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CHAPTER XXV
[Hunted by the Little Chamois]

Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland,
and reached Lucerne about ten o'clock at night.
The first discovery I made was that the beauty of the lake
had not been exaggerated.  Within a day or two I made
another discovery.  This was, that the lauded chamois
is not a wild goat; that it is not a horned animal;
that it is not shy; that it does not avoid human society;
and that there is no peril in hunting it.  The chamois is
a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed;
you do not have to go after it, it comes after you;
it arrives in vast herds and skips and scampers all over
your body, inside your clothes; thus it is not shy,
but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the
contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous,
but neither is it pleasant; its activity has not been
overstated --if you try to put your finger on it,
it will skip a thousand times its own length at one jump,
and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights.
A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written
about the Swiss chamois and the perils of hunting it,
whereas the truth is that even women and children
hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it;
the hunting is going on all the time, day and night,
in bed and out of it.  It is poetic foolishness to hunt
it with a gun; very few people do that; there is not
one man in a million who can hit it with a gun.
It is much easier to catch it that it is to shoot it,
and only the experienced chamois-hunter can do either.
Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the
"scarcity" of the chamois.  It is the reverse of scarce.
Droves of one hundred million chamois are not unusual
in the Swiss hotels.  Indeed, they are so numerous
as to be a great pest.  The romancers always dress up
the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume,
whereas the best way to hut this game is to do it without
any costume at all.  The article of commerce called
chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could skin a chamois,
it is too small.  The creature is a humbug in every way,
and everything which has been written about it is
sentimental exaggeration.  It was no pleasure to me to find
the chamois out, for he had been one of my pet illusions;
all my life it had been my dream to see him in his native
wilds some day, and engage in the adventurous sport
of chasing him from cliff to cliff.  It is no pleasure
to me to expose him, now, and destroy the reader's delight
in him and respect for him, but still it must be done,
for when an honest writer discovers an imposition it
is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down
from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it;
any other course would render him unworthy of the public
confidence.

Lucerne is a charming place.  It begins at the water's edge,
with a fringe of hotels, and scrambles up and spreads
itself over two or three sharp hills in a crowded,
disorderly, but picturesque way, offering to the eye
a heaped-up confusion of red roofs, quaint gables,
dormer windows, toothpick steeples, with here and there
a bit of ancient embattled wall bending itself over
the ridges, worm-fashion, and here and there an old square
tower of heavy masonry.  And also here and there a town
clock with only one hand--a hand which stretches across
the dial and has no joint in it; such a clock helps out
the picture, but you cannot tell the time of day by it.
Between the curving line of hotels and the lake is a broad
avenue with lamps and a double rank of low shade trees.
The lake-front is walled with masonry like a pier,
and has a railing, to keep people from walking overboard.
All day long the vehicles dash along the avenue, and nurses,
children, and tourists sit in the shade of the trees,
or lean on the railing and watch the schools of fishes
darting about in the clear water, or gaze out over the lake
at the stately border of snow-hooded mountains peaks.
Little pleasure steamers, black with people, are coming
and going all the time; and everywhere one sees young
girls and young men paddling about in fanciful rowboats,
or skimming along by the help of sails when there is any wind.
The front rooms of the hotels have little railed balconies,
where one may take his private luncheon in calm,
cool comfort and look down upon this busy and pretty
scene and enjoy it without having to do any of the work
connected with it.

Most of the people, both male and female, are in walking
costume, and carry alpenstocks.  Evidently, it is not
considered safe to go about in Switzerland, even in town,
without an alpenstock.  If the tourist forgets and
comes down to breakfast without his alpenstock he goes
back and gets it, and stands it up in the corner.
When his touring in Switzerland is finished, he does not
throw that broomstick away, but lugs it home with him,
to the far corners of the earth, although this costs him
more trouble and bother than a baby or a courier could.
You see, the alpenstock is his trophy; his name
is burned upon it; and if he has climbed a hill,
or jumped a brook, or traversed a brickyard with it,
he has the names of those places burned upon it, too.
Thus it is his regimental flag, so to speak, and bears
the record of his achievements.  It is worth three francs
when he buys it, but a bonanza could not purchase it
after his great deeds have been inscribed upon it.
There are artisans all about Switzerland whose trade it is
to burn these things upon the alpenstock of the tourist.
And observe, a man is respected in Switzerland according
to his alpenstock.  I found I could get no attention there,
while I carried an unbranded one.  However, branding is
not expected, so I soon remedied that.  The effect
upon the next detachment of tourists was very marked.
I felt repaid for my trouble.

Half of the summer horde in Switzerland is made up of
English people; the other half is made up of many nationalities,
the Germans leading and the Americans coming next.
The Americans were not as numerous as I had expected
they would be.

The seven-thirty table d'ho^te at the great Schweitzerhof
furnished a mighty array and variety of nationalities,
but it offered a better opportunity to observe costumes
than people, for the multitude sat at immensely long tables,
and therefore the faces were mainly seen in perspective;
but the breakfasts were served at small round tables,
and then if one had the fortune to get a table in the
midst of the assemblage he could have as many faces
to study as he could desire.  We used to try to guess out
the nationalities, and generally succeeded tolerably well.
Sometimes we tried to guess people's names; but that was
a failure; that is a thing which probably requires a good
deal of practice.  We presently dropped it and gave our
efforts to less difficult particulars.  One morning I
said:

"There is an American party."

Harris said:

"Yes--but name the state."

I named one state, Harris named another.  We agreed upon
one thing, however--that the young girl with the party
was very beautiful, and very tastefully dressed.
But we disagreed as to her age.  I said she was eighteen,
Harris said she was twenty.  The dispute between us
waxed warm, and I finally said, with a pretense of being
in earnest:

"Well, there is one way to settle the matter--I will go
and ask her."

Harris said, sarcastically, "Certainly, that is the thing
to do.  All you need to do is to use the common formula
over here: go and say, 'I'm an American!' Of course she
will be glad to see you."

Then he hinted that perhaps there was no great danger
of my venturing to speak to her.

I said, "I was only talking--I didn't intend to approach her,
but I see that you do not know what an intrepid person
I am.  I am not afraid of any woman that walks.
I will go and speak to this young girl."

The thing I had in my mind was not difficult.
I meant to address her in the most respectful way and ask
her to pardon me if her strong resemblance to a former
acquaintance of mine was deceiving me; and when she should
reply that the name I mentioned was not the name she bore,
I meant to beg pardon again, most respectfully, and retire.
There would be no harm done.  I walked to her table,
bowed to the gentleman, then turned to her and was about
to begin my little speech when she exclaimed:

"I KNEW I wasn't mistaken--I told John it was you!
John said it probably wasn't, but I knew I was right.
I said you would recognize me presently and come over;
and I'm glad you did, for I shouldn't have felt much flattered
if you had gone out of this room without recognizing me.
Sit down, sit down--how odd it is--you are the last person I
was ever expecting to see again."

This was a stupefying surprise.  It took my wits
clear away, for an instant.  However, we shook hands
cordially all around, and I sat down.  But truly this
was the tightest place I ever was in.  I seemed to vaguely
remember the girl's face, now, but I had no idea where I
had seen it before, or what named belonged with it.
I immediately tried to get up a diversion about Swiss scenery,
to keep her from launching into topics that might
betray that I did not know her, but it was of no use,
she went right along upon matters which interested her more:

"Oh dear, what a night that was, when the sea washed
the forward boats away--do you remember it?"

"Oh, DON'T I!" said I--but I didn't. I wished the sea
had washed the rudder and the smoke-stack and the captain
away--then I could have located this questioner.

"And don't you remember how frightened poor Mary was,
and how she cried?"

"Indeed I do!" said I. "Dear me, how it all comes back!"

I fervently wished it WOULD come back--but my memory was
a blank.  The wise way would have been to frankly own up;
but I could not bring myself to do that, after the young
girl had praised me so for recognizing her; so I went on,
deeper and deeper into the mire, hoping for a chance clue
but never getting one.  The Unrecognizable continued,
with vivacity:

"Do you know, George married Mary, after all?"

"Why, no! Did he?"

"Indeed he did.  He said he did not believe she was half
as much to blame as her father was, and I thought he
was right.  Didn't you?"

"Of course he was.  It was a perfectly plain case.
I always said so."

"Why, no you didn't!--at least that summer."

"Oh, no, not that summer.  No, you are perfectly right
about that.  It was the following winter that I said it."

"Well, as it turned out, Mary was not in the least
to blame --it was all her father's fault--at least
his and old Darley's."

It was necessary to say something--so I said:

"I always regarded Darley as a troublesome old thing."

"So he was, but then they always had a great affection
for him, although he had so many eccentricities.
You remember that when the weather was the least cold,
he would try to come into the house."

I was rather afraid to proceed.  Evidently Darley wa not
a man--he must be some other kind of animal--possibly
a dog, maybe an elephant.  However, tails are common
to all animals, so I ventured to say:

"And what a tail he had!"

"ONE! He had a thousand!"

This was bewildering.  I did not quite know what to say,
so I only said:

"Yes, he WAS rather well fixed in the matter of tails."

"For a negro, and a crazy one at that, I should say he was,"
said she.

It was getting pretty sultry for me.  I said to myself,
"Is it possible she is going to stop there, and wait for
me to speak? If she does, the conversation is blocked.
A negro with a thousand tails is a topic which a person
cannot talk upon fluently and instructively without more
or less preparation.  As to diving rashly into such a
vast subject--"

But here, to my gratitude, she interrupted my thoughts
by saying:

"Yes, when it came to tales of his crazy woes, there was
simply no end to them if anybody would listen.  His own
quarters were comfortable enough, but when the weather
was cold, the family were sure to have his company--nothing
could keep him out of the house.  But they always bore it
kindly because he had saved Tom's life, years before.
You remember Tom?

"Oh, perfectly.  Fine fellow he was, too."

"Yes he was.  And what a pretty little thing his child was!"

"You may well say that.  I never saw a prettier child."

"I used to delight to pet it and dandle it and play
with it."

"So did I."

"You named it.  What WAS that name? I can't call it
to mind."

It appeared to me that the ice was getting pretty
thin, here.  I would have given something to know
what the child's was.  However, I had the good luck
to think of a name that would fit either sex--so I brought it
out:

"I named it Frances."

"From a relative, I suppose? But you named the one that died,
too--one that I never saw.  What did you call that one?"

I was out of neutral names, but as the child was dead
and she had never seen it, I thought I might risk a name
for it and trust to luck.  Therefore I said:

"I called that one Thomas Henry."

She said, musingly:

"That is very singular ... very singular."

I sat still and let the cold sweat run down.  I was
in a good deal of trouble, but I believed I could worry
through if she wouldn't ask me to name any more children.
I wondered where the lightning was going to strike next.
She was still ruminating over that last child's title,
but presently she said:

"I have always been sorry you were away at the time--I
would have had you name my child."

"YOUR child! Are you married?"

"I have been married thirteen years."

"Christened, you mean."

`"No, married.  The youth by your side is my son."

"It seems incredible--even impossible.  I do not mean
any harm by it, but would you mind telling me if you
are any over eighteen?--that is to say, will you tell
me how old you are?"

"I was just nineteen the day of the storm we were
talking about.  That was my birthday."

That did not help matters, much, as I did not know
the date of the storm.  I tried to think of some
non-committal thing to say, to keep up my end of the talk,
and render my poverty in the matter of reminiscences
as little noticeable as possible, but I seemed to be
about out of non-committal things.  I was about to say,
"You haven't changed a bit since then"--but that was risky.
I thought of saying, "You have improved ever so much
since then"--but that wouldn't answer, of course.
I was about to try a shy at the weather, for a saving change,
when the girl slipped in ahead of me and said:

"How I have enjoyed this talk over those happy old times--
haven't you?"

"I never have spent such a half-hour in all my life before!"
said I, with emotion; and I could have added, with a
near approach to truth, "and I would rather be scalped
than spend another one like it." I was holily grateful
to be through with the ordeal, and was about to make
my good-bys and get out, when the girl said:

"But there is one thing that is ever so puzzling to me."

"Why, what is that?"

"That dead child's name.  What did you say it was?"

Here was another balmy place to be in: I had forgotten the
child's name; I hadn't imagined it would be needed again.
However, I had to pretend to know, anyway, so I said:

"Joseph William."

The youth at my side corrected me, and said:

"No, Thomas Henry."

I thanked him--in words--and said, with trepidation:

"O yes--I was thinking of another child that I named--I
have named a great many, and I get them confused--this
one was named Henry Thompson--"

"Thomas Henry," calmly interposed the boy.

I thanked him again--strictly in words--and stammered
out:

"Thomas Henry--yes, Thomas Henry was the poor child's name.
I named him for Thomas--er--Thomas Carlyle, the great author,
you know--and Henry--er--er--Henry the Eight.  The parents
were very grateful to have a child named Thomas Henry."

"That makes it more singular than ever," murmured my
beautiful friend.

"Does it? Why?"

"Because when the parents speak of that child now,
they always call it Susan Amelia."

That spiked my gun.  I could not say anything.  I was entirely
out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie,
and that I would not do; so I simply sat still and suffered
--sat mutely and resignedly there, and sizzled--for I
was being slowly fried to death in my own blushes.
Presently the enemy laughed a happy laugh and said:

"I HAVE enjoyed this talk over old times, but you have not.
I saw very soon that you were only pretending to know me,
and so as I had wasted a compliment on you in the beginning,
I made up my mind to punish you.  And I have succeeded
pretty well.  I was glad to see that you knew George and Tom
and Darley, for I had never heard of them before and therefore
could not be sure that you had; and I was glad to learn
the names of those imaginary children, too.  One can get
quite a fund of information out of you if one goes at
it cleverly.  Mary and the storm, and the sweeping away
of the forward boats, were facts--all the rest was fiction.
Mary was my sister; her full name was Mary ------. NOW
do you remember me?"

"Yes," I said, "I do remember you now; and you are as
hard-headed as you were thirteen years ago in that ship,
else you wouldn't have punished me so.  You haven't
change your nature nor your person, in any way at all;
you look as young as you did then, you are just as beautiful
as you were then, and you have transmitted a deal
of your comeliness to this fine boy.  There--if that
speech moves you any, let's fly the flag of truce,
with the understanding that I am conquered and confess it."

All of which was agreed to and accomplished, on the spot.
When I went back to Harris, I said:

"Now you see what a person with talent and address can do."

"Excuse me, I see what a person of colossal ignorance and
simplicity can do.  The idea of your going and intruding
on a party of strangers, that way, and talking for half
an hour; why I never heard of a man in his right mind
doing such a thing before.  What did you say to them?"

I never said any harm.  I merely asked the girl what her
name was."

"I don't doubt it.  Upon my word I don't. I think you
were capable of it.  It was stupid in me to let you go
over there and make such an exhibition of yourself.
But you know I couldn't really believe you would do such
an inexcusable thing.  What will those people think
of us? But how did you say it?--I mean the manner of it.
I hope you were not abrupt."

"No, I was careful about that.  I said, 'My friend and I
would like to know what your name is, if you don't mind.'"

"No, that was not abrupt.  There is a polish about it that
does you infinite credit.  And I am glad you put me in;
that was a delicate attention which I appreciate at its
full value.  What did she do?"

"She didn't do anything in particular.  She told me
her name."

"Simply told you her name.  Do you mean to say she did
not show any surprise?"

"Well, now I come to think, she did show something;
maybe it was surprise; I hadn't thought of that--I took
it for gratification."

"Oh, undoubtedly you were right; it must have been gratification;
it could not be otherwise than gratifying to be assaulted
by a stranger with such a question as that.  Then what did you
do?"

"I offered my hand and the party gave me a shake."

"I saw it! I did not believe my own eyes, at the time.
Did the gentleman say anything about cutting your throat?"

"No, they all seemed glad to see me, as far as I could judge."

"And do you know, I believe they were.  I think they said
to themselves, 'Doubtless this curiosity has got away from
his keeper--let us amuse ourselves with him.' There is
no other way of accounting for their facile docility.
You sat down.  Did they ASK you to sit down?"

"No, they did not ask me, but I suppose they did not think
of it."

"You have an unerring instinct.  What else did you do?
What did you talk about?"

"Well, I asked the girl how old she was."

"UNdoubtedly. Your delicacy is beyond praise.  Go on,
go on--don't mind my apparent misery--I always look
so when I am steeped in a profound and reverent joy.
Go on--she told you her age?"

"Yes, she told me her age, and all about her mother,
and her grandmother, and her other relations, and all
about herself."

"Did she volunteer these statistics?"

"No, not exactly that.  I asked the questions and she
answered them."

"This is divine.  Go on--it is not possible that you
forgot to inquire into her politics?"

"No, I thought of that.  She is a democrat, her husband
is a republican, and both of them are Baptists."

"Her husband? Is that child married?"

"She is not a child.  She is married, and that is her
husband who is there with her."

"Has she any children."

"Yes--seven and a half."

"That is impossible."

"No, she has them.  She told me herself."

"Well, but seven and a HALF? How do you make out the half?
Where does the half come in?"

"There is a child which she had by another husband--
not this one but another one--so it is a stepchild,
and they do not count in full measure."

"Another husband? Has she another husband?"

"Yes, four.  This one is number four."

"I don't believe a word of it.  It is impossible,
upon its face.  Is that boy there her brother?"

"No, that is her son.  He is her youngest.  He is not
as old as he looked; he is only eleven and a half."

"These things are all manifestly impossible.  This is a
wretched business.  It is a plain case: they simply took
your measure, and concluded to fill you up.  They seem
to have succeeded.  I am glad I am not in the mess;
they may at least be charitable enough to think there
ain't a pair of us.  Are they going to stay here long?"

"No, they leave before noon."

"There is one man who is deeply grateful for that.
How did you find out? You asked, I suppose?"

"No, along at first I inquired into their plans, in a
general way, and they said they were going to be here
a week, and make trips round about; but toward the end
of the interview, when I said you and I would tour around
with them with pleasure, and offered to bring you over
and introduce you, they hesitated a little, and asked
if you were from the same establishment that I was.
I said you were, and then they said they had changed
their mind and considered it necessary to start at once
and visit a sick relative in Siberia."

"Ah, me, you struck the summit! You struck the loftiest
altitude of stupidity that human effort has ever reached.
You shall have a monument of jackasses' skulls as high
as the Strasburg spire if you die before I do.
They wanted to know I was from the same 'establishment'
that you hailed from, did they? What did they mean by
'establishment'?"

"I don't know; it never occurred to me to ask."

"Well _I_ know.  they meant an asylum--an IDIOT asylum,
do you understand? So they DO think there's a pair of us,
after all.  Now what do you think of yourself?"

"Well, I don't know.  I didn't know I was doing any harm;
I didn't MEAN to do any harm.  They were very nice people,
and they seemed to like me."

Harris made some rude remarks and left for his bedroom--
to break some furniture, he said.  He was a singularly
irascible man; any little thing would disturb his temper.

I had been well scorched by the young woman, but no matter,
I took it out on Harris.  One should always "get even"
in some way, else the sore place will go on hurting.



CHAPTER XXVI
[The Nest of the Cuckoo-clock]

The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts.
All summer long the tourists flock to that church about six
o'clock in the evening, and pay their franc, and listen
to the noise.  They don't stay to hear all of it, but get up
and tramp out over the sounding stone floor, meeting late
comers who tramp in in a sounding and vigorous way.
This tramping back and forth is kept up nearly all the time,
and is accented by the continuous slamming of the door,
and the coughing and barking and sneezing of the crowd.
Meantime, the big organ is booming and crashing and
thundering away, doing its best to prove that it is
the biggest and best organ in Europe, and that a tight
little box of a church is the most favorable place
to average and appreciate its powers in.  It is true,
there were some soft and merciful passages occasionally,
but the tramp-tramp of the tourists only allowed one to get
fitful glimpses of them, so to speak.  Then right away
the organist would let go another avalanche.

The commerce of Lucerne consists mainly in gimcrackery of the
souvenir sort; the shops are packed with Alpine crystals,
photographs of scenery, and wooden and ivory carvings.
I will not conceal the fact that miniature figures of the
Lion of Lucerne are to be had in them.  Millions of them.
But they are libels upon him, every one of them.
There is a subtle something about the majestic pathos
of the original which the copyist cannot get.  Even the sun
fails to get it; both the photographer and the carver give
you a dying lion, and that is all.  The shape is right,
the attitude is right, the proportions are right, but that
indescribable something which makes the Lion of Lucerne
the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world,
is wanting.

The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low
cliff--for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff.
His size is colossal, his attitude is noble.  How head
is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder,
his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France.
Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear
stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base,
and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored,
among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass.  The place is
a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise
and stir and confusion--and all this is fitting, for lions
do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals
in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings.
The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere,
but nowhere so impressive as where he is.

Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people.
Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is
very gentle with him; she is charitable toward his failings,
and she finds in him high virtues which are not usually
considered to be virtues when they are lodged in kings.
She makes him out to be a person with a meek and modest
spirit, the heart of a female saint, and a wrong head.
None of these qualities are kingly but the last.
Taken together they make a character which would have fared
harshly at the hands of history if its owner had had the ill
luck to miss martyrdom.  With the best intentions to do
the right thing, he always managed to do the wrong one.
Moreover, nothing could get the female saint out of him.
He knew, well enough, that in national emergencies he must
not consider how he ought to act, as a man, but how he
ought to act as a king; so he honestly tried to sink
the man and be the king--but it was a failure, he only
succeeded in being the female saint.  He was not instant
in season, but out of season.  He could not be persuaded
to do a thing while it could do any good--he was iron,
he was adamant in his stubbornness then--but as soon as
the thing had reached a point where it would be positively
harmful to do it, do it he would, and nothing could
stop him.  He did not do it because it would be harmful,
but because he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve
by it the good which it would have done if applied earlier.
His comprehension was always a train or two behindhand.
If a national toe required amputating, he could not see
that it needed anything more than poulticing; when others
saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first
perceived that the toe needed cutting off--so he cut it off;
and he severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the
disease had reached the thigh.  He was good, and honest,
and well meaning, in the matter of chasing national diseases,
but he never could overtake one.  As a private man,
he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was
strictly contemptible.

