch she had lit.

– This is a pine-torch; I think it the most appropriate light for this place. Electricity is a blasphemy here. The first time I came, which was about three years ago, there were remains of pine torches Still by the entry, so that was how they must have lit this place.

– Who are you talking about?

– The people of the caves. Our ancestors. Here, hold this torch while I light another. It takes some time for the torches to give much light. Stand where you are and let it unfold before you.