(...............11sept) Ascent

Up the dusty path, up the steep grade, up and up, turning around every so often to look below at the great valleys and hills getting smaller and smaller, and the little colonies of homes, a thousand, two thousand clustered in the valleys and up onto the hills, red-roofed villas and haciendas and smooth, grey, mansions, and more coming into view the higher the climb, and the heart faintly sickened that even in the ascent there is no way to get away, no Jacob's Ladder any more to escape the human sprawl, no way to capture the prize of climbing, the emptiness that thrills the heart, the scanning of a landscape without a trace of human alteration, the timeless Somethingj that renews the spirit — the glimpse in Nature of a face that is not our face, and so the prophet came back and said unto the people, 'I'm sorry, but I could not get away.'