His was a most unroyal career, but the most pitiable
spectacle in it was his sentimental treachery to his
Swiss guard on that memorable 10th of August, when he
allowed those heroes to be massacred in his cause,
and forbade them to shed the "sacred French blood"
purporting to be flowing in the veins of the red-capped
mob of miscreants that was raging around the palace.
He meant to be kingly, but he was only the female saint
once more.  Some of his biographers think that upon this
occasion the spirit of Saint Louis had descended upon him.
It must have found pretty cramped quarters.  If Napoleon
the First had stood in the shoes of Louis XVI that day,
instead of being merely a casual and unknown looker-on,
there would be no Lion of Lucerne, now, but there would
be a well-stocked Communist graveyard in Paris which would
answer just as well to remember the 10th of August by.

Martyrdom made a saint of Mary Queen of Scots three
hundred years ago, and she has hardly lost all of her
saintship yet.  Martyrdom made a saint of the trivial
and foolish Marie Antoinette, and her biographers still
keep her fragrant with the odor of sanctity to this day,
while unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write
that the only calamitous instinct which her husband lacked,
she supplied--the instinct to root out and get rid of
an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever she found him.
The hideous but beneficent French Revolution would have
been deferred, or would have fallen short of completeness,
or even might not have happened at all, if Marie
Antoinette had made the unwise mistake of not being born.
The world owes a great deal to the French Revolution,
and consequently to its two chief promoters, Louis the
Poor in Spirit and his queen.

We did not buy any wooden images of the Lion, nor any ivory
or ebony or marble or chalk or sugar or chocolate ones,
or even any photographic slanders of him.  The truth is,
these copies were so common, so universal, in the shops
and everywhere, that they presently became as intolerable
to the wearied eye as the latest popular melody usually
becomes to the harassed ear.  In Lucerne, too, the wood
carvings of other sorts, which had been so pleasant to look
upon when one saw them occasionally at home, soon began
to fatigue us.  We grew very tired of seeing wooden quails
and chickens picking and struting around clock-faces,
and still more tired of seeing wooden images of the alleged
chamois skipping about wooden rocks, or lying upon them
in family groups, or peering alertly up from behind them.
The first day, I would have bought a hundred and fifty
of these clocks if I had the money--and I did buy three--
but on the third day the disease had run its course,
I had convalesced, and was in the market once more--trying
to sell.  However, I had no luck; which was just as well,
for the things will be pretty enough, no doubt, when I get
them home.

For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock;
now here I was, at last, right in the creature's home;
so wherever I went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!
HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears.  For a nervous man,
this was a fine state of things.  Some sounds are hatefuler
than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly,
and aggravating as the "HOO'hoo" of a cuckoo clock, I think.
I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person;
for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened,
I would do that man an ill turn.  What I meant, was, that I
would break one of his legs, or something of that sort;
but in Lucerne I instantly saw that I could impair his mind.
That would be more lasting, and more satisfactory every way.
So I bought the cuckoo clock; and if I ever get home
with it, he is "my meat," as they say in the mines.
I thought of another candidate--a book-reviewer whom
I could name if I wanted to--but after thinking
it over, I didn't buy him a clock.  I couldn't injure
his mind.

We visited the two long, covered wooden bridges which span
the green and brilliant Reuss just below where it goes
plunging and hurrahing out of the lake.  These rambling,
sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their
alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water.
They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures,
by old Swiss masters--old boss sign-painters, who flourished
before the decadence of art.

The lake is alive with fishes, plainly visible to the eye,
for the water is very clear.  The parapets in front of the
hotels were usually fringed with fishers of all ages.
One day I thought I would stop and see a fish caught.
The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly,
a circumstance which I had not thought of before for
twelve years.  This one:

THE MAN WHO PUT UP AT GADSBY'S

When my odd friend Riley and I were newspaper correspondents
in Washington, in the winter of '67, we were coming down
Pennsylvania Avenue one night, near midnight, in a driving
storm of snow, when the flash of a street-lamp fell upon a man
who was eagerly tearing along in the opposite direction.
This is lucky! You are Mr. Riley, ain't you?"

Riley was the most self-possessed and solemnly deliberate
person in the republic.  He stopped, looked his man
over from head to foot, and finally said:

"I am Mr. Riley.  Did you happen to be looking for me?"

"That's just what I was doing," said the man, joyously,
"and it's the biggest luck in the world that I've found you.
My name is Lykins.  I'm one of the teachers of the high
school--San Francisco.  As soon as I heard the San Francisco
postmastership was vacant, I made up my mind to get it--and here
I am."

"Yes," said Riley, slowly, "as you have remarked ...
Mr. Lykins ... here you are.  And have you got it?"

"Well, not exactly GOT it, but the next thing to it.
I've brought a petition, signed by the Superintendent
of Public Instruction, and all the teachers, and by more
than two hundred other people.  Now I want you, if you'll
be so good, to go around with me to the Pacific delegation,
for I want to rush this thing through and get along home."

"If the matter is so pressing, you will prefer that we
visit the delegation tonight," said Riley, in a voice
which had nothing mocking in it--to an unaccustomed ear.

"Oh, tonight, by all means! I haven't got any time to
fool around.  I want their promise before I go to bed--
I ain't the talking kind, I'm the DOING kind!"

"Yes ... you've come to the right place for that.
When did you arrive?"

"Just an hour ago."

"When are you intending to leave?"

"For New York tomorrow evening--for San Francisco
next morning."

"Just so....  What are you going to do tomorrow?"

"DO! Why, I've got to go to the President with the petition
and the delegation, and get the appointment, haven't I?"

"Yes ... very true ... that is correct.  And then what?"

"Executive session of the Senate at 2 P.M.--got to get
the appointment confirmed--I reckon you'll grant that?"

"Yes ... yes," said Riley, meditatively, "you are
right again.  Then you take the train for New York in
the evening, and the steamer for San Francisco next morning?"

"That's it--that's the way I map it out!"

Riley considered a while, and then said:

"You couldn't stay ... a day ... well, say two
days longer?"

"Bless your soul, no! It's not my style.  I ain't a man
to go fooling around--I'm a man that DOES things,
I tell you."

The storm was raging, the thick snow blowing in gusts.
Riley stood silent, apparently deep in a reverie,
during a minute or more, then he looked up and said:

"Have you ever heard about that man who put up at Gadsby's,
once? ... But I see you haven't."

He backed Mr. Lykins against an iron fence, buttonholed him,
fastened him with his eye, like the Ancient Mariner,
and proceeded to unfold his narrative as placidly
and peacefully as if we were all stretched comfortably
in a blossomy summer meadow instead of being persecuted
by a wintry midnight tempest:

"I will tell you about that man.  It was in Jackson's time.
Gadsby's was the principal hotel, then.  Well, this man
arrived from Tennessee about nine o'clock, one morning,
with a black coachman and a splendid four-horse carriage and
an elegant dog, which he was evidently fond of and proud of;
he drove up before Gadsby's, and the clerk and the landlord
and everybody rushed out to take charge of him, but he said,
'Never mind,' and jumped out and told the coachman
to wait--said he hadn't time to take anything to eat,
he only had a little claim against the government to collect,
would run across the way, to the Treasury, and fetch
the money, and then get right along back to Tennessee,
for he was in considerable of a hurry.

"Well, about eleven o'clock that night he came back
and ordered a bed and told them to put the horses
up--said he would collect the claim in the morning.
This was in January, you understand--January, 1834--
the 3d of January--Wednesday.

"Well, on the 5th of February, he sold the fine carriage,
and bought a cheap second-hand one--said it would answer
just as well to take the money home in, and he didn't care
for style.

"On the 11th of August he sold a pair of the fine horses--
said he'd often thought a pair was better than four,
to go over the rough mountain roads with where a body
had to be careful about his driving--and there wasn't
so much of his claim but he could lug the money home
with a pair easy enough.

"On the 13th of December he sold another horse--said
two warn't necessary to drag that old light vehicle
with--in fact, one could snatch it along faster than
was absolutely necessary, now that it was good solid
winter weather and the roads in splendid condition.

"On the 17th of February, 1835, he sold the old carriage
and bought a cheap second-hand buggy--said a buggy
was just the trick to skim along mushy, slushy early
spring roads with, and he had always wanted to try
a buggy on those mountain roads, anyway.

"On the 1st August he sold the buggy and bought the
remains of an old sulky--said he just wanted to see
those green Tennesseans stare and gawk when they saw
him come a-ripping along in a sulky--didn't believe
they'd ever heard of a sulky in their lives.

"Well, on the 29th of August he sold his colored
coachman--said he didn't need a coachman for a sulky--
wouldn't be room enough for two in it anyway--and,
besides, it wasn't every day that Providence sent a man
a fool who was willing to pay nine hundred dollars for
such a third-rate negro as that--been wanting to get
rid of the creature for years, but didn't like to THROW him away.


"Eighteen months later--that is to say, on the 15th
of February, 1837--he sold the sulky and bought
a saddle--said horseback-riding was what the doctor
had always recommended HIM to take, and dog'd if he
wanted to risk HIS neck going over those mountain roads
on wheels in the dead of winter, not if he knew himself.

"On the 9th of April he sold the saddle--said he wasn't
going to risk HIS life with any perishable saddle-girth
that ever was made, over a rainy, miry April road,
while he could ride bareback and know and feel he was
safe--always HAD despised to ride on a saddle, anyway.

"On the 24th of April he sold his horse--said 'I'm just
fifty-seven today, hale and hearty--it would be a PRETTY
howdy-do for me to be wasting such a trip as that and such
weather as this, on a horse, when there ain't anything
in the world so splendid as a tramp on foot through
the fresh spring woods and over the cheery mountains,
to a man that IS a man--and I can make my dog carry my
claim in a little bundle, anyway, when it's collected.
So tomorrow I'll be up bright and early, make my little
old collection, and mosey off to Tennessee, on my own
hind legs, with a rousing good-by to Gadsby's.'

"On the 22d of June he sold his dog--said 'Dern a dog,
anyway, where you're just starting off on a rattling bully
pleasure tramp through the summer woods and hills--perfect
nuisance--chases the squirrels, barks at everything,
goes a-capering and splattering around in the fords--
man can't get any chance to reflect and enjoy nature--
and I'd a blamed sight ruther carry the claim myself,
it's a mighty sight safer; a dog's mighty uncertain
in a financial way- -always noticed it--well, GOOD-by,
boys--last call--I'm off for Tennessee with a good
leg and a gay heart, early in the morning.'"

There was a pause and a silence--except the noise
of the wind and the pelting snow.  Mr. Lykins said,
impatiently:

"Well?"

Riley said:

"Well,--that was thirty years ago."

"Very well, very well--what of it?"

"I'm great friends with that old patriarch.  He comes
every evening to tell me good-by. I saw him an hour ago--
he's off for Tennessee early tomorrow morning--as usual;
said he calculated to get his claim through and be off
before night-owls like me have turned out of bed.
The tears were in his eyes, he was so glad he was going
to see his old Tennessee and his friends once more."

Another silent pause.  The stranger broke it:

"Is that all?"

"That is all."

"Well, for the TIME of night, and the KIND of night,
it seems to me the story was full long enough.  But what's
it all FOR?"

"Oh, nothing in particular."

"Well, where's the point of it?"

"Oh, there isn't any particular point to it.  Only, if you
are not in TOO much of a hurry to rush off to San Francisco
with that post-office appointment, Mr. Lykins, I'd advise
you to 'PUT UP AT GADSBY'S' for a spell, and take it easy.
Good-by. GOD bless you!"

So saying, Riley blandly turned on his heel and left
the astonished school-teacher standing there, a musing
and motionless snow image shining in the broad glow
of the street-lamp.

He never got that post-office.

To go back to Lucerne and its fishers, I concluded,
after about nine hours' waiting, that the man who proposes
to tarry till he sees something hook one of those well-fed
and experienced fishes will find it wisdom to "put up
at Gadsby's" and take it easy.  It is likely that a fish
has not been caught on that lake pier for forty years;
but no matter, the patient fisher watches his cork there
all the day long, just the same, and seems to enjoy it.
One may see the fisher-loafers just as thick and contented
and happy and patient all along the Seine at Paris,
but tradition says that the only thing ever caught there
in modern times is a thing they don't fish for at all--the
recent dog and the translated cat.



CHAPTER XXVII
[I Spare an Awful Bore]

Close by the Lion of Lucerne is what they call the
"Glacier Garden"--and it is the only one in the world.
It is on high ground.  Four or five years ago,
some workmen who were digging foundations for a house
came upon this interesting relic of a long-departed age.
Scientific men perceived in it a confirmation of their
theories concerning the glacial period; so through
their persuasions the little tract of ground was bought
and permanently protected against being built upon.
The soil was removed, and there lay the rasped and guttered
track which the ancient glacier had made as it moved
along upon its slow and tedious journey.  This track
was perforated by huge pot-shaped holes in the bed-rock,
formed by the furious washing-around in them of boulders
by the turbulent torrent which flows beneath all glaciers.
These huge round boulders still remain in the holes;
they and the walls of the holes are worn smooth by
the long-continued chafing which they gave each other
in those old days.  It took a mighty force to churn
these big lumps of stone around in that vigorous way.
The neighboring country had a very different shape,
at that time--the valleys have risen up and become hills,
since, and the hills have become valleys.  The boulders
discovered in the pots had traveled a great distance,
for there is no rock like them nearer than the distant
Rhone Glacier.

For some days we were content to enjoy looking at the blue
lake Lucerne and at the piled-up masses of snow-mountains
that border it all around--an enticing spectacle,
this last, for there is a strange and fascinating beauty
and charm about a majestic snow-peak with the sun blazing
upon it or the moonlight softly enriching it--but finally
we concluded to try a bit of excursioning around on
a steamboat, and a dash on foot at the Rigi.  Very well,
we had a delightful trip to Fluelen, on a breezy, sunny day.
Everybody sat on the upper deck, on benches, under an awning;
everybody talked, laughed, and exclaimed at the wonder scenery;
in truth, a trip on that lake is almost the perfection
of pleasuring.  The mountains were a never-ceasing marvel.
Sometimes they rose straight up out of the lake,
and towered aloft and overshadowed our pygmy steamer
with their prodigious bulk in the most impressive way.
Not snow-clad mountains, these, yet they climbed high
enough toward the sky to meet the clouds and veil their
foreheads in them.  They were not barren and repulsive,
but clothed in green, and restful and pleasant to the eye.
And they were so almost straight-up-and-down, sometimes,
that one could not imagine a man being able to keep
his footing upon such a surface, yet there are paths,
and the Swiss people go up and down them every day.

Sometimes one of these monster precipices had the slight
inclination of the huge ship-houses in dockyards--
then high aloft, toward the sky, it took a little
stronger inclination, like that of a mansard roof--and
perched on this dizzy mansard one's eye detected little
things like martin boxes, and presently perceived that
these were the dwellings of peasants--an airy place
for a home, truly.  And suppose a peasant should walk
in his sleep, or his child should fall out of the front
yard?--the friends would have a tedious long journey down
out of those cloud-heights before they found the remains.
And yet those far-away homes looked ever so seductive,
they were so remote from the troubled world, they dozed
in such an atmosphere of peace and dreams--surely no one
who has learned to live up there would ever want
to live on a meaner level.

We swept through the prettiest little curving arms
of the lake, among these colossal green walls,
enjoying new delights, always, as the stately panorama
unfolded itself before us and rerolled and hid itself
behind us; and now and then we had the thrilling surprise
of bursting suddenly upon a tremendous white mass like the
distant and dominating Jungfrau, or some kindred giant,
looming head and shoulders above a tumbled waste of lesser Alps.

Once, while I was hungrily taking in one of these surprises,
and doing my best to get all I possibly could of it while it
should last, I was interrupted by a young and care-free voice:

"You're an American, I think--so'm I."

He was about eighteen, or possibly nineteen; slender and
of medium height; open, frank, happy face; a restless
but independent eye; a snub nose, which had the air
of drawing back with a decent reserve from the silky
new-born mustache below it until it should be introduced;
a loosely hung jaw, calculated to work easily in the sockets.
He wore a low-crowned, narrow-brimmed straw hat,
with a broad blue ribbon around it which had a white
anchor embroidered on it in front; nobby short-tailed
coat, pantaloons, vest, all trim and neat and up with
the fashion; red-striped stockings, very low-quarter
patent-leather shoes, tied with black ribbon; blue ribbon
around his neck, wide-open collar; tiny diamond studs;
wrinkleless kids; projecting cuffs, fastened with large
oxidized silver sleeve-buttons, bearing the device
of a dog's face--English pug.  He carries a slim cane,
surmounted with an English pug's head with red glass eyes.
Under his arm he carried a German grammar--Otto's. His hair
was short, straight, and smooth, and presently when he turned
his head a moment, I saw that it was nicely parted behind.
He took a cigarette out of a dainty box, stuck it into
a meerschaum holder which he carried in a morocco case,
and reached for my cigar.  While he was lighting, I said:

"Yes--I am an American."

"I knew it--I can always tell them.  What ship did you
come over in?"

"HOLSATIA."

"We came in the BATAVIA--Cunard, you know.  What kind
of passage did you have?"

"Tolerably rough."

"So did we.  Captain said he'd hardly ever seen it rougher.
Where are you from?"

"New England."

"So'm I. I'm from New Bloomfield.  Anybody with you?"

"Yes--a friend."

"Our whole family's along.  It's awful slow, going around
alone--don't you think so?"

"Rather slow."

"Ever been over here before?"

"Yes."

"I haven't. My first trip.  But we've been all around--Paris
and everywhere.  I'm to enter Harvard next year.
Studying German all the time, now.  Can't enter till I
know German.  I know considerable French--I get along
pretty well in Paris, or anywhere where they speak French.
What hotel are you stopping at?"

"Schweitzerhof."

"No! is that so? I never see you in the reception-room.
I go to the reception-room a good deal of the time,
because there's so many Americans there.  I make lots
of acquaintances.  I know an American as soon as I see
him--and so I speak to him and make his acquaintance.
I like to be always making acquaintances--don't you?"

"Lord, yes!"

"You see it breaks up a trip like this, first rate.
I never got bored on a trip like this, if I can
make acquaintances and have somebody to talk to.
But I think a trip like this would be an awful bore,
if a body couldn't find anybody to get acquainted with
and talk to on a trip like this.  I'm fond of talking,
ain't you?

"Passionately."

"Have you felt bored, on this trip?"

"Not all the time, part of it."

"That's it!--you see you ought to go around and get acquainted,
and talk.  That's my way.  That's the way I always do--I
just go 'round, 'round, 'round and talk, talk, talk--I
never get bored.  You been up the Rigi yet?"

"No."

"Going?"

"I think so."

"What hotel you going to stop at?"

"I don't know.  Is there more than one?"

"Three. You stop at the Schreiber--you'll find it full
of Americans.  What ship did you say you came over in?"

"CITY OF ANTWERP."

"German, I guess.  You going to Geneva?"

"Yes."

"What hotel you going to stop at?"

"Hotel de l''Ecu de G'en`eve."

"Don't you do it! No Americans there! You stop at one
of those big hotels over the bridge--they're packed
full of Americans."

"But I want to practice my Arabic."

"Good gracious, do you speak Arabic?"

"Yes--well enough to get along."

"Why, hang it, you won't get along in Geneva--THEY don't
speak Arabic, they speak French.  What hotel are you
stopping at here?"

"Hotel Pension-Beaurivage."

"Sho, you ought to stop at the Schweitzerhof.  Didn't you
know the Schweitzerhof was the best hotel in Switzerland?--
look at your Baedeker."

"Yes, I know--but I had an idea there warn't any
Americans there."

"No Americans! Why, bless your soul, it's just alive with
them! I'm in the great reception-room most all the time.
I make lots of acquaintances there.  Not as many as I did
at first, because now only the new ones stop in there--
the others go right along through.  Where are you from?"

"Arkansaw."

"Is that so? I'm from New England--New Bloomfield's my town
when I'm at home.  I'm having a mighty good time today,
ain't you?"

"Divine."

"That's what I call it.  I like this knocking around,
loose and easy, and making acquaintances and talking.
I know an American, soon as I see him; so I go and speak
to him and make his acquaintance.  I ain't ever bored,
on a trip like this, if I can make new acquaintances and talk.
I'm awful fond of talking when I can get hold of the right
kind of a person, ain't you?"

"I prefer it to any other dissipation."

"That's my notion, too.  Now some people like to take
a book and sit down and read, and read, and read, or moon
around yawping at the lake or these mountains and things,
but that ain't my way; no, sir, if they like it, let 'em do it,
I don't object; but as for me, talking's what _I_ like.
You been up the Rigi?"

"Yes."

"What hotel did you stop at?"

"Schreiber."

"That's the place!--I stopped there too.  FULL of Americans,
WASN'T it? It always is--always is.  That's what they say.
Everybody says that.  What ship did you come over in?"

"VILLE DE PARIS."

"French, I reckon.  What kind of a passage did ... excuse me
a minute, there's some Americans I haven't seen before."

And away he went.  He went uninjured, too--I had the murderous
impulse to harpoon him in the back with my alpenstock,
but as I raised the weapon the disposition left me;
I found I hadn't the heart to kill him, he was such
a joyous, innocent, good-natured numbskull.

Half an hour later I was sitting on a bench inspecting,
with strong interest, a noble monolith which we were
skimming by--a monolith not shaped by man, but by Nature's
free great hand--a massy pyramidal rock eighty feet high,
devised by Nature ten million years ago against the day
when a man worthy of it should need it for his monument.
The time came at last, and now this grand remembrancer
bears Schiller's name in huge letters upon its face.
Curiously enough, this rock was not degraded or defiled
in any way.  It is said that two years ago a stranger let
himself down from the top of it with ropes and pulleys,
and painted all over it, in blue letters bigger than those in
Schiller's name, these words:

"Try Sozodont;" "Buy Sun Stove Polish;" "Helmbold's Buchu;"
"Try Benzaline for the Blood."

