"You're not very brave, are you?" Chris says.

"No,"' I answer, and pull the rind of a slice of salami between my teeth to remove the meat. "But you'd be astonished at how smart I am."

We're down quite a way from the summit now, and the mixed pines and leafy underbrush are much higher here and more closed in than they were at this altitude on the other side of the canyon. Evidently more rain gets into this canyon. I gulp down a large quantity of water from a pot Chris has filled at the stream here, then look at him. I can see by his expression that he's resigned himself to going down and there's no need to lecture him or argue. We finish the lunch off with a part of a bag of candy, wash it down with another pot of water and lay back on the ground for a rest. Mountain springwater has the best taste in the world.

After a while Chris says, "I can carry a heavier load now."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure," he says, a little haughtily.

Gratefully I transfer some of the heavier stuff to his pack and we put the packs on, wriggling through the shoulder straps on the ground and then standing up. I can feel the difference in weight. He can be considerate when he's in the mood.

From here on it looks like a slow descent. This slope has evidently been logged and there's a lot of underbrush higher than our heads that makes it slow going. We'll have to work our way around it.

What I want to do now in the Chautauqua is get away from intellectual abstractions of an extremely general nature and into some solid, practical, day-to-day information, and I'm not quite sure how to go about this.

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it's not a very glamorous or interesting job. You have to depress for a while before you can get down to doing it. Then, once you have depressed into a really low-key mood, it isn't so bad.

To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.

Sylvia knew what she was talking about the first day when she noticed all those people coming the other way. What did she call it? A "funeral procession." The task now is to get back down to that procession with a wider kind of understanding than exists there now.

First of all I should say that I don't know whether Phædrus' claim that Quality is the Tao is true. I don't know of any way of testing it for truth, since all he did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another. He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what Quality was. Or, more likely, he may not have understood the Tao. He certainly was no sage. And there's plenty of advice for sages in that book he would have done well to heed.

I think, furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of what the Tao is. Not a thing.

That sounds like an overwhelming rejection of what he thought and said, but it isn't. I think it's a statement he would have agreed with himself, since any description of Quality is a kind of definition and must therefore fall short of its mark. I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth and thus retard an understanding of Quality.

No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it's the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century. I want to go at these now in as orderly a manner as possible.

We're on steep mucky soil now that's hard to keep a footing in. We grab branches and shrubs to steady ourselves. I take a step, then figure where my next step will be, then take this step, then look again. Soon the brush becomes so thick I see we will have to hack through it. I sit down while Chris gets the machete from the pack on my back. He hands it to me, then, hacking and chopping, I head into the brush. It's slow going. Two or three branches must be cut for every step. It may go on like this for a long time.

The first step down from Phædrus' statement that "Quality is the Buddha" is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.

The relationship of Quality to the area of Art has been shown rather exhaustively through a pursuit of Phædrus' understanding of Quality in the Art of rhetoric. I don't think much more in the way of analysis need be made there. Art is high-quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man. The relationship established by Phædrus makes it clear that the two enormously different sounding statements are actually identical.

In the area of Religion, the rational relationship of Quality to the Godhead needs to be more thoroughly established, and this I hope to do much later on. For the time being one can meditate on the fact that the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical. It's in the area of Science that I want to focus attention in the immediate future, for this is the area that most badly needs the relationship established. The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go. It's that "value freedom" that underlines the death-force effect to which attention was brought early in the Chautauqua. Tomorrow I intend to start on that.

For the remainder of the afternoon we climb down over grey weathered trunks of deadfalls and angle back and forth on the steep slope.

We reach a cliff, angle along its edge in search of a way down, and eventually a narrow draw appears which we're able to descend. It continues down through a rocky crevice in which there is a little rivulet. Shrubs and rocks and muck and roots of huge trees watered by the rivulet fill the crevice. Then we hear the roar of a much larger creek in the distance.

We cross the creek using a rope, which we leave behind, then on the road beyond find some other campers who give us a ride into town.

In Bozeman it's dark and late. Rather than wake up the DeWeeses and ask them to drive in, we check in at the main downtown hotel. Some tourists in the lobby stare at us. With my old Army clothes, walking stick, two-day beard and black beret I must look like some old-time Cuban revolutionary, in for a raid.