This book is a sequel and a reply to a book by Stephen Graham, explorer-poet, and Vernon Hill, artist.

I had a splendid six weeks tramping with my lifetime friend, Stephen Graham, in the Rockies. We climbed northwest through Glacier Park, Montana, across the Canadian line into Alberta, Canada. There it is in two sentences.

It would take more than the EncyclopÆdia Britannica to tell on how many points I differ from Stephen, and on how many points I agree with him. I had not the least idea that so much Lindsay was going into Graham’s fireside notes—while I was asleep at noon, often recovering in an hour from ten hours of restless, sleepless freezing by night. I do not hold myself liable in court for any opinions of mine then recorded by Graham. My daytime strength was not all given to thought, however, but often to trying to keep Graham in sight when he was a quarter of a mile ahead of me climbing mountains absolutely perpendicular. As I remember our first fireside discussions, they were as to whether there was actually such a person as Patrick Henry. Graham had an idea he was a perverse invention of my own fancy. But he looked him up afterwards and found there was such a man. As I remember our conversations after that provocation, I kept trying to deliver to him from memory Bryce’s American Commonwealth, unabridged, two volumes, one thousand pages each. I remember those volumes well. I read every page in lonely country hotels and on slow local trains while a Sunday field-worker for the Anti-Saloon League. And now invisible leaves of Bryce often made the chief ingredient of our tea. So I have indicated in the design.

I did not tell Graham I was quoting the great ambassador, and so many unsupported, heavy and formidable statements he quite properly hesitated to write out, without further confirmation, though he drank them down quite cheerfully. In the great blank spaces in Graham’s narrative where he skips really splendid scenery, I was quoting Bryce—not always singing hymns!

The most authentic part of my book, the part Mr. Vernon Hill has left out, is that the mountains were as steep as I have drawn them. His mountains, otherwise quite correct, are not sufficiently perpendicular. Vernon Hill, of course, was not physically with us on the expedition. He was in London, drawing beautiful and famous Arcadian Calendars. When later he came to illustrate Graham’s book in London, with Graham bending over him, no one mentioned the fact that the mountains were all like church steeples. Graham had not noticed it, and it did not occur to Vernon Hill by wireless. Otherwise Vernon Hill was in excellent communication with us, and every picture in Graham’s book expresses exactly what Graham was talking to me about to make me forget the tumbles and the briers, and to drown out the Bryce.

After I had hunted for years and years to find an explorer-poet who would take a long walk with me, and had scared every one off by the elaborateness of the proposal, the first troubadour that took me up on it almost broke my neck. It was a grand and awful time. The sensible reviews of Graham’s book have been by Walter Prichard Eaton. He does not discuss Graham’s opinions or mine. But he is very plain about the fact that we almost slid into eternity. He has tried those mountains himself, and he knows. He should write several more reviews.

Stephen Graham is a lifetime friend, and I have assembled these drawings as a sign thereof. But because I have been studying Hieroglyphics in the Metropolitan Museum all this summer, and because United States Hieroglyphics of my own invention are haunting me day and night, this book is drawn, and not written. I serve notice on the critics—the verses are most incidental, merely to explain the pictures. And so, directly considered, it is much more a reply to Vernon Hill, the artist, than to Stephen.

The artist of the Arcadian Calendar discerned rightly. Graham and I were in Arcady, even if it was a bit rough.

Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is the very jewel of the mountains of Glacier Park. All the tourists love it, and they are right. Its name fits it.

Going-To-The-Sun Mountain is our American Fujiyama, as all testify who have seen it.

Obviously, an ingredient of good tea is talk on Egyptian Hieroglyphics. I had an invisible copy of an Egyptian Grammar with me and I put a leaf from it into every pot of tea. Graham did not take to the taste of it as much as he did to the pages of Bryce, but he was nobly patient, as one may say, with Egypt.

The Hieroglyphics in this work are based on two more British-Egyptian grammars he sent me after he reached London. Still, they may be described as United States Hieroglyphics, and almost any Egyptologist will be willing to describe them that way, having about as much to do with Egypt as Egyptian cigarettes. The Egyptians were, briefly, a nation of Vernon Hills, who drew their “Arcadian Calendar” for four thousand years in red and black ink, or cut it in granite. I keep thinking about them! A free translation of the hieroglyphic inscription at the bottom of the first picture following is:

With this start, the reader can go straight through the book without a mistake.

Now, a last word as to the seal, The Elements of Good Tea.

On the southern side of the Canadian-United States boundary, just as we reached it, our coffee gave out. Most symbolical happening! There in the deep woods, as we passed to the northern side, Graham said with a sigh of insatiable anticipation: “Now we will have some tea.” We had had tea all along, alternated with coffee. But now Stephen, on his own heath, was emphatic about it. So he made tea, a whole potful, with a kick like a battering ram, and I drank my half.

Certainly the most worth-while thing in Stephen’s book, and mine, is a matter known to all men long before the books were written. That is, that a Britisher and a United Stateser can cross the Canadian-American line together and discover that it is hardly there; can discover that an international boundary can be genuine and eternal and yet friendly. If there is one thing on which Stephen and I will agree till the Judgment Day, it is that all the boundaries in the world should be as open, and as happy, as the Canadian-United States line. To many diplomats such a boundary is incredible, and yet it exists, one of the longest in the world.

Vachel Lindsay