He was captured and it turned out that he was an American.
Upon his trial the judge said to him:

"You are from a land where any insolent that wants to is
privileged to profane and insult Nature, and, through her,
Nature's God, if by so doing he can put a sordid penny
in his pocket.  But here the case is different.  Because you
are a foreigner and ignorant, I will make your sentence light;
if you were a native I would deal strenuously with you.
Hear and obey: --You will immediately remove every trace
of your offensive work from the Schiller monument; you pay
a fine of ten thousand francs; you will suffer two years'
imprisonment at hard labor; you will then be horsewhipped,
tarred and feathered, deprived of your ears, ridden on a
rail to the confines of the canton, and banished forever.
The severest penalties are omitted in your case--not as
a grace to you, but to that great republic which had the
misfortune to give you birth."

The steamer's benches were ranged back to back across
the deck.  My back hair was mingling innocently with
the back hair of a couple of ladies.  Presently they
were addressed by some one and I overheard this conversation:

"You are Americans, I think? So'm I."

"Yes--we are Americans."

"I knew it--I can always tell them.  What ship did you
come over in?"

"CITY OF CHESTER."

"Oh, yes--Inman line.  We came in the BATAVIA--Cunard
you know.  What kind of a passage did you have?"

"Pretty fair."

"That was luck.  We had it awful rough.  Captain said
he'd hardly seen it rougher.  Where are you from?"

"New Jersey."

"So'm I. No--I didn't mean that; I'm from New England.
New Bloomfield's my place.  These your children?--belong
to both of you?"

"Only to one of us; they are mine; my friend is not married."

"Single, I reckon? So'm I. Are you two ladies traveling alone?"

"No--my husband is with us."

"Our whole family's along.  It's awful slow, going around
alone--don't you think so?"

"I suppose it must be."

"Hi, there's Mount Pilatus coming in sight again.
Named after Pontius Pilate, you know, that shot the apple
off of William Tell's head.  Guide-book tells all about it,
they say.  I didn't read it--an American told me.  I don't
read when I'm knocking around like this, having a good time.
Did you ever see the chapel where William Tell used
to preach?"

"I did not know he ever preached there."

"Oh, yes, he did.  That American told me so.  He don't
ever shut up his guide-book. He knows more about this lake
than the fishes in it.  Besides, they CALL it 'Tell's
Chapel'--you know that yourself.  You ever been over here
before?"

"Yes."

"I haven't. It's my first trip.  But we've been all around
--Paris and everywhere.  I'm to enter Harvard next year.
Studying German all the time now.  Can't enter till I
know German.  This book's Otto's grammar.  It's a mighty
good book to get the ICH HABE GEHABT HABEN's out of.
But I don't really study when I'm knocking around this way.
If the notion takes me, I just run over my little
old ICH HAVE GEHABT, DU HAST GEHABT, ER HAT GEHABT,
WIR HABEN GEHABT, IHR HABEN GEHABT, SIE HABEN GEHABT
--kind of 'Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep' fashion, you know,
and after that, maybe I don't buckle to it for three days.
It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is;
you want to take it in small doses, or first you know
your brains all run together, and you feel them sloshing
around in your head same as so much drawn butter.
But French is different; FRENCH ain't anything.  I ain't
any more afraid of French than a tramp's afraid of pie; I can
rattle off my little J'AI, TU AS, IL A, and the rest of it,
just as easy as a-b-c. I get along pretty well in Paris,
or anywhere where they speak French.  What hotel are you
stopping at?"

"The Schweitzerhof."

"No! is that so? I never see you in the big reception-room.
I go in there a good deal of the time, because there's
so many Americans there.  I make lots of acquaintances.
You been up the Rigi yet?"

"No."

"Going?"

"We think of it."

"What hotel you going to stop at?"

"I don't know."

"Well, then you stop at the Schreiber--it's full of Americans.
What ship did you come over in?"

"CITY OF CHESTER."

"Oh, yes, I remember I asked you that before.  But I
always ask everybody what ship they came over in, and so
sometimes I forget and ask again.  You going to Geneva?"

"Yes."

"What hotel you going to stop at?"

"We expect to stop in a pension."

"I don't hardly believe you'll like that; there's very few
Americans in the pensions.  What hotel are you stopping
at here?"

"The Schweitzerhof."

"Oh, yes.  I asked you that before, too.  But I always
ask everybody what hotel they're stopping at, and so I've
got my head all mixed up with hotels.  But it makes talk,
and I love to talk.  It refreshes me up so--don't it
you--on a trip like this?"

"Yes--sometimes."

"Well, it does me, too.  As long as I'm talking I never
feel bored--ain't that the way with you?"

"Yes--generally. But there are exception to the rule."

"Oh, of course.  _I_ don't care to talk to everybody, MYSELF.
If a person starts in to jabber-jabber-jabber about scenery,
and history, and pictures, and all sorts of tiresome things,
I get the fan-tods mighty soon.  I say 'Well, I must be going
now--hope I'll see you again'--and then I take a walk.  Where you
from?"

"New Jersey."

"Why, bother it all, I asked you THAT before, too.
Have you seen the Lion of Lucerne?"

"Not yet."

"Nor I, either.  But the man who told me about
Mount Pilatus says it's one of the things to see.
It's twenty-eight feet long.  It don't seem reasonable,
but he said so, anyway.  He saw it yesterday; said it
was dying, then, so I reckon it's dead by this time.
But that ain't any matter, of course they'll stuff it.
Did you say the children are yours--or HERS?"

"Mine."

"Oh, so you did.  Are you going up the ... no, I asked
you that.  What ship ... no, I asked you that, too.
What hotel are you ... no, you told me that.
Let me see ... um ....  Oh, what kind of voy ... no,
we've been over that ground, too.  Um ... um ... well,
I believe that is all.  BONJOUR--I am very glad to have
made your acquaintance, ladies.  GUTEN TAG."



CHAPTER XXVIII
[The Jodel and Its Native Wilds]

The Rigi-Kulm is an imposing Alpine mass, six thousand
feet high, which stands by itself, and commands a mighty
prospect of blue lakes, green valleys, and snowy mountains--
a compact and magnificent picture three hundred miles
in circumference.  The ascent is made by rail, or horseback,
or on foot, as one may prefer.  I and my agent panoplied
ourselves in walking-costume, one bright morning,
and started down the lake on the steamboat; we got ashore
at the village of Wa"ggis; three-quarters of an hour distant
from Lucerne.  This village is at the foot of the mountain.

We were soon tramping leisurely up the leafy mule-path,
and then the talk began to flow, as usual.  It was
twelve o'clock noon, and a breezy, cloudless day;
the ascent was gradual, and the glimpses, from under
the curtaining boughs, of blue water, and tiny sailboats,
and beetling cliffs, were as charming as glimpses of dreamland.
All the circumstances were perfect--and the anticipations,
too, for we should soon be enjoying, for the first time,
that wonderful spectacle, an Alpine sunrise--the object
of our journey.  There was (apparently) no real need
for hurry, for the guide-book made the walking-distance
from Wa"ggis to the summit only three hours and a quarter.
I say "apparently," because the guide-book had already
fooled us once--about the distance from Allerheiligen
to Oppenau--and for aught I knew it might be getting ready
to fool us again.  We were only certain as to the altitudes--
we calculated to find out for ourselves how many hours
it is from the bottom to the top.  The summit is six
thousand feet above the sea, but only forty-five hundred
feet above the lake.  When we had walked half an hour,
we were fairly into the swing and humor of the undertaking,
so we cleared for action; that is to say, we got a boy whom
we met to carry our alpenstocks and satchels and overcoats
and things for us; that left us free for business.
I suppose we must have stopped oftener to stretch out
on the grass in the shade and take a bit of a smoke
than this boy was used to, for presently he asked if it
had been our idea to hire him by the job, or by the year?
We told him he could move along if he was in a hurry.
He said he wasn't in such a very particular hurry,
but he wanted to get to the top while he was young.
We told him to clear out, then, and leave the things at
the uppermost hotel and say we should be along presently.
He said he would secure us a hotel if he could, but if they
were all full he would ask them to build another one
and hurry up and get the paint and plaster dry against
we arrived.  Still gently chaffing us, he pushed ahead,
up the trail, and soon disappeared.  By six o'clock we
were pretty high up in the air, and the view of lake
and mountains had greatly grown in breadth and interest.
We halted awhile at a little public house, where we
had bread and cheese and a quart or two of fresh milk,
out on the porch, with the big panorama all before us--and
then moved on again.

Ten minutes afterward we met a hot, red-faced man plunging
down the mountain, making mighty strides, swinging his
alpenstock ahead of him, and taking a grip on the ground
with its iron point to support these big strides.
He stopped, fanned himself with his hat, swabbed the
perspiration from his face and neck with a red handkerchief,
panted a moment or two, and asked how far to Wa"ggis.
I said three hours.  He looked surprised, and said:

"Why, it seems as if I could toss a biscuit into the lake
from here, it's so close by.  Is that an inn, there?"

I said it was.

"Well," said he, "I can't stand another three hours,
I've had enough today; I'll take a bed there."

I asked:

"Are we nearly to the top?"

"Nearly to the TOP?" Why, bless your soul, you haven't
really started, yet."

I said we would put up at the inn, too.  So we turned
back and ordered a hot supper, and had quite a jolly
evening of it with this Englishman.

The German landlady gave us neat rooms and nice beds,
and when I and my agent turned in, it was with the resolution
to be up early and make the utmost of our first Alpine sunrise.
But of course we were dead tired, and slept like policemen;
so when we awoke in the morning and ran to the window it
was already too late, because it was half past eleven.
It was a sharp disappointment.  However, we ordered
breakfast and told the landlady to call the Englishman,
but she said he was already up and off at daybreak--and
swearing like mad about something or other.  We could not
find out what the matter was.  He had asked the landlady
the altitude of her place above the level of the lake,
and she told him fourteen hundred and ninety-five feet.
That was all that was said; then he lost his temper.
He said that between ------fools and guide-books, a man
could acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours in a
country like this to last him a year.  Harris believed
our boy had been loading him up with misinformation;
and this was probably the case, for his epithet described
that boy to a dot.

We got under way about the turn of noon, and pulled out
for the summit again, with a fresh and vigorous step.
When we had gone about two hundred yards, and stopped
to rest, I glanced to the left while I was lighting my pipe,
and in the distance detected a long worm of black smoke
crawling lazily up the steep mountain.  Of course that was
the locomotive.  We propped ourselves on our elbows at once,
to gaze, for we had never seen a mountain railway yet.
Presently we could make out the train.  It seemed incredible
that that thing should creep straight up a sharp slant
like the roof of a house--but there it was, and it was doing
that very miracle.

In the course of a couple hours we reached a fine breezy
altitude where the little shepherd huts had big stones
all over their roofs to hold them down to the earth when
the great storms rage.  The country was wild and rocky
about here, but there were plenty of trees, plenty of moss,
and grass.

Away off on the opposite shore of the lake we could
see some villages, and now for the first time we could
observe the real difference between their proportions
and those of the giant mountains at whose feet they slept.
When one is in one of those villages it seems spacious,
and its houses seem high and not out of proportion to the
mountain that overhands them--but from our altitude,
what a change! The mountains were bigger and grander
than ever, as they stood there thinking their solemn
thoughts with their heads in the drifting clouds,
but the villages at their feet--when the painstaking
eye could trace them up and find them--were so reduced,
almost invisible, and lay so flat against the ground,
that the exactest simile I can devise is to compare
them to ant-deposits of granulated dirt overshadowed
by the huge bulk of a cathedral.  The steamboats skimming
along under the stupendous precipices were diminished
by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sailboats
and rowboats to shallops proper for fairies that keep
house in the cups of lilies and ride to court on the backs
of bumblebees.

Presently we came upon half a dozen sheep nibbling grass
in the spray of a stream of clear water that sprang
from a rock wall a hundred feet high, and all at once
our ears were startled with a melodious "Lul ...
l ... l l l llul-lul-LAhee-o-o-o!" pealing joyously
from a near but invisible source, and recognized that we
were hearing for the first time the famous Alpine JODEL
in its own native wilds.  And we recognized, also,
that it was that sort of quaint commingling of baritone
and falsetto which at home we call "Tyrolese warbling."

The jodeling (pronounced yOdling--emphasis on the O)
continued, and was very pleasant and inspiriting to hear.
Now the jodeler appeared--a shepherd boy of sixteen--
and in our gladness and gratitude we gave him a franc
to jodel some more.  So he jodeled and we listened.
We moved on, presently, and he generously jodeled us
out of sight.  After about fifteen minutes we came across
another shepherd boy who was jodeling, and gave him half
a franc to keep it up.  He also jodeled us out of sight.
After that, we found a jodeler every ten minutes;
we gave the first one eight cents, the second one
six cents, the third one four, the fourth one a penny,
contributed nothing to Nos.  5, 6, and 7, and during
the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers,
at a franc apiece, not to jodel any more.  There is somewhat
too much of the jodeling in the Alps.

About the middle of the afternoon we passed through
a prodigious natural gateway called the Felsenthor,
formed by two enormous upright rocks, with a third lying
across the top.  There was a very attractive little
hotel close by, but our energies were not conquered yet,
so we went on.

Three hours afterward we came to the railway-track. It
was planted straight up the mountain with the slant
of a ladder that leans against a house, and it seemed
to us that man would need good nerves who proposed
to travel up it or down it either.

During the latter part of the afternoon we cooled our
roasting interiors with ice-cold water from clear streams,
the only really satisfying water we had tasted since we
left home, for at the hotels on the continent they
merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in,
and that only modifies its hotness, doesn't make it cold.
Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by
being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.
Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion.  How do they
know?--they never drink any.

At ten minutes past six we reached the Kaltbad station,
where there is a spacious hotel with great verandas which
command a majestic expanse of lake and mountain scenery.
We were pretty well fagged out, now, but as we did
not wish to miss the Alpine sunrise, we got through our
dinner as quickly as possible and hurried off to bed.
It was unspeakably comfortable to stretch our weary limbs
between the cool, damp sheets.  And how we did sleep!--for
there is no opiate like Alpine pedestrianism.

In the morning we both awoke and leaped out of bed at the
same instant and ran and stripped aside the window-curtains;
but we suffered a bitter disappointment again: it
was already half past three in the afternoon.

We dressed sullenly and in ill spirits, each accusing
the other of oversleeping.  Harris said if we had brought
the courier along, as we ought to have done, we should
not have missed these sunrises.  I said he knew very well
that one of us would have to sit up and wake the courier;
and I added that we were having trouble enough to take
care of ourselves, on this climb, without having to take
care of a courier besides.

During breakfast our spirits came up a little, since we
found by this guide-book that in the hotels on the summit
the tourist is not left to trust to luck for his sunrise,
but is roused betimes by a man who goes through the halls
with a great Alpine horn, blowing blasts that would
raise the dead.  And there was another consoling thing:
the guide-book said that up there on the summit the guests
did not wait to dress much, but seized a red bed blanket
and sailed out arrayed like an Indian.  This was good;
this would be romantic; two hundred and fifty people
grouped on the windy summit, with their hair flying and
their red blankets flapping, in the solemn presence of the
coming sun, would be a striking and memorable spectacle.
So it was good luck, not ill luck, that we had missed
those other sunrises.

We were informed by the guide-book that we were now
3,228 feet above the level of the lake--therefore
full two-thirds of our journey had been accomplished.
We got away at a quarter past four, P.M.; a hundred yards
above the hotel the railway divided; one track went
straight up the steep hill, the other one turned square
off to the right, with a very slight grade.  We took
the latter, and followed it more than a mile, turned a
rocky corner, and came in sight of a handsome new hotel.
If we had gone on, we should have arrived at the summit,
but Harris preferred to ask a lot of questions--as usual,
of a man who didn't know anything--and he told us to go
back and follow the other route.  We did so.  We could ill
afford this loss of time.

We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about
forty summits, but there was always another one just ahead.
It came on to rain, and it rained in dead earnest.
We were soaked through and it was bitter cold.  Next a
smoky fog of clouds covered the whole region densely,
and we took to the railway-ties to keep from getting lost.
Sometimes we slopped along in a narrow path on the left-hand
side of the track, but by and by when the fog blew as aside
a little and we saw that we were treading the rampart
of a precipice and that our left elbows were projecting
over a perfectly boundless and bottomless vacancy,
we gasped, and jumped for the ties again.

The night shut down, dark and drizzly and cold.
About eight in the evening the fog lifted and showed us
a well-worn path which led up a very steep rise to the left.
We took it, and as soon as we had got far enough from the
railway to render the finding it again an impossibility,
the fog shut down on us once more.

We were in a bleak, unsheltered place, now, and had
to trudge right along, in order to keep warm, though we
rather expected to go over a precipice, sooner or later.
About nine o'clock we made an important discovery--
that we were not in any path.  We groped around a while
on our hands and knees, but we could not find it;
so we sat down in the mud and the wet scant grass to wait.

We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted
with a vast body which showed itself vaguely for an instant
and in the next instant was smothered in the fog again.
It was really the hotel we were after, monstrously magnified
by the fog, but we took it for the face of a precipice,
and decided not to try to claw up it.

We sat there an hour, with chattering teeth and quivering bodies,
and quarreled over all sorts of trifles, but gave most
of our attention to abusing each other for the stupidity
of deserting the railway-track. We sat with our backs
to the precipice, because what little wind there was
came from that quarter.  At some time or other the fog
thinned a little; we did not know when, for we were facing
the empty universe and the thinness could not show;
but at last Harris happened to look around, and there stood
a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been.
One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys,
and a dull blur of lights.  Our first emotion was deep,
unutterable gratitude, our next was a foolish rage,
born of the suspicion that possibly the hotel had been
visible three-quarters of an hour while we sat there
in those cold puddles quarreling.

Yes, it was the Rigi-Kulm hotel--the one that occupies
the extreme summit, and whose remote little sparkle
of lights we had often seen glinting high aloft among
the stars from our balcony away down yonder in Lucerne.
The crusty portier and the crusty clerks gave us the surly
reception which their kind deal out in prosperous times,
but by mollifying them with an extra display of obsequiousness
and servility we finally got them to show us to the room
which our boy had engaged for us.

We got into some dry clothing, and while our supper was
preparing we loafed forsakenly through a couple of vast
cavernous drawing-rooms, one of which had a stove in it.
This stove was in a corner, and densely walled around
with people.  We could not get near the fire, so we moved
at large in the artic spaces, among a multitude of people
who sat silent, smileless, forlorn, and shivering--thinking
what fools they were to come, perhaps.  There were some
Americans and some Germans, but one could see that the
great majority were English.

We lounged into an apartment where there was a great crowd,
to see what was going on.  It was a memento-magazine.
The tourists were eagerly buying all sorts and styles of
paper-cutters, marked "Souvenir of the Rigi," with handles
made of the little curved horn of the ostensible chamois;
there were all manner of wooden goblets and such things,
similarly marked.  I was going to buy a paper-cutter, but I
believed I could remember the cold comfort of the Rigi-Kulm
without it, so I smothered the impulse.

Supper warmed us, and we went immediately to bed--but first,
as Mr. Baedeker requests all tourists to call his attention
to any errors which they may find in his guide-books, I
dropped him a line to inform him he missed it by just
about three days.  I had previously informed him of his
mistake about the distance from Allerheiligen to Oppenau,
and had also informed the Ordnance Depart of the German
government of the same error in the imperial maps.
I will add, here, that I never got any answer to those letters,
or any thanks from either of those sources; and, what is still
more discourteous, these corrections have not been made,
either in the maps or the guide-books. But I will write
again when I get time, for my letters may have miscarried.

We curled up in the clammy beds, and went to sleep without
rocking.
We were so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor
turned over till the blooming blasts of the Alpine horn
aroused us.  It may well be imagined that we did not lose
any time.  We snatched on a few odds and ends of clothing,
cocooned ourselves in the proper red blankets, and plunged
along the halls and out into the whistling wind bareheaded.
We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak
of the summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it.
We rushed up the stairs to the top of this scaffolding,
and stood there, above the vast outlying world, with hair
flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the fierce
breeze.

"Fifteen minutes too late, at last!" said Harris,
in a vexed voice.  "The sun is clear above the horizon."

"No matter," I said, "it is a most magnificent spectacle,
and we will see it do the rest of its rising anyway."

In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us,
and dead to everything else.  The great cloud-barred disk
of the sun stood just above a limitless expanse of tossing
white-caps--so to speak--a billowy chaos of massy mountain
domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and flooded
with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors,
while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun,
radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith.
The cloven valleys of the lower world swam in a tinted
mist which veiled the ruggedness of their crags and ribs
and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region
into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.

We could not speak.  We could hardly breathe.
We could only gaze in drunken ecstasy and drink in it.
Presently Harris exclaimed:

"Why--nation, it's going DOWN!"

Perfectly true.  We had missed the MORNING hornblow,
and slept all day.  This was stupefying.

Harris said:

"Look here, the sun isn't the spectacle--it's US--stacked
up here on top of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets,
and two hundred and fifty well-dressed men and women down
here gawking up at us and not caring a straw whether the sun
rises or sets, as long as they've got such a ridiculous
spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books.
They seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there's
one girl there at appears to be going all to pieces.
I never saw such a man as you before.  I think you are
the very last possibility in the way of an ass."

"What have _I_ done?" I answered, with heat.

"What have you done?" You've got up at half past seven
o'clock in the evening to see the sun rise, that's what
you've done."

"And have you done any better, I'd like to know? I've
always used to get up with the lark, till I came under
the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect."

"YOU used to get up with the lark--Oh, no doubt--
you'll get up with the hangman one of these days.
But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this,
in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top
of the Alps.  And no end of people down here to boot;
this isn't any place for an exhibition of temper."

And so the customary quarrel went on.  When the sun
was fairly down, we slipped back to the hotel in the
charitable gloaming, and went to bed again.  We had
encountered the horn-blower on the way, and he had tried
to collect compensation, not only for announcing the sunset,
which we did see, but for the sunrise, which we had
totally missed; but we said no, we only took our solar
rations on the "European plan"--pay for what you get.
He promised to make us hear his horn in the morning,
if we were alive.



