The Voice of Nature

Section 1.

Presently we recognise the fellow of the earthly Devil's Bridge,
still intact as a footway, spanning the gorge, and old memories turn
us off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towards
it. It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. We
cross it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit and
warmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in the
dale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in the
gallery overhead, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it
flung on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one could wish,
and descend, discoursing how good and fair an ordered world may be,
but with a certain unformulated qualification in our minds about
those thumb marks we have left behind.

"Do you recall the Zermatt valley?" says my friend, "and how on
earth it reeks and stinks with smoke?"

"People make that an argument for obstructing change, instead of
helping it forward!"

And here perforce an episode intrudes. We are invaded by a talkative
person.

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not
unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly
respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first
ineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow
of talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund,
knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as
botryoidal, and about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair.
He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears
over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him
a fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks.
His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright pink with the
keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was
the only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet.) He
salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in with
our slower paces.

"Climbers, I presume?" he says, "and you scorn these trams of
theirs? I like you. So do I! Why a man should consent to be dealt
with as a bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticket--when God
gave him legs and a face--passes my understanding."

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that
runs across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in the
rock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a
viaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade through
a jutting crag, and there dismisses it with a spiral whirl. "_No_!"
he says.

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been