In some missionary work I have read that certain South
Sea Islanders believed in a future paradise where the good should go on
eating for ever with insatiable appetites at an inexhaustible banquet.
They were to continue their eternal dinner in a house with open
wickerwork sides; and it was to be the punishment of the damned to crawl
outside in perpetual hunger and look in through the chinks as little
boys look in through the windows of a London cookshop. With similar
feelings I lately watched through a telescope the small black dots,
which were really men, creeping up the high flanks of Mont Blanc or
Monte Rosa. The eternal snows represented for me the Elysian fields,
into which entrance was sternly forbidden, and I lingered about the spot
with a mixture of pleasure and pain, in the envious contemplation of my
more fortunate companions.
I know there are those who will receive these assertions with civil
incredulity. Some persons assume that every pleasure with which they
cannot sympathise is necessarily affectation, and hold, as a particular
case of that doctrine, that Alpine travellers risk their lives merely
from fashion or desire of notoriety.
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