CHAPTER XXIX
[Looking West for Sunrise]

He kept his word.  We heard his horn and instantly got up.
It was dark and cold and wretched.  As I fumbled around
for the matches, knocking things down with my quaking hands,
I wished the sun would rise in the middle of the day,
when it was warm and bright and cheerful, and one
wasn't sleepy.  We proceeded to dress by the gloom of a
couple sickly candles, but we could hardly button anything,
our hands shook so.  I thought of how many happy people
there were in Europe, Asia, and America, and everywhere,
who were sleeping peacefully in their beds, and did not
have to get up and see the Rigi sunrise--people who did
not appreciate their advantage, as like as not, but would
get up in the morning wanting more boons of Providence.
While thinking these thoughts I yawned, in a rather ample way,
and my upper teeth got hitched on a nail over the door,
and while I was mounting a chair to free myself, Harris drew
the window-curtain, and said:

"Oh, this is luck! We shan't have to go out at all--
yonder are the mountains, in full view."

That was glad news, indeed.  It made us cheerful right away.
One could see the grand Alpine masses dimly outlined
against the black firmament, and one or two faint stars
blinking through rifts in the night.  Fully clothed,
and wrapped in blankets, and huddled ourselves up,
by the window, with lighted pipes, and fell into chat,
while we waited in exceeding comfort to see how an Alpine
sunrise was going to look by candlelight.  By and by
a delicate, spiritual sort of effulgence spread itself
by imperceptible degrees over the loftiest altitudes of
the snowy wastes--but there the effort seemed to stop.
I said, presently:

"There is a hitch about this sunrise somewhere.
It doesn't seem to go.  What do you reckon is the matter
with it?"

"I don't know.  It appears to hang fire somewhere.
I never saw a sunrise act like that before.  Can it be
that the hotel is playing anything on us?"

"Of course not.  The hotel merely has a property interest
in the sun, it has nothing to do with the management of it.
It is a precarious kind of property, too; a succession
of total eclipses would probably ruin this tavern.
Now what can be the matter with this sunrise?"

Harris jumped up and said:

"I've got it! I know what's the matter with it! We've
been looking at the place where the sun SET last night!"

"It is perfectly true! Why couldn't you have thought of
that sooner? Now we've lost another one! And all through
your blundering.  It was exactly like you to light a pipe
and sit down to wait for the sun to rise in the west."

"It was exactly like me to find out the mistake, too.
You never would have found it out.  I find out all the mistakes."

"You make them all, too, else your most valuable faculty
would be wasted on you.  But don't stop to quarrel,
now--maybe we are not too late yet."

But we were.  The sun was well up when we got to the
exhibition-ground.

On our way up we met the crowd returning--men and women
dressed in all sorts of queer costumes, and exhibiting
all degrees of cold and wretchedness in their gaits
and countenances.  A dozen still remained on the ground
when we reached there, huddled together about the scaffold
with their backs to the bitter wind.  They had their red
guide-books open at the diagram of the view, and were
painfully picking out the several mountains and trying
to impress their names and positions on their memories.
It was one of the saddest sights I ever saw.

Two sides of this place were guarded by railings,
to keep people from being blown over the precipices.
The view, looking sheer down into the broad valley,
eastward, from this great elevation--almost a perpendicular
mile--was very quaint and curious.  Counties, towns,
hilly ribs and ridges, wide stretches of green meadow,
great forest tracts, winding streams, a dozen blue lakes,
a block of busy steamboats--we saw all this little
world in unique circumstantiality of detail--saw it
just as the birds see it--and all reduced to the smallest
of scales and as sharply worked out and finished as a
steel engraving.  The numerous toy villages, with tiny
spires projecting out of them, were just as the children
might have left them when done with play the day before;
the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss;
one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller
ones to puddles--though they did not look like puddles,
but like blue eardrops which had fallen and lodged
in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes,
among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty
green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along,
as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover
the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart;
and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if
one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows
in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling
across it and finding the distance a tedious one.
This beautiful miniature world had exactly the appearance
of those "relief maps" which reproduce nature precisely,
with the heights and depressions and other details graduated
to a reduced scale, and with the rocks, trees, lakes,
etc., colored after nature.

I believed we could walk down to Wa"ggis or Vitznau
in a day, but I knew we could go down by rail in about
an hour, so I chose the latter method.  I wanted to see
what it was like, anyway.  The train came along about
the middle of the afternoon, and an odd thing it was.
The locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole
locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole
locomotive were tiled sharply backward.  There were
two passenger-cars, roofed, but wide open all around.
These cars were not tilted back, but the seats were;
this enables the passenger to sit level while going down a
steep incline.

There are three railway-tracks; the central one is cogged;
the "lantern wheel" of the engine grips its way along
these cogs, and pulls the train up the hill or retards its
motion on the down trip.  About the same speed--three miles
an hour--is maintained both ways.  Whether going up or down,
the locomotive is always at the lower end of the train.
It pushes in the one case, braces back in the other.
The passenger rides backward going up, and faces forward
going down.

We got front seats, and while the train moved along
about fifty yards on level ground, I was not the
least frightened; but now it started abruptly downstairs,
and I caught my breath.  And I, like my neighbors,
unconsciously held back all I could, and threw my weight
to the rear, but, of course, that did no particular good.
I had slidden down the balusters when I was a boy,
and thought nothing of it, but to slide down the balusters
in a railway-train is a thing to make one's flesh creep.
Sometimes we had as much as ten yards of almost level
ground, and this gave us a few full breaths in comfort;
but straightway we would turn a corner and see a long steep
line of rails stretching down below us, and the comfort
was at an end.  One expected to see the locomotive pause,
or slack up a little, and approach this plunge cautiously,
but it did nothing of the kind; it went calmly on, and went
it reached the jumping-off place it made a sudden bow,
and went gliding smoothly downstairs, untroubled by
the circumstances.

It was wildly exhilarating to slide along the edge of
the precipices, after this grisly fashion, and look straight
down upon that far-off valley which I was describing a while ago.


There was no level ground at the Kaltbad station;
the railbed was as steep as a roof; I was curious
to see how the stop was going to be managed.
But it was very simple; the train came sliding down,
and when it reached the right spot it just stopped--that
was all there was "to it"--stopped on the steep incline,
and when the exchange of passengers and baggage had
been made, it moved off and went sliding down again.
The train can be stopped anywhere, at a moment's notice.

There was one curious effect, which I need not take the
trouble to describe--because I can scissor a description
of it out of the railway company's advertising pamphlet,
and say my ink:

"On the whole tour, particularly at the Descent, we undergo
an optical illusion which often seems to be incredible.
All the shrubs, fir trees, stables, houses, etc., seem to be bent
in a slanting direction, as by an immense pressure of air.
They are all standing awry, so much awry that the chalets
and cottages of the peasants seem to be tumbling down.
It is the consequence of the steep inclination of the line.
Those who are seated in the carriage do not observe that they
are doing down a declivity of twenty to twenty-five degrees
(their seats being adapted to this course of proceeding
and being bent down at their backs). They mistake their
carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure
of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside
which really are in a horizontal position must show a
disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity,
in regard to the mountain."

By the time one reaches Kaltbad, he has acquired confidence
in the railway, and he now ceases to try to ease the
locomotive by holding back.  Thenceforth he smokes his
pipe in serenity, and gazes out upon the magnificent
picture below and about him with unfettered enjoyment.
There is nothing to interrupt the view or the breeze;
it is like inspecting the world on the wing.  However--to be
exact--there is one place where the serenity lapses for a while;
this is while one is crossing the Schnurrtobel Bridge,
a frail structure which swings its gossamer frame down
through the dizzy air, over a gorge, like a vagrant
spider-strand.

One has no difficulty in remembering his sins while
the train is creeping down this bridge; and he repents
of them, too; though he sees, when he gets to Vitznau,
that he need not have done it, the bridge was perfectly safe.

So ends the eventual trip which we made to the Rigi-Kulm
to see an Alpine sunrise.



CHAPTER XXX
[Harris Climbs Mountains for Me]

An hour's sail brought us to Lucerne again.  I judged
it best to go to bed and rest several days, for I knew
that the man who undertakes to make the tour of Europe
on foot must take care of himself.

Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that
they did not take in the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier,
the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn, etc.  I immediately
examined the guide-book to see if these were important,
and found they were; in fact, a pedestrian tour of Europe
could not be complete without them.  Of course that decided
me at once to see them, for I never allow myself to do
things by halves, or in a slurring, slipshod way.

I called in my agent and instructed him to go without delay
and make a careful examination of these noted places,
on foot, and bring me back a written report of the result,
for insertion in my book.  I instructed him to go to Hospenthal
as quickly as possible, and make his grand start from there;
to extend his foot expedition as far as the Giesbach fall,
and return to me from thence by diligence or mule.
I told him to take the courier with him.

He objected to the courier, and with some show of reason,
since he was about to venture upon new and untried ground;
but I thought he might as well learn how to take care of
the courier now as later, therefore I enforced my point.
I said that the trouble, delay, and inconvenience
of traveling with a courier were balanced by the deep
respect which a courier's presence commands, and I must
insist that as much style be thrown into my journeys
as possible.

So the two assumed complete mountaineering costumes
and departed.  A week later they returned, pretty well
used up, and my agent handed me the following

Official Report

OF A VISIT TO THE FURKA REGION.  BY H. HARRIS, AGENT

About seven o'clock in the morning, with perfectly
fine weather, we started from Hospenthal, and arrived at
the MAISON on the Furka in a little under QUATRE hours.
The want of variety in the scenery from Hospenthal made
the KAHKAHPONEEKA wearisome; but let none be discouraged;
no one can fail to be completely R'ECOMPENS'EE for
his fatigue, when he sees, for the first time, the monarch
of the Oberland, the tremendous Finsteraarhorn.  A moment
before all was dullness, but a PAS further has placed us
on the summit of the Furka; and exactly in front of us,
at a HOPOW of only fifteen miles, this magnificent mountain
lifts its snow-wreathed precipices into the deep blue sky.
The inferior mountains on each side of the pass form
a sort of frame for the picture of their dread lord,
and close in the view so completely that no other prominent
feature in the Oberland is visible from this BONG-A-BONG;
nothing withdraws the attention from the solitary grandeur
of the Finsteraarhorn and the dependent spurs which form
the abutments of the central peak.

With the addition of some others, who were also bound
for the Grimsel, we formed a large XHVLOJ as we descended
the STEG which winds round the shoulder of a mountain
toward the Rhone Glacier.  We soon left the path and took
to the ice; and after wandering amongst the crevices UN PEU,
to admire the wonders of these deep blue caverns, and hear
the rushing of waters through their subglacial channels,
we struck out a course toward L'AUTRE CO^T'E and crossed
the glacier successfully, a little above the cave from
which the infant Rhone takes its first bound from under
the grand precipice of ice.  Half a mile below this
we began to climb the flowery side of the Meienwand.
One of our party started before the rest, but the HITZE
was so great, that we found IHM quite exhausted,
and lying at full length in the shade of a large GESTEIN.
We sat down with him for a time, for all felt the heat
exceedingly in the climb up this very steep BOLWOGGOLY,
and then we set out again together, and arrived at last
near the Dead Man's Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn.
This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place,
after a sanguinary BATTUE between the French and Austrians,
is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight
to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten
whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass
in the OWDAWAKK of winter.  Near this point the footpath joins
the wider track, which connects the Grimsel with the head
of the Rhone SCHNAWP; this has been carefully constructed,
and leads with a tortuous course among and over LES PIERRES,
down to the bank of the gloomy little SWOSH-SWOSH, which
almost washes against the walls of the Grimsel Hospice.
We arrived a little before four o'clock at the end
of our day's journey, hot enough to justify the step,
taking by most of the PARTIE, of plunging into the crystal
water of the snow-fed lake.

The next afternoon we started for a walk up the Unteraar glacier,
with the intention of, at all events, getting as far
as the HU"TTE which is used as a sleeping-place by most
of those who cross the Strahleck Pass to Grindelwald.
We got over the tedious collection of stones and DE'BRIS
which covers the PIED of the GLETCHER, and had walked
nearly three hours from the Grimsel, when, just as
we were thinking of crossing over to the right,
to climb the cliffs at the foot of the hut, the clouds,
which had for some time assumed a threatening appearance,
suddenly dropped, and a huge mass of them, driving toward
us from the Finsteraarhorn, poured down a deluge of
HABOOLONG and hail.  Fortunately, we were not far from
a very large glacier-table; it was a huge rock balanced
on a pedestal of ice high enough to admit of our all
creeping under it for GOWKARAK.  A stream of PUCKITTYPUKK
had furrowed a course for itself in the ice at its base,
and we were obliged to stand with one FUSS on each side
of this, and endeavor to keep ourselves CHAUD by cutting
steps in the steep bank of the pedestal, so as to get
a higher place for standing on, as the WASSER rose rapidly
in its trench.  A very cold BZZZZZZZZEEE accompanied
the storm, and made our position far from pleasant;
and presently came a flash of BLITZEN, apparently in the
middle of our little party, with an instantaneous clap
of YOKKY, sounding like a large gun fired close to our ears;
the effect was startling; but in a few seconds our attention
was fixed by the roaring echoes of the thunder against
the tremendous mountains which completely surrounded us.
This was followed by many more bursts, none of WELCHE,
however, was so dangerously near; and after waiting a long
DEMI-hour in our icy prison, we sallied out to talk through
a HABOOLONG which, though not so heavy as before, was quite
enough to give us a thorough soaking before our arrival at the
Hospice.

The Grimsel is CERTAINEMENT a wonderful place; situated at
the bottom of a sort of huge crater, the sides of which
are utterly savage GEBIRGE, composed of barren rocks
which cannot even support a single pine ARBRE, and afford
only scanty food for a herd of GMWKWLLOLP, it looks as
if it must be completely BEGRABEN in the winter snows.
Enormous avalanches fall against it every spring,
sometimes covering everything to the depth of thirty
or forty feet; and, in spite of walls four feet thick,
and furnished with outside shutters, the two men who stay here
when the VOYAGEURS are snugly quartered in their distant homes
can tell you that the snow sometimes shakes the house to its
foundations.

Next morning the HOGGLEBUMGULLUP still continued bad,
but we made up our minds to go on, and make the best of it.
Half an hour after we started, the REGEN thickened unpleasantly,
and we attempted to get shelter under a projecting rock,
but being far to NASS already to make standing at all
AGRE'ABLE, we pushed on for the Handeck, consoling ourselves
with the reflection that from the furious rushing
of the river Aar at our side, we should at all events
see the celebrated WASSERFALL in GRANDE PERFECTION.
Nor were we NAPPERSOCKET in our expectation; the water
was roaring down its leap of two hundred and fifty feet
in a most magnificent frenzy, while the trees which cling
to its rocky sides swayed to and fro in the violence of the
hurricane which it brought down with it; even the stream,
which falls into the main cascade at right angles,
and TOUTEFOIS forms a beautiful feature in the scene,
was now swollen into a raging torrent; and the violence
of this "meeting of the waters," about fifty feet below
the frail bridge where we stood, was fearfully grand.
While we were looking at it, GLU"CKLICHEWEISE a gleam
of sunshine came out, and instantly a beautiful rainbow
was formed by the spray, and hung in mid-air suspended over
the awful gorge.

On going into the CHALET above the fall, we were
informed that a BRU"CKE had broken down near Guttanen,
and that it would be impossible to proceed for some time;
accordingly we were kept in our drenched condition for
EIN STUNDE, when some VOYAGEURS arrived from Meiringen,
and told us that there had been a trifling accident,
ABER that we could now cross.  On arriving at the spot,
I was much inclined to suspect that the whole story was a ruse
to make us SLOWWK and drink the more at the Handeck Inn,
for only a few planks had been carried away, and though
there might perhaps have been some difficulty with mules,
the gap was certainly not larger than a MMBGLX might cross
with a very slight leap.  Near Guttanen the HABOOLONG
happily ceased, and we had time to walk ourselves tolerably
dry before arriving at Reichenback, WO we enjoyed a good DINE'
at the Hotel des Alps.

Next morning we walked to Rosenlaui, the BEAU ID'EAL
of Swiss scenery, where we spent the middle of the day
in an excursion to the glacier.  This was more beautiful
than words can describe, for in the constant progress
of the ice it has changed the form of its extremity
and formed a vast cavern, as blue as the sky above,
and rippled like a frozen ocean.  A few steps cut
in the WHOOPJAMBOREEHOO enabled us to walk completely
under this, and feast our eyes upon one of the loveliest
objects in creation.  The glacier was all around divided
by numberless fissures of the same exquisite color,
and the finest wood-ERDBEEREN were growing in abundance
but a few yards from the ice.  The inn stands in a CHARMANT
spot close to the C^OTE DE LA RIVIE`RE, which, lower down,
forms the Reichenbach fall, and embosomed in the richest
of pine woods, while the fine form of the Wellhorn
looking down upon it completes the enchanting BOPPLE.
In the afternoon we walked over the Great Scheideck
to Grindelwald, stopping to pay a visit to the Upper
glacier by the way; but we were again overtaken by bad
HOGGLEBUMGULLUP and arrived at the hotel in a SOLCHE
a state that the landlord's wardrobe was in great request.

The clouds by this time seemed to have done their worst,
for a lovely day succeeded, which we determined to devote
to an ascent of the Faulhorn.  We left Grindelwald just as
a thunder-storm was dying away, and we hoped to find GUTEN
WETTER up above; but the rain, which had nearly ceased,
began again, and we were struck by the rapidly increasing
FROID as we ascended.  Two-thirds of the way up were
completed when the rain was exchanged for GNILLIC,
with which the BODEN was thickly covered, and before we
arrived at the top the GNILLIC and mist became so thick
that we could not see one another at more than twenty
POOPOO distance, and it became difficult to pick our way over
the rough and thickly covered ground.  Shivering with cold,
we turned into bed with a double allowance of clothes,
and slept comfortably while the wind howled AUTOUR DE
LA MAISON; when I awoke, the wall and the window looked
equally dark, but in another hour I found I could just
see the form of the latter; so I jumped out of bed,
and forced it open, though with great difficulty from
the frost and the quantities of GNILLIC heaped up against it.

A row of huge icicles hung down from the edge of the roof,
and anything more wintry than the whole ANBLICK could
not well be imagined; but the sudden appearance of the
great mountains in front was so startling that I felt no
inclination to move toward bed again.  The snow which had
collected upon LA FENE^TRE had increased the FINSTERNISS
ODER DER DUNKELHEIT, so that when I looked out I was
surprised to find that the daylight was considerable,
and that the BALRAGOOMAH would evidently rise before long.
Only the brightest of LES E'TOILES were still shining;
the sky was cloudless overhead, though small curling
mists lay thousands of feet below us in the valleys,
wreathed around the feet of the mountains, and adding
to the splendor of their lofty summits.  We were soon
dressed and out of the house, watching the gradual approach
of dawn, thoroughly absorbed in the first near view
of the Oberland giants, which broke upon us unexpectedly
after the intense obscurity of the evening before.
"KABAUGWAKKO SONGWASHEE KUM WETTERHORN SNAWPO!" cried some one,
as that grand summit gleamed with the first rose of dawn;
and in a few moments the double crest of the Schreckhorn
followed its example; peak after peak seemed warmed
with life, the Jungfrau blushed even more beautifully
than her neighbors, and soon, from the Wetterhorn in the
east to the Wildstrubel in the west, a long row of fires
glowed upon mighty altars, truly worthy of the gods.
The WLGW was very severe; our sleeping-place could
hardly be DISTINGUEE' from the snow around it, which had
fallen to a depth of a FLIRK during the past evening,
and we heartily enjoyed a rough scramble EN BAS to the
Giesbach falls, where we soon found a warm climate.
At noon the day before Grindelwald the thermometer could
not have stood at less than 100 degrees Fahr.  in the sun;
and in the evening, judging from the icicles formed,
and the state of the windows, there must have been at least
twelve DINGBLATTER of frost, thus giving a change of 80
degrees during a few hours.

I said:

"You have done well, Harris; this report is concise,
compact, well expressed; the language is crisp,
the descriptions are vivid and not needlessly elaborated;
your report goes straight to the point, attends strictly
to business, and doesn't fool around.  It is in many
ways an excellent document.  But it has a fault--it
is too learned, it is much too learned.  What is 'DINGBLATTER'?

"'DINGBLATTER' is a Fiji word meaning 'degrees.'"

"You knew the English of it, then?"

"Oh, yes."

"What is 'GNILLIC'?

"That is the Eskimo term for 'snow.'"

"So you knew the English for that, too?"

"Why, certainly."

"What does 'MMBGLX' stand for?"

"That is Zulu for 'pedestrian.'"

"'While the form of the Wellhorn looking down upon it
completes the enchanting BOPPLE.' What is 'BOPPLE'?"

"'Picture.' It's Choctaw."

"What is 'SCHNAWP'?"

"'Valley.' That is Choctaw, also."

"What is 'BOLWOGGOLY'?"

"That is Chinese for 'hill.'"

"'KAHKAHPONEEKA'?"

"'Ascent.' Choctaw."

"'But we were again overtaken by bad HOGGLEBUMGULLUP.'
What does 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' mean?"

"That is Chinese for 'weather.'"

"Is 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' better than the English word? Is
it any more descriptive?"

"No, it means just the same."

"And 'DINGBLATTER' and 'GNILLIC,' and 'BOPPLE,'
and 'SCHNAWP'--are they better than the English words?"

"No, they mean just what the English ones do."

"Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this
Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?"

"Because I didn't know any French but two or three words,
and I didn't know any Latin or Greek at all."

"That is nothing.  Why should you want to use foreign words,
anyhow?"

"They adorn my page.  They all do it."

"Who is 'all'?"

"Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly.  Anybody has
a right to that wants to."

