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The fall might not be dangerous in itself, but it seemed impossible that anybody launched upon that declivity could escape a glissade over the precipice. This struck me in an instant and, grasping a shrub which grew in a crevice, I held out my right hand toward him. "Get hold, lift yourself with your foot, and I'll drag you up!" I said.
His fellow-adventurer, who from first to last bore himself with a gay recklessness good to behold, laughed all such forebodings utterly to scorn. I tried the gentler tone of grave argument, demonstrating that a glissade on shingles in dry weather was next to impossible, and that the ridge, once gained, was nearly as safe traveling as an ordinary mountain-path.
I must reach the camp by daylight, whatever happens." They went on. The pace, instead of a scramble, became in places a wild glissade, and no beast of burden but a mountain pack-horse could have kept its footing ten minutes.
Rare sight on a December day, the peacock was still pacing to and fro, for the air was as mild and balmy as in June, and although the road ran water and the trees were rapidly losing their icy trappings the courtyard had been swept of snow and therefore remained almost dry. The beauty of the glissade was over. But Artémise looked only for a moment at the peacock.
He never stumped, but he stole along with a glissade that was the envy and admiration, not exactly of surrounding nations, but of the dancing-master. It was a beautiful study to see him walk, and I made myself master of it.
Probably a severe storm had blown it over and buried it in the snow. We left the summit at three o'clock and arrived at the 20,000 foot camp two hours and fifteen minutes later. The first part of the way down to the saddle we attempted a glissade. Then the slope grew steeper and we got up too much speed for comfort, so we finally had to be content with a slower method of locomotion.
Therefore I will say that, already at the end of the fourteenth century, though Castagno and Masolino and Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Angelico were alive, and Masaccio and Piero and Bellini had yet to be born, it looked as if the road that started from Constantinople in the sixth century were about to end in a glissade.
And if the legs be not too stiff from the glissade, a climb over the southern wall of the Glen to Desolation Valley and Pyramid Peak, whence can be seen the long gorge of the Rubicon.
No glissade was possible, nor plunge such as travellers make down through the ash-heaps of Vesuvius; but, having once worried through the wretched little spruces, mean counterfeits of trees, we could fling ourselves down from mossy step to step, measuring off the distance by successive leaps of a second each, and alighting, sound after each, on moss yielding as a cushion.
As the élan vital that has made and characterized any period declines, it throws off reactions, the object of which is if possible to arrest, or at least delay, the fatal glissade. These are, in intent and in fact, reforms; conscious efforts at saving a desperate situation by regenerative methods.
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