The Life

"'Suddenly,' she later said, 'there appeared this extraordinary brown-faced man, fairly small, with strong legs and a strong body, a shock of hair and slightly weak chin. He had blazing eyes everyone used to talk about; he just sat and looked. It was indefinable. I melted like an ice cube.' Yet there was something distant about him, as if he held an important part of himself in reserve, as remote and wild as the mountains he loved so much. His greatest pleasure came from journeys into unknown, unmapped terrain, and he preferred to take the simplest way possible."