"I think you are mistaken." I then proceeded in the following
scathing manner.  "When really learned men write books
for other learned men to read, they are justified in using
as many learned words as they please--their audience
will understand them; but a man who writes a book for the
general public to read is not justified in disfiguring
his pages with untranslated foreign expressions.
It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers,
for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying,
'Get the translations made yourself if you want them,
this book is not written for the ignorant classes.' There are
men who know a foreign language so well and have used it
so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole
volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously,
and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time.
That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the
man's readers.  What is the excuse for this? The writer
would say he only uses the foreign language where the
delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English.
Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man,
and he ought to warn the nine other not to buy his book.
However, the excuse he offers is at least an excuse;
but there is another set of men who are like YOU;
they know a WORD here and there, of a foreign language,
or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from
the back of the Dictionary, and these are continually
peppering into their literature, with a pretense of
knowing that language--what excuse can they offer? The
foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact
equivalents in a nobler language--English; yet they think
they 'adorn their page' when they say STRASSE for street,
and BAHNHOF for railway-station, and so on--flaunting
these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader's face
and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the
sign of untold riches held in reserve.  I will let your
'learning' remain in your report; you have as much right,
I suppose, to 'adorn your page' with Zulu and Chinese
and Choctaw rubbish as others of your sort have to adorn
theirs with insolent odds and ends smouched from half
a dozen learned tongues whose A-B ABS they don't even know."

When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel,
he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up.
Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the
tranquil and unsuspecting Agent.  I can be dreadfully rough
on a person when the mood takes me.



CHAPTER XXXI
[Alp-scaling by Carriage]

We now prepared for a considerable walk--from Lucerne
to Interlaken, over the Bru"nig Pass.  But at the last moment
the weather was so good that I changed my mind and hired
a four-horse carriage.  It was a huge vehicle, roomy, as easy
in its motion as a palanquin, and exceedingly comfortable.

We got away pretty early in the morning, after a hot breakfast,
and went bowling over a hard, smooth road, through the summer
loveliness of Switzerland, with near and distant lakes
and mountains before and about us for the entertainment
of the eye, and the music of multitudinous birds to charm
the ear.  Sometimes there was only the width of the road
between the imposing precipices on the right and the clear
cool water on the left with its shoals of uncatchable
fish skimming about through the bars of sun and shadow;
and sometimes, in place of the precipices, the grassy land
stretched away, in an apparently endless upward slant,
and was dotted everywhere with snug little chalets,
the peculiarly captivating cottage of Switzerland.

The ordinary chalet turns a broad, honest gable end
to the road, and its ample roof hovers over the home
in a protecting, caressing way, projecting its sheltering
eaves far outward.  The quaint windows are filled with
little panes, and garnished with white muslin curtains,
and brightened with boxes of blooming flowers.
Across the front of the house, and up the spreading eaves
and along the fanciful railings of the shallow porch,
are elaborate carvings--wreaths, fruits, arabesques,
verses from Scripture, names, dates, etc.  The building
is wholly of wood, reddish brown in tint, a very
pleasing color.  It generally has vines climbing over it.
Set such a house against the fresh green of the hillside,
and it looks ever so cozy and inviting and picturesque,
and is a decidedly graceful addition to the landscape.

One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken
upon him, until he presently comes upon a new house--
a house which is aping the town fashions of Germany
and France, a prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing,
plastered all over on the outside to look like stone,
and altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly, and forbidding,
and so out of tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf
and dumb and dead to the poetry of its surroundings,
that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at
a wedding, a puritan in Paradise.

In the course of the morning we passed the spot where Pontius
Pilate is said to have thrown himself into the lake.
The legend goes that after the Crucifixion his conscience
troubled him, and he fled from Jerusalem and wandered
about the earth, weary of life and a prey to tortures of
the mind.  Eventually, he hid himself away, on the heights
of Mount Pilatus, and dwelt alone among the clouds and
crags for years; but rest and peace were still denied him,
so he finally put an end to his misery by drowning himself.

Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor
was born.  This was the children's friend, Santa Claus,
or St. Nicholas.  There are some unaccountable reputations
in the world.  This saint's is an instance.  He has
ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children,
yet it appears he was not much of a friend to his own.
He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them,
and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible,
and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon
pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other
noises from the nursery, doubtless.

Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule
for the construction of hermits; they seem made out of all
kinds of material.  But Pilate attended to the matter of
expiating his sin while he was alive, whereas St. Nicholas
will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys,
Christmas eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other
people's children, to make up for deserting his own.
His bones are kept in a church in a village (Sachseln)
which we visited, and are naturally held in great reverence.
His portrait is common in the farmhouses of the region,
but is believed by many to be but an indifferent likeness.
During his hermit life, according to legend, he partook
of the bread and wine of the communion once a month,
but all the rest of the month he fasted.

A constant marvel with us, as we sped along the bases
of the steep mountains on this journey, was, not that
avalanches occur, but that they are not occurring all
the time.  One does not understand why rocks and landslides
do not plunge down these declivities daily.  A landslip
occurred three quarters of a century ago, on the route
from Arth to Brunnen, which was a formidable thing.
A mass of conglomerate two miles long, a thousand feet broad,
and a hundred feet thick, broke away from a cliff three
thousand feet high and hurled itself into the valley below,
burying four villages and five hundred people, as in a grave.

We had such a beautiful day, and such endless pictures
of limpid lakes, and green hills and valleys,
and majestic mountains, and milky cataracts dancing
down the steeps and gleaming in the sun, that we could
not help feeling sweet toward all the world; so we tried
to drink all the milk, and eat all the grapes and apricots
and berries, and buy all the bouquets of wild flowers
which the little peasant boys and girls offered for sale;
but we had to retire from this contract, for it was too heavy.

At short distances--and they were entirely too short--all
along the road, were groups of neat and comely children,
with their wares nicely and temptingly set forth
in the grass under the shade trees, and as soon as we
approached they swarmed into the road, holding out their
baskets and milk bottles, and ran beside the carriage,
barefoot and bareheaded, and importuned us to buy.
They seldom desisted early, but continued to run and
insist--beside the wagon while they could, and behind
it until they lost breath.  Then they turned and chased
a returning carriage back to their trading-post again.
After several hours of this, without any intermission,
it becomes almost annoying.  I do not know what we
should have done without the returning carriages to draw
off the pursuit.  However, there were plenty of these,
loaded with dusty tourists and piled high with luggage.
Indeed, from Lucerne to Interlaken we had the spectacle,
among other scenery, of an unbroken procession of
fruit-peddlers and tourists carriages.

Our talk was mostly anticipatory of what we should see
on the down-grade of the Bru"nig, by and by, after we
should pass the summit.  All our friends in Lucerne had
said that to look down upon Meiringen, and the rushing
blue-gray river Aar, and the broad level green valley;
and across at the mighty Alpine precipices that rise
straight up to the clouds out of that valley; and up
at the microscopic chalets perched upon the dizzy eaves
of those precipices and winking dimly and fitfully
through the drifting veil of vapor; and still up and up,
at the superb Oltschiback and the other beautiful cascades
that leap from those rugged heights, robed in powdery spray,
ruffled with foam, and girdled with rainbows--to look upon
these things, they say, was to look upon the last possibility
of the sublime and the enchanting.  Therefore, as I say,
we talked mainly of these coming wonders; if we were conscious
of any impatience, it was to get there in favorable season;
if we felt any anxiety, it was that the day might
remain perfect, and enable us to see those marvels at their best.


As we approached the Kaiserstuhl, a part of the harness gave way.

We were in distress for a moment, but only a moment.
It was the fore-and-aft gear that was broken--the thing
that leads aft from the forward part of the horse and is
made fast to the thing that pulls the wagon.  In America
this would have been a heavy leathern strap; but, all over
the continent it is nothing but a piece of rope the size
of your little finger--clothes-line is what it is.
Cabs use it, private carriages, freight-carts and wagons,
all sorts of vehicles have it.  In Munich I afterward saw
it used on a long wagon laden with fifty-four half-barrels
of beer; I had before noticed that the cabs in Heidelberg
used it--not new rope, but rope that had been in use
since Abraham's time --and I had felt nervous, sometimes,
behind it when the cab was tearing down a hill.  But I
had long been accustomed to it now, and had even become
afraid of the leather strap which belonged in its place.
Our driver got a fresh piece of clothes-line out of his
locker and repaired the break in two minutes.

So much for one European fashion.  Every country has its
own ways.  It may interest the reader to know how they "put
horses to" on the continent.  The man stands up the horses
on each side of the thing that projects from the front end
of the wagon, and then throws the tangled mess of gear
forward through a ring, and hauls it aft, and passes the
other thing through the other ring and hauls it aft on the
other side of the other horse, opposite to the first one,
after crossing them and bringing the loose end back,
and then buckles the other thing underneath the horse,
and takes another thing and wraps it around the thing I spoke
of before, and puts another thing over each horse's head,
with broad flappers to it to keep the dust out of his eyes,
and puts the iron thing in his mouth for him to grit his
teeth on, uphill, and brings the ends of these things aft
over his back, after buckling another one around under
his neck to hold his head up, and hitching another thing
on a thing that goes over his shoulders to keep his head
up when he is climbing a hill, and then takes the slack
of the thing which I mentioned a while ago, and fetches it
aft and makes it fast to the thing that pulls the wagon,
and hands the other things up to the driver to steer with.
I never have buckled up a horse myself, but I do not think
we do it that way.

We had four very handsome horses, and the driver was very proud
of his turnout.  He would bowl along on a reasonable trot,
on the highway, but when he entered a village he did it on
a furious run, and accompanied it with a frenzy of ceaseless
whip-crackings that sounded like volleys of musketry.
He tore through the narrow streets and around the sharp
curves like a moving earthquake, showering his volleys
as he went, and before him swept a continuous tidal wave
of scampering children, ducks, cats, and mothers clasping
babies which they had snatched out of the way of the
coming destruction; and as this living wave washed aside,
along the walls, its elements, being safe, forgot their fears
and turned their admiring gaze upon that gallant driver
till he thundered around the next curve and was lost to sight.

He was a great man to those villagers, with his gaudy
clothes and his terrific ways.  Whenever he stopped
to have his cattle watered and fed with loaves of bread,
the villagers stood around admiring him while he
swaggered about, the little boys gazed up at his face with
humble homage, and the landlord brought out foaming mugs
of beer and conversed proudly with him while he drank.
Then he mounted his lofty box, swung his explosive whip,
and away he went again, like a storm.  I had not seen
anything like this before since I was a boy, and the
stage used to flourish the village with the dust flying
and the horn tooting.

When we reached the base of the Kaiserstuhl, we took
two more horses; we had to toil along with difficulty
for an hour and a half or two hours, for the ascent
was not very gradual, but when we passed the backbone
and approached the station, the driver surpassed all
his previous efforts in the way of rush and clatter.
He could not have six horses all the time, so he made
the most of his chance while he had it.

Up to this point we had been in the heart of the William
Tell region.  The hero is not forgotten, by any means,
or held in doubtful veneration.  His wooden image,
with his bow drawn, above the doors of taverns, was a
frequent feature of the scenery.

About noon we arrived at the foot of the Bru"nig Pass,
and made a two-hour stop at the village hotel, another of
those clean, pretty, and thoroughly well-kept inns which are
such an astonishment to people who are accustomed to hotels
of a dismally different pattern in remote country-towns.
There was a lake here, in the lap of the great mountains,
the green slopes that rose toward the lower crags
were graced with scattered Swiss cottages nestling
among miniature farms and gardens, and from out a leafy
ambuscade in the upper heights tumbled a brawling cataract.

Carriage after carriage, laden with tourists and trunks,
arrived, and the quiet hotel was soon populous.
We were early at the table d'ho^te and saw the people
all come in.  There were twenty-five, perhaps.  They were
of various nationalities, but we were the only Americans.
Next to me sat an English bride, and next to her sat her
new husband, whom she called "Neddy," though he was big
enough and stalwart enough to be entitled to his full name.
They had a pretty little lovers' quarrel over what wine
they should have.  Neddy was for obeying the guide-book
and taking the wine of the country; but the bride said:

"What, that nahsty stuff!"

"It isn't nahsty, pet, it's quite good."

"It IS nahsty."

"No, it ISN'T nahsty."

"It's Oful nahsty, Neddy, and I shahn't drink it."

Then the question was, what she must have.  She said he
knew very well that she never drank anything but champagne.

She added:

"You know very well papa always has champagne on his table,
and I've always been used to it."

Neddy made a playful pretense of being distressed about
the expense, and this amused her so much that she nearly
exhausted herself with laughter--and this pleased HIM
so much that he repeated his jest a couple of times,
and added new and killing varieties to it.  When the bride
finally recovered, she gave Neddy a love-box on the arm
with her fan, and said with arch severity:

"Well, you would HAVE me--nothing else would do--
so you'll have to make the best of a bad bargain.
DO order the champagne, I'm Oful dry."

So with a mock groan which made her laugh again,
Neddy ordered the champagne.

The fact that this young woman had never moistened
the selvedge edge of her soul with a less plebeian
tipple than champagne, had a marked and subduing effect
on Harris.  He believed she belonged to the royal family.
But I had my doubts.

We heard two or three different languages spoken by
people at the table and guessed out the nationalities
of most of the guests to our satisfaction, but we
failed with an elderly gentleman and his wife and a
young girl who sat opposite us, and with a gentleman
of about thirty-five who sat three seats beyond Harris.
We did not hear any of these speak.  But finally the
last-named gentleman left while we were not noticing,
but we looked up as he reached the far end of the table.
He stopped there a moment, and made his toilet with a
pocket comb.  So he was a German; or else he had lived
in German hotels long enough to catch the fashion.
When the elderly couple and the young girl rose to leave,
they bowed respectfully to us.  So they were Germans, too.
This national custom is worth six of the other one,
for export.

After dinner we talked with several Englishmen, and they
inflamed our desire to a hotter degree than ever,
to see the sights of Meiringen from the heights of
the Bru"nig Pass.  They said the view was marvelous,
and that one who had seen it once could never forget it.
They also spoke of the romantic nature of the road over
the pass, and how in one place it had been cut through
a flank of the solid rock, in such a way that the mountain
overhung the tourist as he passed by; and they furthermore
said that the sharp turns in the road and the abruptness
of the descent would afford us a thrilling experience,
for we should go down in a flying gallop and seem to be
spinning around the rings of a whirlwind, like a drop
of whiskey descending the spirals of a corkscrew.
I got all the information out of these gentlemen that we
could need; and then, to make everything complete, I asked
them if a body could get hold of a little fruit and milk
here and there, in case of necessity.  They threw up their
hands in speechless intimation that the road was simply paved
with refreshment-peddlers. We were impatient to get away,
now, and the rest of our two-hour stop rather dragged.
But finally the set time arrived and we began the ascent.
Indeed it was a wonderful road.  It was smooth, and compact,
and clean, and the side next the precipices was guarded
all along by dressed stone posts about three feet high,
placed at short distances apart.  The road could not have
been better built if Napoleon the First had built it.
He seems to have been the introducer of the sort of roads
which Europe now uses.  All literature which describes
life as it existed in England, France, and Germany up
to the close of the last century, is filled with pictures
of coaches and carriages wallowing through these three
countries in mud and slush half-wheel deep; but after
Napoleon had floundered through a conquered kingdom he
generally arranged things so that the rest of the world
could follow dry-shod.

We went on climbing, higher and higher, and curving hither
and thither, in the shade of noble woods, and with a rich
variety and profusion of wild flowers all about us;
and glimpses of rounded grassy backbones below us occupied
by trim chalets and nibbling sheep, and other glimpses
of far lower altitudes, where distance diminished the
chalets to toys and obliterated the sheep altogether;
and every now and then some ermined monarch of the Alps
swung magnificently into view for a moment, then drifted
past an intervening spur and disappeared again.

It was an intoxicating trip altogether; the exceeding
sense of satisfaction that follows a good dinner added
largely to the enjoyment; the having something especial
to look forward to and muse about, like the approaching
grandeurs of Meiringen, sharpened the zest.  Smoking was
never so good before, solid comfort was never solider;
we lay back against the thick cushions silent, meditative,
steeped in felicity.

I rubbed my eyes, opened them, and started.  I had been
dreaming I was at sea, and it was a thrilling surprise to wake
up and find land all around me.  It took me a couple seconds
to "come to," as you may say; then I took in the situation.
The horses were drinking at a trough in the edge of a town,
the driver was taking beer, Harris was snoring at my side,
the courier, with folded arms and bowed head, was sleeping
on the box, two dozen barefooted and bareheaded children
were gathered about the carriage, with their hands
crossed behind, gazing up with serious and innocent
admiration at the dozing tourists baking there in the sun.
Several small girls held night-capped babies nearly
as big as themselves in their arms, and even these fat
babies seemed to take a sort of sluggish interest in us.

We had slept an hour and a half and missed all the scenery!
I did not need anybody to tell me that.  If I had been
a girl, I could have cursed for vexation.  As it was,
I woke up the agent and gave him a piece of my mind.
Instead of being humiliated, he only upbraided me for being
so wanting in vigilance.  He said he had expected to improve
his mind by coming to Europe, but a man might travel to the
ends of the earth with me and never see anything, for I
was manifestly endowed with the very genius of ill luck.
He even tried to get up some emotion about that poor courier,
who never got a chance to see anything, on account of
my heedlessness.  But when I thought I had borne about
enough of this kind of talk, I threatened to make Harris
tramp back to the summit and make a report on that scenery,
and this suggestion spiked his battery.

We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions
of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the
clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not
entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across
a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the
pretty town of Interlaken.  It was just about sunset,
and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.



CHAPTER XXXII
[The Jungfrau, the Bride, and the Piano]

We located ourselves at the Jungfrau Hotel, one of those
huge establishments which the needs of modern travel
have created in every attractive spot on the continent.
There was a great gathering at dinner, and, as usual,
one heard all sorts of languages.

The table d'ho^te was served by waitresses dressed
in the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasants.
This consists of a simple gros de laine, trimmed with ashes
of roses, with overskirt of scare bleu ventre saint gris,
cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polonaise
and narrow insertions of pa^te de foie gras backstitched
to the mise en sce`ne in the form of a jeu d'esprit. It gives
to the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect.

One of these waitresses, a woman of forty,
had side-whiskers reaching half-way down her jaws.
They were two fingers broad, dark in color, pretty thick,
and the hairs were an inch long.  One sees many women on
the continent with quite conspicuous mustaches, but this
was the only woman I saw who had reached the dignity of whiskers.


After dinner the guests of both sexes distributed themselves
about the front porches and the ornamental grounds belonging
to the hotel, to enjoy the cool air; but, as the twilight
deepened toward darkness, they gathered themselves together
in that saddest and solemnest and most constrained of
all places, the great blank drawing-room which is the chief
feature of all continental summer hotels.  There they
grouped themselves about, in couples and threes, and mumbled
in bated voices, and looked timid and homeless and forlorn.

There was a small piano in this room, a clattery, wheezy,
asthmatic thing, certainly the very worst miscarriage
in the way of a piano that the world has seen.  In turn,
five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached
it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired
with the lockjaw.  But the boss of that instrument was
to come, nevertheless; and from my own country--from Arkansaw.

She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself
and her grave and worshiping stripling of a husband; she was
about eighteen, just out of school, free from affections,
unconscious of that passionless multitude around her;
and the very first time she smote that old wreck one
recognized that it had met its destiny.  Her stripling
brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room--
for this bride went "heeled," as you might say--and bent
himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages.

The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end
of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings,
as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth
with the agony of it.  Then, without any more preliminaries,
she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of Prague,"
that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood
of the slain.  She made a fair and honorable average
of two false notes in every five, but her soul was in arms
and she never stopped to correct.  The audience stood it
with pretty fair grit for a while, but when the cannonade
waxed hotter and fiercer, and the discord average
rose to four in five, the procession began to move.
A few stragglers held their ground ten minutes longer,
but when the girl began to wring the true inwardness out
of the "cries of the wounded," they struck their colors
and retired in a kind of panic.

There never was a completer victory; I was the only
non-combatant left on the field.  I would not have
deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but indeed I had no
desires in that direction.  None of us like mediocrity,
but we all reverence perfection.  This girl's music
was perfection in its way; it was the worst music that
had ever been achieved on our planet by a mere human being.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain.  When she
got through, I asked her to play it again.  She did it
with a pleased alacrity and a heightened enthusiasm.
She made it ALL discords, this time.  She got an amount
of anguish into the cries of the wounded that shed a new
light on human suffering.  She was on the war-path all
the evening.  All the time, crowds of people gathered on
the porches and pressed their noses against the windows
to look and marvel, but the bravest never ventured in.
The bride went off satisfied and happy with her young fellow,
when her appetite was finally gorged, and the tourists
swarmed in again.

What a change has come over Switzerland, and in fact
all Europe, during this century! Seventy or eighty years
ago Napoleon was the only man in Europe who could really
be called a traveler; he was the only man who had devoted
his attention to it and taken a powerful interest in it;
he was the only man who had traveled extensively;
but now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland,
and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown
remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days
a buzzing hive of restless strangers every summer.
But I digress.

In the morning, when we looked out of our windows,
we saw a wonderful sight.  Across the valley,
and apparently quite neighborly and close at hand,
the giant form of the Jungfrau rose cold and white into
the clear sky, beyond a gateway in the nearer highlands.
It reminded me, somehow, of one of those colossal billows
which swells suddenly up beside one's ship, at sea,
sometimes, with its crest and shoulders snowy white, and the
rest of its noble proportions streaked downward with creamy foam.


I took out my sketch-book and made a little picture
of the Jungfrau, merely to get the shape.  [Figure 9]

I do not regard this as one of my finished works, in fact I
do not rank it among my Works at all; it is only a study;
it is hardly more than what one might call a sketch.
Other artists have done me the grace to admire it; but I
am severe in my judgments of my own pictures, and this
one does not move me.

It was hard to believe that that lofty wooded rampart on
the left which so overtops the Jungfrau was not actually
the higher of the two, but it was not, of course.
It is only two or three thousand feet high, and of course
has no snow upon it in summer, whereas the Jungfrau is not
much shorter of fourteen thousand feet high and therefore
that lowest verge of snow on her side, which seems nearly
down to the valley level, is really about seven thousand feet
higher up in the air than the summit of that wooded rampart.
It is the distance that makes the deception.  The wooded
height is but four or five miles removed from us,
but the Jungfrau is four or five times that distance away.

Walking down the street of shops, in the fore-noon, I
was attracted by a large picture, carved, frame and all,
from a single block of chocolate-colored wood.
There are people who know everything.  Some of these had
told us that continental shopkeepers always raise their
prices on English and Americans.  Many people had told
us it was expensive to buy things through a courier,
whereas I had supposed it was just the reverse.
When I saw this picture, I conjectured that it was worth
more than the friend I proposed to buy it for would
like to pay, but still it was worth while to inquire;
so I told the courier to step in and ask the price, as if he
wanted it for himself; I told him not to speak in English,
and above all not to reveal the fact that he was a courier.
Then I moved on a few yards, and waited.

