The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in
him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy.
It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead,
the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
One, He is Death incarnate.

And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of
death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme
sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax,
his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before
it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death,
and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.

And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further
on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This
Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost
lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But
in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death,
complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism
in its completeness of leaving off.

Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain,
accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man,
there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of
the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water,