ward to it with an awed curiosity. With the conventional notion of cheering him, I talked of staying till he was able to return with me to civilisation, but he only laughed.
"I am not going back," he said. "Not that way. What they may do afterwards with these broken bones does not much concern either you or me.
"It's a good place to die in," he continued. "A man can think up here."
It was difficult to feel sorry for him, his own fate appearing to make so little difference to himself. The world was still full of interest to him—not his own particular corner of it: that, he gave me to understand, he had tidied up and dismissed from his mind. It was the future, its coming problems, its possibilities, its new developments, about which he seemed eager to talk. One might have imagined him a young man with the years before him.
One evening—it was near the end—we were alone together. The woodcutter and his wife had gone down into the valley to see their children, and the nurse, leaving him in my charge, had gone for a walk. We had carried him round to his favourite side of the hut facing the towering mass of the Jung-
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