The courier came presently and reported the price.
I said to myself, "It is a hundred francs too much,"
and so dismissed the matter from my mind.  But in
the afternoon I was passing that place with Harris,
and the picture attracted me again.  We stepped in,
to see how much higher broken German would raise the price.
The shopwoman named a figure just a hundred francs lower
than the courier had named.  This was a pleasant surprise.
I said I would take it.  After I had given directions as to
where it was to be shipped, the shipped, the shopwoman said,
appealingly:

"If your please, do not let your courier know you bought it."

This was an unexpected remark.  I said:

"What makes you think I have a courier?"

"Ah, that is very simple; he told me himself."

"He was very thoughtful.  But tell me--why did you charge
him more than you are charging me?"

"That is very simple, also: I do not have to pay you
a percentage."

"Oh, I begin to see.  You would have had to pay the courier
a percentage."

"Undoubtedly. The courier always has his percentage.
In this case it would have been a hundred francs."

"Then the tradesman does not pay a part of it--
the purchaser pays all of it?"

"There are occasions when the tradesman and the courier
agree upon a price which is twice or thrice the value of
the article, then the two divide, and both get a percentage."

"I see.  But it seems to me that the purchaser does
all the paying, even then."

"Oh, to be sure! It goes without saying."

"But I have bought this picture myself; therefore why
shouldn't the courier know it?"

The woman exclaimed, in distress:

"Ah, indeed it would take all my little profit! He would
come and demand his hundred francs, and I should have
to pay."

"He has not done the buying.  You could refuse."

"I could not dare to refuse.  He would never bring
travelers here again.  More than that, he would denounce me
to the other couriers, they would divert custom from me,
and my business would be injured."

I went away in a thoughtful frame of mind.  I began to see why
a courier could afford to work for fifty-five dollars a month
and his fares.  A month or two later I was able to understand
why a courier did not have to pay any board and lodging,
and why my hotel bills were always larger when I had him
with me than when I left him behind, somewhere, for a few days.

Another thing was also explained, now, apparently.
In one town I had taken the courier to the bank to do
the translating when I drew some money.  I had sat
in the reading-room till the transaction was finished.
Then a clerk had brought the money to me in person,
and had been exceedingly polite, even going so far as to
precede me to the door and holding it open for me and bow
me out as if I had been a distinguished personage.
It was a new experience.  Exchange had been in my favor
ever since I had been in Europe, but just that one time.
I got simply the face of my draft, and no extra francs,
whereas I had expected to get quite a number of them.
This was the first time I had ever used the courier at
the bank.  I had suspected something then, and as long
as he remained with me afterward I managed bank matters
by myself.

Still, if I felt that I could afford the tax, I would
never travel without a courier, for a good courier is
a convenience whose value cannot be estimated in dollars
and cents.  Without him, travel is a bitter harassment,
a purgatory of little exasperating annoyances, a ceaseless
and pitiless punishment--I mean to an irascible man
who has no business capacity and is confused by details.

Without a courier, travel hasn't a ray of pleasure
in it, anywhere; but with him it is a continuous and
unruffled delight.  He is always at hand, never has to be
sent for; if your bell is not answered promptly--and it
seldom is--you have only to open the door and speak,
the courier will hear, and he will have the order attended
to or raise an insurrection.  You tell him what day
you will start, and whither you are going--leave all
the rest to him.  You need not inquire about trains,
or fares, or car changes, or hotels, or anything else.
At the proper time he will put you in a cab or an omnibus,
and drive you to the train or the boat; he has packed your
luggage and transferred it, he has paid all the bills.
Other people have preceded you half an hour to scramble
for impossible places and lose their tempers, but you can
take your time; the courier has secured your seats for you,
and you can occupy them at your leisure.

At the station, the crowd mash one another to pulp in the
effort to get the weigher's attention to their trunks;
they dispute hotly with these tyrants, who are cool
and indifferent; they get their baggage billets, at last,
and then have another squeeze and another rage over the
disheartening business of trying to get them recorded and
paid for, and still another over the equally disheartening
business of trying to get near enough to the ticket
office to buy a ticket; and now, with their tempers gone
to the dogs, they must stand penned up and packed together,
laden with wraps and satchels and shawl-straps, with the
weary wife and babies, in the waiting-room, till the doors
are thrown open--and then all hands make a grand final
rush to the train, find it full, and have to stand on
the platform and fret until some more cars are put on.
They are in a condition to kill somebody by this time.
Meantime, you have been sitting in your car, smoking,
and observing all this misery in the extremest comfort.

On the journey the guard is polite and watchful--won't
allow anybody to get into your compartment--tells them
you are just recovering from the small-pox and do not
like to be disturbed.  For the courier has made everything
right with the guard.  At way-stations the courier comes
to your compartment to see if you want a glass of water,
or a newspaper, or anything; at eating-stations he sends
luncheon out to you, while the other people scramble
and worry in the dining-rooms. If anything breaks about
the car you are in, and a station-master proposes to pack
you and your agent into a compartment with strangers,
the courier reveals to him confidentially that you are
a French duke born deaf and dumb, and the official comes
and makes affable signs that he has ordered a choice car
to be added to the train for you.

At custom-houses the multitude file tediously through,
hot and irritated, and look on while the officers
burrow into the trunks and make a mess of everything;
but you hand your keys to the courier and sit still.
Perhaps you arrive at your destination in a rain-storm
at ten at night--you generally do.  The multitude
spend half an hour verifying their baggage and getting
it transferred to the omnibuses; but the courier puts
you into a vehicle without a moment's loss of time,
and when you reach your hotel you find your rooms have been
secured two or three days in advance, everything is ready,
you can go at once to bed.  Some of those other people will
have to drift around to two or three hotels, in the rain,
before they find accommodations.

I have not set down half of the virtues that are
vested in a good courier, but I think I have set down
a sufficiency of them to show that an irritable man
who can afford one and does not employ him is not a
wise economist.  My courier was the worst one in Europe,
yet he was a good deal better than none at all.
It could not pay him to be a better one than he was,
because I could not afford to buy things through him.
He was a good enough courier for the small amount he
got out of his service.  Yes, to travel with a courier
is bliss, to travel without one is the reverse.

I have had dealings with some very bad couriers; but I have also
had dealings with one who might fairly be called perfection.
He was a young Polander, named Joseph N. Verey.  He spoke
eight languages, and seemed to be equally at home in all
of them; he was shrewd, prompt, posted, and punctual;
he was fertile in resources, and singularly gifted in
the matter of overcoming difficulties; he not only knew
how to do everything in his line, but he knew the best ways
and the quickest; he was handy with children and invalids;
all his employer needed to do was to take life easy
and leave everything to the courier.  His address is,
care of Messrs.  Gay & Son, Strand, London; he was formerly
a conductor of Gay's tourist parties.  Excellent couriers
are somewhat rare; if the reader is about to travel,
he will find it to his advantage to make a note of this one.



CHAPTER XXXIII
[We Climb Far--by Buggy]

The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the
other side of the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated
every night with those gorgeous theatrical fires whose
name I cannot call just at this moment.  This was said
to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means
to miss.  I was strongly tempted, but I could not go
there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.
The task which I had set myself was to walk over Europe
on foot, not skim over it in a boat.  I had made a tacit
contract with myself; it was my duty to abide by it.
I was willing to make boat trips for pleasure, but I could
not conscientiously make them in the way of business.

It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight,
but I lived down the desire, a nd gained in my self-respect
through the triumph.  I had a finer and a grander sight,
however, where I was.  This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau
softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by
the starlight.  There was something subduing in the influence
of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed
to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal,
face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature
of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.
One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation
of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit
which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages,
upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them;
and would judge a million more--and still be there,
watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life
should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.

While I was feeling these things, I was groping,
without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the
spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other
mountains--that strange, deep, nameless influence, which,
once felt, cannot be forgotten--once felt, leaves always
behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing
which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning
which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.
I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative,
cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries
and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they
could not explain why.  They had come first, they said,
out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it;
they had come since because they could not help it, and they
should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason;
they had tried to break their chains and stay away,
but it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them.
Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they
could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they
were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to
sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps;
the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace
upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid
things here, before the visible throne of God.

Down the road a piece was a Kursaal--whatever that may be--
and we joined the human tide to see what sort of enjoyment
it might afford.  It was the usual open-air concert,
in an ornamental garden, with wines, beer, milk, whey,
grapes, etc.--the whey and the grapes being necessaries
of life to certain invalids whom physicians cannot repair,
and who only continue to exist by the grace of whey
or grapes.  One of these departed spirits told me,
in a sad and lifeless way, that there is no way for him
to live but by whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey,
he didn't know whey he did, but he did.  After making
this pun he died--that is the whey it served him.

Some other remains, preserved from decomposition
by the grape system, told me that the grapes were of
a peculiar breed, highly medicinal in their nature,
and that they were counted out and administered by the
grape-doctors as methodically as if they were pills.
The new patient, if very feeble, began with one grape
before breakfast, took three during breakfast, a couple
between meals, five at luncheon, three in the afternoon,
seven at dinner, four for supper, and part of a grape
just before going to bed, by way of a general regulator.
The quantity was gradually and regularly increased,
according to the needs and capacities of the patient,
until by and by you would find him disposing of his one
grape per second all the day long, and his regular barrel
per day.

He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard
the grape system, never afterward got over the habit
of talking as if they were dictating to a slow amanuensis,
because they always made a pause between each two words
while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary grape.
He said these were tedious people to talk with.
He said that men who had been cured by the other process
were easily distinguished from the rest of mankind
because they always tilted their heads back, between every
two words, and swallowed a swig of imaginary whey.
He said it was an impressive thing to observe two men,
who had been cured by the two processes, engaged in
conversation--said their pauses and accompanying movements
were so continuous and regular that a stranger would think
himself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines.
One finds out a great many wonderful things, by traveling,
if he stumbles upon the right person.

I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was
good enough, but it seemed rather tame after the cyclone
of that Arkansaw expert.  Besides, my adventurous spirit
had conceived a formidable enterprise--nothing less
than a trip from Interlaken, by the Gemmi and Visp,
clear to Zermatt, on foot! So it was necessary to plan
the details, and get ready for an early start.  The courier
(this was not the one I have just been speaking of)
thought that the portier of the hotel would be able
to tell us how to find our way.  And so it turned out.
He showed us the whole thing, on a relief-map, and we could
see our route, with all its elevations and depressions,
its villages and its rivers, as clearly as if we were sailing
over it in a balloon.  A relief-map is a great thing.
The portier also wrote down each day's journey and the
nightly hotel on a piece of paper, and made our course
so plain that we should never be able to get lost without
high-priced outside help.

I put the courier in the care of a gentleman who was
going to Lausanne, and then we went to bed, after laying
out the walking-costumes and putting them into condition
for instant occupation in the morning.

However, when we came down to breakfast at 8 A.M., it
looked so much like rain that I hired a two-horse top-buggy
for the first third of the journey.  For two or three hours
we jogged along the level road which skirts the beautiful
lake of Thun, with a dim and dreamlike picture of watery
expanses and spectral Alpine forms always before us,
veiled in a mellowing mist.  Then a steady downpour
set in, and hid everything but the nearest objects.
We kept the rain out of our faces with umbrellas, and away
from our bodies with the leather apron of the buggy;
but the driver sat unsheltered and placidly soaked the weather
in and seemed to like it.  We had the road to ourselves,
and I never had a pleasanter excursion.

The weather began to clear while we were driving up
a valley called the Kienthal, and presently a vast black
cloud-bank in front of us dissolved away and uncurtained
the grand proportions and the soaring loftiness of the
Blumis Alp.  It was a sort of breath-taking surprise;
for we had not supposed there was anything behind
that low-hung blanket of sable cloud but level valley.
What we had been mistaking for fleeting glimpses of sky
away aloft there, were really patches of the Blumis's
snowy crest caught through shredded rents in the drifting
pall of vapor.

We dined in the inn at Frutigen, and our driver ought
to have dined there, too, but he would not have had
time to dine and get drunk both, so he gave his mind
to making a masterpiece of the latter, and succeeded.
A German gentleman and his two young-lady daughters had
been taking their nooning at the inn, and when they left,
just ahead of us, it was plain that their driver was
as drunk as ours, and as happy and good-natured, too,
which was saying a good deal.  These rascals overflowed
with attentions and information for their guests, and with
brotherly love for each other.  They tied their reins,
and took off their coats and hats, so that they might
be able to give unencumbered attention to conversation
and to the gestures necessary for its illustration.

The road was smooth; it led up and over and down a continual
succession of hills; but it was narrow, the horses were
used to it, and could not well get out of it anyhow;
so why shouldn't the drivers entertain themselves and us?
The noses of our horses projected sociably into the rear
of the forward carriage, and as we toiled up the long
hills our driver stood up and talked to his friend,
and his friend stood up and talked back to him, with his
rear to the scenery.  When the top was reached and we
went flying down the other side, there was no change in
the program.  I carry in my memory yet the picture of that
forward driver, on his knees on his high seat, resting his
elbows on its back, and beaming down on his passengers,
with happy eye, and flying hair, and jolly red face,
and offering his card to the old German gentleman while he
praised his hack and horses, and both teams were whizzing
down a long hill with nobody in a position to tell whether
we were bound to destruction or an undeserved safety.

Toward sunset we entered a beautiful green valley dotted
with chalets, a cozy little domain hidden away from the busy
world in a cloistered nook among giant precipices topped
with snowy peaks that seemed to float like islands above
the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them from
the lower world.  Down from vague and vaporous heights,
little ruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling,
and found their way to the verge of one of those tremendous
overhanging walls, whence they plunged, a shaft of silver,
shivered to atoms in mid-descent and turned to an air puff
of luminous dust.  Here and there, in grooved depressions
among the snowy desolations of the upper altitudes,
one glimpsed the extremity of a glacier, with its sea-green
and honeycombed battlements of ice.

Up the valley, under a dizzy precipice, nestled the
village of Kandersteg, our halting-place for the night.
We were soon there, and housed in the hotel.  But the waning
day had such an inviting influence that we did not remain
housed many moments, but struck out and followed a roaring
torrent of ice-water up to its far source in a sort of
little grass-carpeted parlor, walled in all around by vast
precipices and overlooked by clustering summits of ice.
This was the snuggest little croquet-ground imaginable;
it was perfectly level, and not more than a mile long
by half a mile wide.  The walls around it were so gigantic,
and everything about it was on so mighty a scale that it
was belittled, by contrast, to what I have likened it
to--a cozy and carpeted parlor.  It was so high above
the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing between it
and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate
relations with the high altitudes before; the snow-peaks
had always been remote and unapproachable grandeurs,
hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if one may use
such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations
so august as these.

We could see the streams which fed the torrent we
had followed issuing from under the greenish ramparts
of glaciers; but two or three of these, instead of flowing
over the precipices, sank down into the rock and sprang
in big jets out of holes in the mid-face of the walls.

The green nook which I have been describing is called
the Gasternthal.  The glacier streams gather and flow through
it in a broad and rushing brook to a narrow cleft between
lofty precipices; here the rushing brook becomes a mad torrent
and goes booming and thundering down toward Kandersteg,
lashing and thrashing its way over and among monster boulders,
and hurling chance roots and logs about like straws.
There was no lack of cascades along this route.
The path by the side of the torrent was so narrow
that one had to look sharp, when he heard a cow-bell,
and hunt for a place that was wide enough to accommodate
a cow and a Christian side by side, and such places were
not always to be had at an instant's notice.  The cows
wear church-bells, and that is a good idea in the cows,
for where that torrent is, you couldn't hear an ordinary
cow-bell any further than you could hear the ticking of a watch.

I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting
stranded logs and dead trees adrift, and I sat on a
boulder and watched them go whirling and leaping head
over heels down the boiling torrent.  It was a wonderfully
exhilarating spectacle.  When I had had enough exercise,
I made the agent take some, by running a race with one
of those logs.  I made a trifle by betting on the log.

After dinner we had a walk up and down the Kandersteg valley,
in the soft gloaming, with the spectacle of the dying lights
of day playing about the crests and pinnacles of the still
and solemn upper realm for contrast, and text for talk.
There were no sounds but the dulled complaining of the
torrent and the occasional tinkling of a distant bell.
The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace;
one might dream his life tranquilly away there, and not miss
it or mind it when it was gone.

The summer departed with the sun, and winter came with
the stars.  It grew to be a bitter night in that little hotel,
backed up against a precipice that had no visible top to it,
but we kept warm, and woke in time in the morning to find
that everybody else had left for Gemmi three hours before--
so our little plan of helping that German family (principally
the old man) over the pass, was a blocked generosity.



CHAPTER XXXIV
[The World's Highest Pig Farm]

We hired the only guide left, to lead us on our way.
He was over seventy, but he could have given me nine-tenths
of his strength and still had all his age entitled him to.
He shouldered our satchels, overcoats, and alpenstocks,
and we set out up the steep path.  It was hot work.
The old man soon begged us to hand over our coats
and waistcoats to him to carry, too, and we did it;
one could not refuse so little a thing to a poor old man
like that; he should have had them if he had been a hundred
and fifty.

When we began that ascent, we could see a microscopic
chalet perched away up against heaven on what seemed
to be the highest mountain near us.  It was on our right,
across the narrow head of the valley.  But when we got
up abreast it on its own level, mountains were towering
high above on every hand, and we saw that its altitude
was just about that of the little Gasternthal which we had
visited the evening before.  Still it seemed a long way up
in the air, in that waste and lonely wilderness of rocks.
It had an unfenced grass-plot in front of it which seemed
about as big as a billiard-table, and this grass-plot
slanted so sharply downward, and was so brief, and ended
so exceedingly soon at the verge of the absolute precipice,
that it was a shuddery thing to think of a person's venturing
to trust his foot on an incline so situated at all.
Suppose a man stepped on an orange peel in that yard;
there would be nothing for him to seize; nothing could
keep him from rolling; five revolutions would bring him
to the edge, and over he would go.  What a frightful distance
he would fall!--for there are very few birds that fly
as high as his starting-point. He would strike and bounce,
two or three times, on his way down, but this would be
no advantage to him.  I would as soon taking an airing
on the slant of a rainbow as in such a front yard.
I would rather, in fact, for the distance down would be about
the same, and it is pleasanter to slide than to bounce.
I could not see how the peasants got up to that chalet--
the region seemed too steep for anything but a balloon.

As we strolled on, climbing up higher and higher, we were
continually bringing neighboring peaks into view and lofty
prominence which had been hidden behind lower peaks before;
so by and by, while standing before a group of these giants,
we looked around for the chalet again; there it was,
away down below us, apparently on an inconspicuous ridge
in the valley! It was as far below us, now, as it had been
above us when we were beginning the ascent.

After a while the path led us along a railed precipice,
and we looked over--far beneath us was the snug parlor again,
the little Gasternthal, with its water jets spouting
from the face of its rock walls.  We could have dropped
a stone into it.  We had been finding the top of the world
all along--and always finding a still higher top stealing
into view in a disappointing way just ahead; when we looked
down into the Gasternthal we felt pretty sure that we
had reached the genuine top at last, but it was not so;
there were much higher altitudes to be scaled yet.
We were still in the pleasant shade of forest trees,
we were still in a region which was cushioned with beautiful
mosses and aglow with the many-tinted luster of innumerable
wild flowers.

We found, indeed, more interest in the wild flowers
than in anything else.  We gathered a specimen or two
of every kind which we were unacquainted with; so we
had sumptuous bouquets.  But one of the chief interests
lay in chasing the seasons of the year up the mountain,
and determining them by the presence of flowers and
berries which we were acquainted with.  For instance,
it was the end of August at the level of the sea;
in the Kandersteg valley at the base of the pass,
we found flowers which would not be due at the sea-level
for two or three weeks; higher up, we entered October,
and gathered fringed gentians.  I made no notes, and have
forgotten the details, but the construction of the floral
calendar was very entertaining while it lasted.

In the high regions we found rich store of the splendid
red flower called the Alpine rose, but we did not find
any examples of the ugly Swiss favorite called Edelweiss.
Its name seems to indicate that it is a noble flower
and that it is white.  It may be noble enough,
but it is not attractive, and it is not white.
The fuzzy blossom is the color of bad cigar ashes,
and appears to be made of a cheap quality of gray plush.
It has a noble and distant way of confining itself to the
high altitudes, but that is probably on account of its looks;
it apparently has no monopoly of those upper altitudes,
however, for they are sometimes intruded upon by some
of the loveliest of the valley families of wild flowers.
Everybody in the Alps wears a sprig of Edelweiss in his hat.
It is the native's pet, and also the tourist's.

All the morning, as we loafed along, having a good time,
other pedestrians went staving by us with vigorous strides,
and with the intent and determined look of men who were
walking for a wager.  These wore loose knee-breeches, long
yarn stockings, and hobnailed high-laced walking-shoes.
They were gentlemen who would go home to England or Germany
and tell how many miles they had beaten the guide-book
every day.  But I doubted if they ever had much real fun,
outside of the mere magnificent exhilaration of the
tramp through the green valleys and the breezy heights;
for they were almost always alone, and even the finest
scenery loses incalculably when there is no one to enjoy
it with.

All the morning an endless double procession of mule-mounted
tourists filed past us along the narrow path--the one
procession going, the other coming.  We had taken
a good deal of trouble to teach ourselves the kindly
German custom of saluting all strangers with doffed hat,
and we resolutely clung to it, that morning, although it
kept us bareheaded most of the time a nd was not always
responded to.  Still we found an interest in the thing,
because we naturally liked to know who were English
and Americans among the passers-by. All continental
natives responded of course; so did some of the English
and Americans, but, as a general thing, these two races
gave no sign.  Whenever a man or a woman showed us
cold neglect, we spoke up confidently in our own tongue
and asked for such information as we happened to need,
and we always got a reply in the same language.
The English and American folk are not less kindly than
other races, they are only more reserved, and that comes
of habit and education.  In one dreary, rocky waste,
away above the line of vegetation, we met a procession
of twenty-five mounted young men, all from America.
We got answering bows enough from these, of course,
for they were of an age to learn to do in Rome as Rome does,
without much effort.

