"Never lose your head." My most
favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of
mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a
permanent snow mountain in my life.
I do not care a row of pins how
badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and
composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the
edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one
side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an
arete with a precipice on either. Nothing on earth would persuade
me to do either of these things myself, but they remind me of bits
of country I have been through where you walk along a narrow line of
security with gulfs of murder looming on each side, and where in
exactly the same way you are as safe as if you were in your easy
chair at home, as long as you get sufficient holding ground: not on
rock in the bush village inhabited by murderous cannibals, but on
ideas in those men's and women's minds; and these ideas, which I
think I may say you will always find, give you safety. It is not
advisable to play with them, or to attempt to eradicate them,
because you regard them as superstitious; and never, never shoot too
soon. I have never had to shoot, and hope never to have to; because
in such a situation, one white alone with no troops to back him
means a clean finish.
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