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What I am driving at, good people, is that a man who takes no book upon a holiday forms very worthily one of the series of men who do, and I will confess that this No Book is the book I invariably take with me, in every distant journey which those who meet me upon them may think holidays, but which I myself have always considered to be occupation and life.

Its many advantages!... Up in Bigorre, branching northward from the main Roman Road across the Pyrenees, runs a torrent which falls in perhaps a thousand falls from the height and the mountains, and whose valley forms a very difficult approach to Spain. Now if a man be cut off by this torrent, rising after fresh rain and threatening his life, and if he attempts to ford it, what book do you think would survive? So the Peña Blanca; it is not a rock for mountaineers, but for true travelling men. Your mountaineer, your Alpine Club mountaineer, travels with a bath, a tent, and in general a baggage train; he can carry books if he likes; he climbs with a weight on his back or compels a servant to do so, but no man can get down the Peña Blanca or up it on the steep side with a Liddell and Scott or a London Directory on his back. There are places on Peña Blanca where everything you brought with you, including your boots, you wish were away, and these places are places where the body is in the shape of an X, the right foot, the left foot, the right hand and the left hand each trying to persuade itself that it has a hold, and the co-ordinating spirit within also asserting by sheer faith that the surface of the rock does not lean outwards. What would a man do with a book in such a place as this?—I mean with a book in its aspect of existence? No Book is worth more than a whole library to a man so placed and so thinking.