At one extremity of this patch of desolation, overhung by bare
and forbidding crags which husbanded drifts of everlasting
snow in their shaded cavities, was a small stretch
of thin and discouraged grass, and a man and a family
of pigs were actually living here in some shanties.
Consequently this place could be really reckoned as
"property"; it had a money value, and was doubtless taxed.
I think it must have marked the limit of real estate
in this world.  It would be hard to set a money value
upon any piece of earth that lies between that spot
and the empty realm of space.  That man may claim the
distinction of owning the end of the world, for if there
is any definite end to the world he has certainly found it.

From here forward we moved through a storm-swept
and smileless desolation.  All about us rose gigantic
masses, crags, and ramparts of bare and dreary rock,
with not a vestige or semblance of plant or tree or
flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life.
The frost and the tempests of unnumbered ages had battered
and hacked at these cliffs, with a deathless energy,
destroying them piecemeal; so all the region about
their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments
which had been split off and hurled to the ground.
Soiled and aged banks of snow lay close about our path.
The ghastly desolation of the place was as tremendously
complete as if Dor'e had furnished the working-plans
for it.  But every now and then, through the stern
gateways around us we caught a view of some neighboring
majestic dome, sheathed with glittering ice, and displaying
its white purity at an elevation compared to which
ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle
always chained one's interest and admiration at once,
and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world.

I have just said that there was nothing but death
and desolation in these hideous places, but I forgot.
In the most forlorn and arid and dismal one of all,
where the racked and splintered debris was thickest,
where the ancient patches of snow lay against the very path,
where the winds blew bitterest and the general aspect was
mournfulest and dreariest, and furthest from any suggestion
of cheer or hope, I found a solitary wee forget-me-not
flourishing away, not a droop about it anywhere,
but holding its bright blue star up with the prettiest
and gallantest air in the world, the only happy spirit,
the only smiling thing, in all that grisly desert.
She seemed to say, "Cheer up!--as long as we are here,
let us make the best of it." I judged she had earned
a right to a more hospitable place; so I plucked her up
and sent her to America to a friend who would respect
her for the fight she had made, all by her small self,
to make a whole vast despondent Alpine desolation stop
breaking its heart over the unalterable, and hold up its
head and look at the bright side of things for once.

We stopped for a nooning at a strongly built little inn
called the Schwarenbach.  It sits in a lonely spot among
the peaks, where it is swept by the trailing fringes
of the cloud-rack, and is rained on, and snowed on,
and pelted and persecuted by the storms, nearly every day
of its life.  It was the only habitation in the whole
Gemmi Pass.

Close at hand, now, was a chance for a blood-curdling
Alpine adventure.  Close at hand was the snowy mass
of the Great Altels cooling its topknot in the sky
and daring us to an ascent.  I was fired with the idea,
and immediately made up my mind to procure the necessary
guides, ropes, etc., and undertake it.  I instructed
Harris to go to the landlord of the inn and set him
about our preparations.  Meantime, I went diligently
to work to read up and find out what this much-talked-of
mountain-climbing was like, and how one should go about
it--for in these matters I was ignorant.  I opened
Mr. Hinchliff's SUMMER MONTHS AMONG THE ALPS (published
1857), and selected his account of his ascent of Monte Rosa.

It began:

    "It is very difficult to free the mind from excitement
    on the evening before a grand expedition--"

I saw that I was too calm; so I walked the room a while
and worked myself into a high excitement; but the book's
next remark --that the adventurer must get up at two
in the morning--came as near as anything to flatting it
all out again.  However, I reinforced it, and read on,
about how Mr. Hinchliff dressed by candle-light and was "soon
down among the guides, who were bustling about in the passage,
packing provisions, and making every preparation for the start";
and how he glanced out into the cold clear night and saw that--

"The whole sky was blazing with stars, larger and brighter
than they appear through the dense atmosphere breathed
by inhabitants of the lower parts of the earth.
They seemed actually suspended from the dark vault
of heaven, and their gentle light shed a fairylike gleam
over the snow-fields around the foot of the Matterhorn,
which raised its stupendous pinnacle on high, penetrating to
the heart of the Great Bear, and crowning itself with a
diadem of his magnificent stars.  Not a sound disturbed
the deep tranquillity of the night, except the distant
roar of streams which rush from the high plateau of the
St. Theodule glacier, and fall headlong over precipitous
rocks till they lose themselves in the mazes of
the Gorner glacier."

He took his hot toast and coffee, and then about
half past three his caravan of ten men filed away
from the Riffel Hotel, and began the steep climb.
At half past five he happened to turn around, and "beheld
the glorious spectacle of the Matterhorn, just touched
by the rosy-fingered morning, and looking like a huge
pyramid of fire rising out of the barren ocean of ice
and rock around it." Then the Breithorn and the Dent
Blanche caught the radiant glow; but "the intervening
mass of Monte Rosa made it necessary for us to climb many
long hours before we could hope to see the sun himself,
yet the whole air soon grew warmer after the splendid
birth of the day."

He gazed at the lofty crown of Monte Rosa and the wastes
of snow that guarded its steep approaches, and the chief
guide delivered the opinion that no man could conquer
their awful heights and put his foot upon that summit.
But the adventurers moved steadily on, nevertheless.

They toiled up, and up, and still up; they passed
the Grand Plateau; then toiled up a steep shoulder
of the mountain, clinging like flies to its rugged face;
and now they were confronted by a tremendous wall from
which great blocks of ice and snow were evidently in the
habit of falling.  They turned aside to skirt this wall,
and gradually ascended until their way was barred by a "maze
of gigantic snow crevices,"--so they turned aside again,
and "began a long climb of sufficient steepness to make
a zigzag course necessary."

Fatigue compelled them to halt frequently, for a moment
or two.  At one of these halts somebody called out,
"Look at Mont Blanc!" and "we were at once made aware
of the very great height we had attained by actually seeing
the monarch of the Alps and his attendant satellites
right over the top of the Breithorn, itself at least
14,000 feet high!"

These people moved in single file, and were all tied
to a strong rope, at regular distances apart, so that if
one of them slipped on those giddy heights, the others
could brace themselves on their alpenstocks and save him
from darting into the valley, thousands of feet below.
By and by they came to an ice-coated ridge which was tilted
up at a sharp angle, and had a precipice on one side of it.
They had to climb this, so the guide in the lead cut
steps in the ice with his hatchet, and as fast as he
took his toes out of one of these slight holes, the toes
of the man behind him occupied it.

"Slowly and steadily we kept on our way over this dangerous
part of the ascent, and I dare say it was fortunate for
some of us that attention was distracted from the head
by the paramount necessity of looking after the feet;
FOR, WHILE ON THE LEFT THE INCLINE OF ICE WAS SO STEEP
THAT IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY MAN TO SAVE HIMSELF
IN CASE OF A SLIP, UNLESS THE OTHERS COULD HOLD HIM UP,
ON THE RIGHT WE MIGHT DROP A PEBBLE FROM THE HAND OVER
PRECIPICES OF UNKNOWN EXTENT DOWN UPON THE TREMENDOUS
GLACIER BELOW.

"Great caution, therefore, was absolutely necessary,
and in this exposed situation we were attacked by all
the fury of that grand enemy of aspirants to Monte
Rosa--a severe and bitterly cold wind from the north.
The fine powdery snow was driven past us in the clouds,
penetrating the interstices of our clothes, and the pieces
of ice which flew from the blows of Peter's ax were
whisked into the air, and then dashed over the precipice.
We had quite enough to do to prevent ourselves from being
served in the same ruthless fashion, and now and then,
in the more violent gusts of wind, were glad to stick our
alpenstocks into the ice and hold on hard."

Having surmounted this perilous steep, they sat down and
took a brief rest with their backs against a sheltering
rock and their heels dangling over a bottomless abyss;
then they climbed to the base of another ridge--a more
difficult and dangerous one still:

"The whole of the ridge was exceedingly narrow, and the
fall on each side desperately steep, but the ice in some
of these intervals between the masses of rock assumed
the form of a mere sharp edge, almost like a knife;
these places, though not more than three or four short
paces in length, looked uncommonly awkward; but, like the
sword leading true believers to the gates of Paradise,
they must needs be passed before we could attain to
the summit of our ambition.  These were in one or two
places so narrow, that in stepping over them with toes
well turned out for greater security, ONE END OF THE
FOOT PROJECTED OVER THE AWFUL PRECIPICE ON THE RIGHT,
WHILE THE OTHER WAS ON THE BEGINNING OF THE ICE SLOPE ON
THE LEFT, WHICH WAS SCARCELY LESS STEEP THAN THE ROCKS.
On these occasions Peter would take my hand, and each
of us stretching as far as we could, he was thus enabled
to get a firm footing two paces or rather more from me,
whence a spring would probably bring him to the rock
on the other side; then, turning around, he called
to me to come, and, taking a couple of steps carefully,
I was met at the third by his outstretched hand ready
to clasp mine, and in a moment stood by his side.
The others followed in much the same fashion.  Once my
right foot slipped on the side toward the precipice,
but I threw out my left arm in a moment so that it caught
the icy edge under my armpit as I fell, and supported
me considerably; at the same instant I cast my eyes
down the side on which I had slipped, and contrived
to plant my right foot on a piece of rock as large as a
cricket-ball, which chanced to protrude through the ice,
on the very edge of the precipice.  Being thus anchored
fore and aft, as it were, I believe I could easily have
recovered myself, even if I had been alone, though it must
be confessed the situation would have been an awful one;
as it was, however, a jerk from Peter settled the matter
very soon, and I was on my legs all right in an instant.
The rope is an immense help in places of this kind."

Now they arrived at the base of a great knob or dome
veneered with ice and powdered with snow--the utmost,
summit, the last bit of solidity between them and the hollow
vault of heaven.  They set to work with their hatchets,
and were soon creeping, insectlike, up its surface, with their
heels projecting over the thinnest kind of nothingness,
thickened up a little with a few wandering shreds and
films of cloud moving in a lazy procession far below.
Presently, one man's toe-hold broke and he fell! There he
dangled in mid-air at the end of the rope, like a spider,
till his friends above hauled him into place again.

A little bit later, the party stood upon the wee pedestal
of the very summit, in a driving wind, and looked out
upon the vast green expanses of Italy and a shoreless
ocean of billowy Alps.

When I had read thus far, Harris broke into the room
in a noble excitement and said the ropes and the guides
were secured, and asked if I was ready.  I said I
believed I wouldn't ascend the Altels this time.
I said Alp-climbing was a different thing from what I had
supposed it was, and so I judged we had better study its
points a little more before we went definitely into it.
But I told him to retain the guides and order them to
follow us to Zermatt, because I meant to use them there.
I said I could feel the spirit of adventure beginning
to stir in me, and was sure that the fell fascination
of Alp-climbing would soon be upon me.  I said he could
make up his mind to it that we would do a deed before we
were a week older which would make the hair of the timid
curl with fright.

This made Harris happy, and filled him with ambitious
anticipations.  He went at once to tell the guides to
follow us to Zermatt and bring all their paraphernalia
with them.



CHAPTER XXXV
[Swindling the Coroner]

A great and priceless thing is a new interest! How
it takes possession of a man! how it clings to him,
how it rides him! I strode onward from the Schwarenback
hostelry a changed man, a reorganized personality.
I walked into a new world, I saw with new eyes.
I had been looking aloft at the giant show-peaks only as
things to be worshiped for their grandeur and magnitude,
and their unspeakable grace of form; I looked up at
them now, as also things to be conquered and climbed.
My sense of their grandeur and their noble beauty
was neither lost nor impaired; I had gained a new
interest in the mountains without losing the old ones.
I followed the steep lines up, inch by inch, with my eye,
and noted the possibility or impossibility of following
them with my feet.  When I saw a shining helmet of ice
projecting above the clouds, I tried to imagine I saw
files of black specks toiling up it roped together with a
gossamer thread.

We skirted the lonely little lake called the Daubensee,
and presently passed close by a glacier on the right--
a thing like a great river frozen solid in its flow
and broken square off like a wall at its mouth.
I had never been so near a glacier before.

Here we came upon a new board shanty, and found some men
engaged in building a stone house; so the Schwarenback was
soon to have a rival.  We bought a bottle or so of beer here;
at any rate they called it beer, but I knew by the price
that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the
taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.

We were surrounded by a hideous desolation.  We stepped
forward to a sort of jumping-off place, and were confronted
by a startling contrast: we seemed to look down into fairyland.
Two or three thousand feet below us was a bright green level,
with a pretty town in its midst, and a silvery stream
winding among the meadows; the charming spot was walled
in on all sides by gigantic precipices clothed with pines;
and over the pines, out of the softened distances,
rose the snowy domes and peaks of the Monte Rosa region.
How exquisitely green and beautiful that little valley
down there was! The distance was not great enough to
obliterate details, it only made them little, and mellow,
and dainty, like landscapes and towns seen through the
wrong end of a spy-glass.

Right under us a narrow ledge rose up out of the valley,
with a green, slanting, bench-shaped top, and grouped
about upon this green-baize bench were a lot of black
and white sheep which looked merely like oversized worms.
The bench seemed lifted well up into our neighborhood,
but that was a deception--it was a long way down to it.

We began our descent, now, by the most remarkable road I
have ever seen.  It wound it corkscrew curves down the face
of the colossal precipice--a narrow way, with always
the solid rock wall at one elbow, and perpendicular
nothingness at the other.  We met an everlasting procession
of guides, porters, mules, litters, and tourists climbing
up this steep and muddy path, and there was no room
to spare when you had to pass a tolerably fat mule.
I always took the inside, when I heard or saw the
mule coming, and flattened myself against the wall.
I preferred the inside, of course, but I should have had
to take it anyhow, because the mule prefers the outside.
A mule's preference--on a precipice--is a thing to
be respected.  Well, his choice is always the outside.
His life is mostly devoted to carrying bulky panniers
and packages which rest against his body--therefore he
is habituated to taking the outside edge of mountain paths,
to keep his bundles from rubbing against rocks or banks
on the other.  When he goes into the passenger business he
absurdly clings to his old habit, and keeps one leg of his
passenger always dangling over the great deeps of the lower
world while that passenger's heart is in the highlands,
so to speak.  More than once I saw a mule's hind foot
cave over the outer edge and send earth and rubbish into
the bottom abyss; and I noticed that upon these occasions
the rider, whether male or female, looked tolerably unwell.

There was one place where an eighteen-inch breadth of
light masonry had been added to the verge of the path,
and as there was a very sharp turn here, a panel of fencing
had been set up there at some time, as a protection.
This panel was old and gray and feeble, and the light
masonry had been loosened by recent rains.  A young
American girl came along on a mule, and in making the turn
the mule's hind foot caved all the loose masonry and one
of the fence-posts overboard; the mule gave a violent lurch
inboard to save himself, and succeeded in the effort,
but that girl turned as white as the snows of Mont Blanc
for a moment.

The path was simply a groove cut into the face of
the precipice; there was a four-foot breadth of solid rock
under the traveler, and four-foot breadth of solid rock
just above his head, like the roof of a narrow porch;
he could look out from this gallery and see a sheer
summitless and bottomless wall of rock before him,
across a gorge or crack a biscuit's toss in width--
but he could not see the bottom of his own precipice
unless he lay down and projected his nose over the edge.
I did not do this, because I did not wish to soil my clothes.

Every few hundred yards, at particularly bad places,
one came across a panel or so of plank fencing; but they
were always old and weak, and they generally leaned
out over the chasm and did not make any rash promises
to hold up people who might need support.  There was one
of these panels which had only its upper board left;
a pedestrianizing English youth came tearing down the path,
was seized with an impulse to look over the precipice,
and without an instant's thought he threw his weight
upon that crazy board.  It bent outward a foot! I never
made a gasp before that came so near suffocating me.
The English youth's face simply showed a lively surprise,
but nothing more.  He went swinging along valleyward again,
as if he did not know he had just swindled a coroner by the
closest kind of a shave.

The Alpine litter is sometimes like a cushioned box
made fast between the middles of two long poles,
and sometimes it is a chair with a back to it and a support
for the feet.  It is carried by relays of strong porters.
The motion is easier than that of any other conveyance.
We met a few men and a great many ladies in litters;
it seemed to me that most of the ladies looked pale
and nauseated; their general aspect gave me the idea
that they were patiently enduring a horrible suffering.
As a rule, they looked at their laps, and left the scenery
to take care of itself.

But the most frightened creature I saw, was a led horse
that overtook us.  Poor fellow, he had been born and reared
in the grassy levels of the Kandersteg valley and had
never seen anything like this hideous place before.
Every few steps he would stop short, glance wildly out from
the dizzy height, and then spread his red nostrils wide
and pant as violently as if he had been running a race;
and all the while he quaked from head to heel as with
a palsy.  He was a handsome fellow, and he made a fine
statuesque picture of terror, but it was pitiful to see
him suffer so.

This dreadful path has had its tragedy.  Baedeker, with his
customary overterseness, begins and ends the tale thus:

"The descent on horseback should be avoided.
In 1861 a Comtesse d'Herlincourt fell from her saddle
over the precipice and was killed on the spot."

We looked over the precipice there, and saw the monument
which commemorates the event.  It stands in the bottom
of the gorge, in a place which has been hollowed out of
the rock to protect it from the torrent and the storms.
Our old guide never spoke but when spoken to, and then
limited himself to a syllable or two, but when we asked
him about this tragedy he showed a strong interest
in the matter.  He said the Countess was very pretty,
and very young--hardly out of her girlhood, in fact.
She was newly married, and was on her bridal tour.
The young husband was riding a little in advance; one guide
was leading the husband's horse, another was leading the
bride's.

The old man continued:

"The guide that was leading the husband's horse happened
to glance back, and there was that poor young thing sitting
up staring out over the precipice; and her face began
to bend downward a little, and she put up her two hands
slowly and met it--so,--and put them flat against her
eyes--so--and then she sank out of the saddle, with a
sharp shriek, and one caught only the flash of a dress,
and it was all over."

Then after a pause:

"Ah, yes, that guide saw these things--yes, he saw them all.
He saw them all, just as I have told you."

After another pause:

"Ah, yes, he saw them all.  My God, that was ME.
I was that guide!"

This had been the one event of the old man's life; so one
may be sure he had forgotten no detail connected with it.
We listened to all he had to say about what was done and what
happened and what was said after the sorrowful occurrence,
and a painful story it was.

When we had wound down toward the valley until we were about
on the last spiral of the corkscrew, Harris's hat blew
over the last remaining bit of precipice--a small cliff
a hundred or hundred and fifty feet high--and sailed down
toward a steep slant composed of rough chips and fragments
which the weather had flaked away from the precipices.
We went leisurely down there, expecting to find it without
any trouble, but we had made a mistake, as to that.
We hunted during a couple of hours--not because the old
straw hat was valuable, but out of curiosity to find out
how such a thing could manage to conceal itself in open
ground where there was nothing left for it to hide behind.
When one is reading in bed, and lays his paper-knife down,
he cannot find it again if it is smaller than a saber;
that hat was as stubborn as any paper-knife could have been,
and we finally had to give it up; but we found a fragment
that had once belonged to an opera-glass, and by digging
around and turning over the rocks we gradually collected
all the lenses and the cylinders and the various odds
and ends that go to making up a complete opera-glass.
We afterward had the thing reconstructed, and the owner
can have his adventurous lost-property by submitting
proofs and paying costs of rehabilitation.  We had hopes
of finding the owner there, distributed around amongst
the rocks, for it would have made an elegant paragraph;
but we were disappointed.  Still, we were far from
being disheartened, for there was a considerable area
which we had not thoroughly searched; we were satisfied he
was there, somewhere, so we resolved to wait over a day at
Leuk and come back and get him.

Then we sat down to polish off the perspiration and
arrange about what we would do with him when we got him.
Harris was for contributing him to the British Museum;
but I was for mailing him to his widow.  That is the difference
between Harris and me: Harris is all for display, I am
all for the simple right, even though I lose money by it.
Harris argued in favor of his proposition against mine,
I argued in favor of mine and against his.  The discussion
warmed into a dispute; the dispute warmed into a quarrel.
I finally said, very decidedly:

"My mind is made up.  He goes to the widow."

Harris answered sharply:

"And MY mind is made up.  He goes to the Museum."

I said, calmly:

"The museum may whistle when it gets him."

Harris retorted:

"The widow may save herself the trouble of whistling,
for I will see that she never gets him."

After some angry bandying of epithets, I said:

"It seems to me that you are taking on a good many airs
about these remains.  I don't quite see what YOU'VE got
to say about them?"

"I? I've got ALL to say about them.  They'd never have
been thought of if I hadn't found their opera-glass. The
corpse belongs to me, and I'll do as I please with him."

I was leader of the Expedition, and all discoveries
achieved by it naturally belonged to me.  I was entitled
to these remains, and could have enforced my right;
but rather than have bad blood about the matter,
I said we would toss up for them.  I threw heads and won,
but it was a barren victory, for although we spent all
the next day searching, we never found a bone.  I cannot
imagine what could ever have become of that fellow.

The town in the valley is called Leuk or Leukerbad.
We pointed our course toward it, down a verdant slope
which was adorned with fringed gentians and other flowers,
and presently entered the narrow alleys of the outskirts
and waded toward the middle of the town through liquid
"fertilizer." They ought to either pave that village or
organize a ferry.

Harris's body was simply a chamois-pasture; his person
was populous with the little hungry pests; his skin,
when he stripped, was splotched like a scarlet-fever patient's;
so, when we were about to enter one of the Leukerbad inns,
and he noticed its sign, "Chamois Hotel," he refused
to stop there.  He said the chamois was plentiful enough,
without hunting up hotels where they made a specialty of it.
I was indifferent, for the chamois is a creature that will
neither bite me nor abide with me; but to calm Harris,
we went to the Ho^tel des Alpes.

At the table d'ho^te, we had this, for an incident.
A very grave man--in fact his gravity amounted to solemnity,
and almost to austerity--sat opposite us and he was
"tight," but doing his best to appear sober.  He took up
a CORKED bottle of wine, tilted it over his glass awhile,
then set it out of the way, with a contented look, and went
on with his dinner.

Presently he put his glass to his mouth, and of course
found it empty.  He looked puzzled, and glanced furtively
and suspiciously out of the corner of his eye at a
benignant and unconscious old lady who sat at his right.
Shook his head, as much as to say, "No, she couldn't have
done it." He tilted the corked bottle over his glass again,
meantime searching around with his watery eye to see
if anybody was watching him.  He ate a few mouthfuls,
raised his glass to his lips, and of course it was
still empty.  He bent an injured and accusing side-glance
upon that unconscious old lady, which was a study to see.
She went on eating and gave no sign.  He took up his glass
and his bottle, with a wise private nod of his head,
and set them gravely on the left-hand side of his plate--
poured himself another imaginary drink--went to work
with his knife and fork once more--presently lifted
his glass with good confidence, and found it empty,
as usual.

This was almost a petrifying surprise.  He straightened
himself up in his chair and deliberately and sorrowfully
inspected the busy old ladies at his elbows, first one and
then the other.  At last he softly pushed his plate away,
set his glass directly in front of him, held on to it
with his left hand, and proceeded to pour with his right.
This time he observed that nothing came.  He turned the
bottle clear upside down; still nothing issued from it;
a plaintive look came into his face, and he said, as if
to himself,

" 'IC! THEY'VE GOT IT ALL!" Then he set the bottle down,
resignedly, and took the rest of his dinner dry.

It was at that table d'ho^te, too, that I had under inspection
the largest lady I have ever seen in private life.
She was over seven feet high, and magnificently proportioned.
What had first called my attention to her, was my stepping
on an outlying flange of her foot, and hearing, from up
toward the ceiling, a deep "Pardon, m'sieu, but you encroach!"

That was when we were coming through the hall, and the place
was dim, and I could see her only vaguely.  The thing
which called my attention to her the second time was,
that at a table beyond ours were two very pretty girls,
and this great lady came in and sat down between them
and me and blotted out my view.  She had a handsome face,
and she was very finely formed--perfected formed,
I should say.  But she made everybody around her look trivial
and commonplace.  Ladies near her looked like children,
and the men about her looked mean.  They looked like failures;
and they looked as if they felt so, too.  She sat with
her back to us.  I never saw such a back in my life.
I would have so liked to see the moon rise over it.
The whole congregation waited, under one pretext or another,
till she finished her dinner and went out; they wanted to see
her at full altitude, and they found it worth tarrying for.
She filled one's idea of what an empress ought to be,
when she rose up in her unapproachable grandeur and moved
superbly out of that place.

We were not at Leuk in time to see her at her heaviest weight.
She had suffered from corpulence and had come there to get
rid of her extra flesh in the baths.  Five weeks of soaking--
five uninterrupted hours of it every day--had accomplished
her purpose and reduced her to the right proportions.

Those baths remove fat, and also skin-diseases. The
patients remain in the great tanks for hours at a time.
A dozen gentlemen and ladies occupy a tank together,
and amuse themselves with rompings and various games.
They have floating desks and tables, and they read or lunch
or play chess in water that is breast-deep. The tourist
can step in and view this novel spectacle if he chooses.
There's a poor-box, and he will have to contribute.
There are several of these big bathing-houses, and you can
always tell when you are near one of them by the romping
noises and shouts of laughter that proceed from it.
The water is running water, and changes all the time,
else a patient with a ringworm might take the bath with only
a partial success, since, while he was ridding himself of
the ringworm, he might catch the itch.

The next morning we wandered back up the green valley,
leisurely, with the curving walls of those bare and
stupendous precipices rising into the clouds before us.
I had never seen a clean, bare precipice stretching up
five thousand feet above me before, and I never shall
expect to see another one.  They exist, perhaps, but not
in places where one can easily get close to them.
This pile of stone is peculiar.  From its base to the
soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and
all its details vaguely suggest human architecture.
There are rudimentary bow-windows, cornices, chimneys,
demarcations of stories, etc.  One could sit and stare up
there and study the features and exquisite graces of this
grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never
weary his interest.  The termination, toward the town,
observed in profile, is the perfection of shape.
It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of rounded,
colossal, terracelike projections--a stairway for the gods;
at its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers,
one after another, with faint films of vapor curling
always about them like spectral banners.  If there were
a king whose realms included the whole world, here would
be the place meet and proper for such a monarch.  He would
only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light.
He could give audience to a nation at a time under its roof.

Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with
a glass the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche
that once swept down from some pine-grown summits behind
the town and swept away the houses and buried the people;
then we struck down the road that leads toward the Rhone,
to see the famous Ladders.  These perilous things are
built against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or
three hundred feet high.  The peasants, of both sexes,
were climbing up and down them, with heavy loads on
their backs.  I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I
could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he
accomplished the feat successfully, though a subagent,
for three francs, which I paid.  It makes me shudder yet
when I think of what I felt when I was clinging there
between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy.
At times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep
from letting go, so dizzying was the appalling danger.
Many a person would have given up and descended, but I stuck
to my task, and would not yield until I had accomplished it.
I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not
have repeated it for the wealth of the world.  I shall
break my neck yet with some such foolhardy performance,
for warnings never seem to have any lasting effect on me.
When the people of the hotel found that I had been
climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of
considerable attention.

Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took
the train for Visp.  There we shouldered our knapsacks
and things, and set out on foot, in a tremendous rain,
up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt.  Hour after hour we
slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble
Lesser Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green
all the way up and had little atomy Swiss homes perched
upon grassy benches along their mist-dimmed heights.

The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we
continued to enjoy both.  At the one spot where this torrent
tossed its white mane highest, and thundered loudest,
and lashed the big boulders fiercest, the canton had done
itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden bridge
that exists in the world.  While we were walking over it,
along with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even
the larger raindrops made it shake.  I called Harris's
attention to it, and he noticed it, too.  It seemed
to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake,
and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice
before I would ride him over that bridge.

We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half
past four in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through
the fertilizer-juice, and stopped at a new and nice hotel
close by the little church.  We stripped and went to bed,
and sent our clothes down to be baked.  And the horde
of soaked tourists did the same.  That chaos of clothing
got mixed in the kitchen, and there were consequences.
I did not get back the same drawers I sent down, when our
things came up at six-fifteen; I got a pair on a new plan.
They were merely a pair of white ruffle-cuffed absurdities,
hitched together at the top with a narrow band, and they did
not come quite down to my knees.  They were pretty enough,
but they made me feel like two people, and disconnected
at that.  The man must have been an idiot that got himself
up like that, to rough it in the Swiss mountains.
The shirt they brought me was shorter than the drawers,
and hadn't any sleeves to it--at least it hadn't anything
more than what Mr. Darwin would call "rudimentary" sleeves;
these had "edging" around them, but the bosom was
ridiculously plain.  The knit silk undershirt they brought
me was on a new plan, and was really a sensible thing;
it opened behind, and had pockets in it to put your
shoulder-blades in; but they did not seem to fit mine,
and so I found it a sort of uncomfortable garment.
They gave my bobtail coat to somebody else, and sent me
an ulster suitable for a giraffe.  I had to tie my collar on,
because there was no button behind on that foolish little shirt
which I described a while ago.

When I was dressed for dinner at six-thirty, I was too loose
in some places and too tight in others, and altogether I
felt slovenly and ill-conditioned. However, the people
at the table d'ho^te were no better off than I was;
they had everybody's clothes but their own on.  A long
stranger recognized his ulster as soon as he saw the tail
of it following me in, but nobody claimed my shirt or
my drawers, though I described them as well as I was able.
I gave them to the chambermaid that night when I went
to bed, and she probably found the owner, for my own
things were on a chair outside my door in the morning.

There was a lovable English clergyman who did
not get to the table d'ho^te at all.  His breeches
had turned up missing, and without any equivalent.
He said he was not more particular than other people,
but he had noticed that a clergyman at dinner without
any breeches was almost sure to excite remark.



CHAPTER XXXVI
[The Fiendish Fun of Alp-climbing]

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas.  The church-bell
began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from
the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it
takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation
through his head.  Most church-bells in the world
are of poor quality, and have a harsh and rasping
sound which upsets the temper and produces much sin,
but the St. Nicholas bell is a good deal the worst one
that has been contrived yet, and is peculiarly maddening
in its operation.  Still, it may have its right and its
excuse to exist, for the community is poor and not every
citizen can afford a clock, perhaps; but there cannot be
any excuse for our church-bells at home, for their is no
family in America without a clock, and consequently there
is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful
sounds that issues from our steeples.  There is much more
profanity in America on Sunday than is all in the other six
days of the week put together, and it is of a more bitter
and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too.
It is produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap
church-bells.

We build our churches almost without regard to cost;
we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town, and we
gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage it, and do everything
we can think of to perfect it, and then spoil it all by
putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it,
giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance,
and the rest the blind staggers.

An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is
the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature;
but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later.
Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands incomplete to this day;
but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter
or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds
of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find
himself "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell--
as Joseph Addison would say.  The church is always trying
to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea
to reform itself a little, by way of example.  It is still
clinging to one or two things which were useful once,
but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.
One is the bell-ringing to remind a clock-caked town
that it is church-time, and another is the reading from
the pulpit of a tedious list of "notices" which everybody
who is interested has already read in the newspaper.
The clergyman even reads the hymn through--a relic
of an ancient time when hymn-books are scarce and costly;
but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public reading
is no longer necessary.  It is not merely unnecessary,
it is generally painful; for the average clergyman could
not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse
reader than himself, unless the weapon scattered shamefully.
I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only
meaning to be truthful.  The average clergyman, in all
countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader.
One would think he would at least learn how to read
the Lord's Prayer, by and by, but it is not so.  He races
through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in,
the sooner it would be answered.  A person who does not
appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know
how to measure their duration judiciously, cannot render
the grand simplicity and dignity of a composition like
that effectively.

We took a tolerably early breakfast, and tramped off
toward Zermatt through the reeking lanes of the village,
glad to get away from that bell.  By and by we had a fine
spectacle on our right.  It was the wall-like butt end of a
huge glacier, which looked down on us from an Alpine height
which was well up in the blue sky.  It was an astonishing
amount of ice to be compacted together in one mass.
We ciphered upon it and decided that it was not less than
several hundred feet from the base of the wall of solid
ice to the top of it--Harris believed it was really
twice that.  We judged that if St. Paul's, St. Peter's,
the Great Pyramid, the Strasburg Cathedral and the Capitol
in Washington were clustered against that wall, a man
sitting on its upper edge could not hang his hat on the top
of any one of them without reaching down three or four
hundred feet--a thing which, of course, no man could do.

To me, that mighty glacier was very beautiful.  I did
not imagine that anybody could find fault with it; but I
was mistaken.  Harris had been snarling for several days.
He was a rabid Protestant, and he was always saying:

"In the Protestant cantons you never see such poverty
and dirt and squalor as you do in this Catholic one;
you never see the lanes and alleys flowing with foulness;
you never see such wretched little sties of houses;
you never see an inverted tin turnip on top of a church
for a dome; and as for a church-bell, why, you never hear
a church-bell at all."

All this morning he had been finding fault, straight along.
First it was with the mud.  He said, "It ain't muddy in a
Protestant canton when it rains." Then it was with the dogs:
"They don't have those lop-eared dogs in a Protestant canton."
Then it was with the roads: "They don't leave the roads
to make themselves in a Protestant canton, the people make
them--and they make a road that IS a road, too." Next it
was the goats: "You never see a goat shedding tears
in a Protestant canton--a goat, there, is one of the
cheerfulest objects in nature." Next it was the chamois:
"You never see a Protestant chamois act like one of these--
they take a bite or two and go; but these fellows camp
with you and stay." Then it was the guide-boards: "In
a Protestant canton you couldn't get lost if you wanted to,
but you never see a guide-board in a Catholic canton."
Next, "You never see any flower-boxes in the windows,
here--never anything but now and then a cat--a torpid one;
but you take a Protestant canton: windows perfectly lovely
with flowers--and as for cats, there's just acres of them.
These folks in this canton leave a road to make itself,
and then fine you three francs if you 'trot' over it--
as if a horse could trot over such a sarcasm of a road."
Next about the goiter: "THEY talk about goiter!--I haven't
seen a goiter in this whole canton that I couldn't put
in a hat."

He had growled at everything, but I judged it would puzzle
him to find anything the matter with this majestic glacier.
I intimated as much; but he was ready, and said with surly
discontent: "You ought to see them in the Protestant cantons."

This irritated me.  But I concealed the feeling, and asked:

"What is the matter with this one?"

"Matter? Why, it ain't in any kind of condition.
They never take any care of a glacier here.  The moraine
has been spilling gravel around it, and got it all dirty."

"Why, man, THEY can't help that."

"THEY? You're right.  That is, they WON'T. They could
if they wanted to.  You never see a speck of dirt
on a Protestant glacier.  Look at the Rhone glacier.
It is fifteen miles long, and seven hundred feet think.
If this was a Protestant glacier you wouldn't see it looking
like this, I can tell you."

"That is nonsense.  What would they do with it?"

"They would whitewash it.  They always do."

I did not believe a word of this, but rather than have
trouble I let it go; for it is a waste of breath to argue
with a bigot.  I even doubted if the Rhone glacier WAS
in a Protestant canton; but I did not know, so I could
not make anything by contradicting a man who would
probably put me down at once with manufactured evidence.

About nine miles from St. Nicholas we crossed a bridge
over the raging torrent of the Visp, and came to a log
strip of flimsy fencing which was pretending to secure
people from tumbling over a perpendicular wall forty feet
high and into the river.  Three children were approaching;
one of them, a little girl, about eight years old,
was running; when pretty close to us she stumbled and fell,
and her feet shot under the rail of the fence and for a
moment projected over the stream.  It gave us a sharp shock,
for we thought she was gone, sure, for the ground slanted
steeply, and to save herself seemed a sheer impossibility;
but she managed to scramble up, and ran by us laughing.

We went forward and examined the place and saw the long
tracks which her feet had made in the dirt when they
darted over the verge.  If she had finished her trip she
would have struck some big rocks in the edge of the water,
and then the torrent would have snatched her downstream
among the half-covered boulders and she would have been
pounded to pulp in two minutes.  We had come exceedingly
near witnessing her death.

And now Harris's contrary nature and inborn selfishness
were striking manifested.  He has no spirit of self-denial.
He began straight off, and continued for an hour,
to express his gratitude that the child was not destroyed.
I never saw such a man.  That was the kind of person he was;
just so HE was gratified, he never cared anything about
anybody else.  I had noticed that trait in him, over and
over again.  Often, of course, it was mere heedlessness,
mere want of reflection.  Doubtless this may have been
the case in most instances, but it was not the less hard
to bar on that account--and after all, its bottom,
its groundwork, was selfishness.  There is no avoiding
that conclusion.  In the instance under consideration,
I did think the indecency of running on in that way might
occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad,
that was sufficient--he cared not a straw for MY feelings,
or my loss of such a literary plum, snatched from my
very mouth at the instant it was ready to drop into it.
His selfishness was sufficient to place his own gratification
in being spared suffering clear before all concern for me,
his friend.  Apparently, he did not once reflect upon the
valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall
to me: fishing the child out--witnessing the surprise of
the family and the stir the thing would have made among the
peasants--then a Swiss funeral--then the roadside monument,
to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it.
And we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal.
I was silent.  I was too much hurt to complain.  If he could
act so, and be so heedless and so frivolous at such a time,
and actually seem to glory in it, after all I had done for him,
I would have cut my hand off before I would let him see
that I was wounded.

We were approaching Zermatt; consequently, we were
approaching the renowned Matterhorn.  A month before,
this mountain had been only a name to us, but latterly
we had been moving through a steadily thickening double
row of pictures of it, done in oil, water, chromo, wood,
steel, copper, crayon, and photography, and so it had at
length become a shape to us--and a very distinct, decided,
and familiar one, too.  We were expecting to recognize
that mountain whenever or wherever we should run across it.
We were not deceived.  The monarch was far away when we
first saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him.
He has the rare peculiarity of standing by himself;
he is peculiarly steep, too, and is also most oddly shaped.
He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge, with the
upper third of its blade bent a little to the left.
The broad base of this monster wedge is planted upon
a grand glacier-paved Alpine platform whose elevation
is ten thousand feet above sea-level; as the wedge itself
is some five thousand feet high, it follows that its
apex is about fifteen thousand feet above sea-level.
So the whole bulk of this stately piece of rock, this
sky-cleaving monolith, is above the line of eternal snow.
Yet while all its giant neighbors have the look of being
built of solid snow, from their waists up, the Matterhorn
stands black and naked and forbidding, the year round,
or merely powdered or streaked with white in places,
for its sides are so steep that the snow cannot stay there.
Its strange form, its august isolation, and its majestic
unkinship with its own kind, make it--so to speak--the Napoleon
of the mountain world.  "Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,"
is a phrase which fits it as aptly as it fitted the great
captain.

Think of a monument a mile high, standing on a pedestal
two miles high! This is what the Matterhorn is--a monument.
Its office, henceforth, for all time, will be to keep
watch and ward over the secret resting-place of the young
Lord Douglas, who, in 1865, was precipitated from the
summit over a precipice four thousand feet high, and never
seen again.  No man ever had such a monument as this before;
the most imposing of the world's other monuments are
but atoms compared to it; and they will perish, and their
places will pass from memory, but this will remain. [1]

1.  The accident which cost Lord Douglas his life (see
    Chapter xii) also cost the lives of three other men.
    These three fell four-fifths of a mile, and their bodies
    were afterward found, lying side by side, upon a glacier,
    whence they were borne to Zermatt and buried in the
churchyard.
    The remains of Lord Douglas have never been found.
    The secret of his sepulture, like that of Moses, must remain
    a mystery always.

A walk from St. Nicholas to Zermatt is a wonderful experience.
Nature is built on a stupendous plan in that region.
One marches continually between walls that are piled
into the skies, with their upper heights broken into
a confusion of sublime shapes that gleam white and cold
against the background of blue; and here and there one
sees a big glacier displaying its grandeurs on the top
of a precipice, or a graceful cascade leaping and flashing
down the green declivities.  There is nothing tame,
or cheap, or trivial--it is all magnificent.  That short
valley is a picture-gallery of a notable kind, for it
contains no mediocrities; from end to end the Creator
has hung it with His masterpieces.

We made Zermatt at three in the afternoon, nine hours out
from St. Nicholas.  Distance, by guide-book, twelve miles;
by pedometer seventy-two. We were in the heart and home
of the mountain-climbers, now, as all visible things
testified.  The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof,
in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around,
in a friendly, sociable way; guides, with the ropes and
axes and other implements of their fearful calling slung
about their persons, roosted in a long line upon a stone
wall in front of the hotel, and waited for customers;
sun-burnt climbers, in mountaineering costume, and followed
by their guides and porters, arrived from time to time,
from breakneck expeditions among the peaks and glaciers
of the High Alps; male and female tourists, on mules,
filed by, in a continuous procession, hotelward-bound from
wild adventures which would grow in grandeur very time
they were described at the English or American fireside,
and at last outgrow the possible itself.

We were not dreaming; this was not a make-believe home
of the Alp-climber, created by our heated imaginations;
no, for here was Mr. Girdlestone himself, the famous
Englishman who hunts his way to the most formidable Alpine
summits without a guide.  I was not equal to imagining
a Girdlestone; it was all I could do to even realize him,
while looking straight at him at short range.  I would rather
face whole Hyde Parks of artillery than the ghastly forms
of death which he has faced among the peaks and precipices
of the mountains.  There is probably no pleasure equal
to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is
a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can
find pleasure in it.  I have not jumped to this conclusion;
I have traveled to it per gravel-train, so to speak.
I have thought the thing all out, and am quite sure I
am right.  A born climber's appetite for climbing is hard
to satisfy; when it comes upon him he is like a starving
man with a feast before him; he may have other business
on hand, but it must wait.  Mr. Girdlestone had had
his usual summer holiday in the Alps, and had spent it
in his usual way, hunting for unique chances to break
his neck; his vacation was over, and his luggage packed
for England, but all of a sudden a hunger had come upon
him to climb the tremendous Weisshorn once more, for he
had heard of a new and utterly impossible route up it.
His baggage was unpacked at once, and now he and a friend,
laden with knapsacks, ice-axes, coils of rope, and canteens
of milk, were just setting out.  They would spend
the night high up among the snows, somewhere, and get
up at two in the morning and finish the enterprise.
I had a strong desire to go with them, but forced it down--
a feat which Mr. Girdlestone, with all his fortitude,
could not do.

Even ladies catch the climbing mania, and are unable to
throw it off.  A famous climber, of that sex, had attempted
the Weisshorn a few days before our arrival, and she
and her guides had lost their way in a snow-storm high up
among the peaks and glaciers and been forced to wander
around a good while before they could find a way down.
When this lady reached the bottom, she had been on her
feet twenty-three hours!

Our guides, hired on the Gemmi, were already at Zermatt
when we reached there.  So there was nothing to interfere
with our getting up an adventure whenever we should
choose the time and the object.  I resolved to devote
my first evening in Zermatt to studying up the subject
of Alpine climbing, by way of preparation.

I read several books, and here are some of the things
I found out.  One's shoes must be strong and heavy,
and have pointed hobnails in them.  The alpenstock
must be of the best wood, for if it should break,
loss of life might be the result.  One should carry an ax,
to cut steps in the ice with, on the great heights.
There must be a ladder, for there are steep bits of rock
which can be surmounted with this instrument--or this
utensil--but could not be surmounted without it;
such an obstruction has compelled the tourist to waste
hours hunting another route, when a ladder would have
saved him all trouble.  One must have from one hundred
and fifty to five hundred feet of strong rope, to be used
in lowering the party down steep declivities which are
too steep and smooth to be traversed in any other way.
One must have a steel hook, on another rope--a very
useful thing; for when one is ascending and comes to a low
bluff which is yet too high for the ladder, he swings
this rope aloft like a lasso, the hook catches at the top
of the bluff, and then the tourist climbs the rope,
hand over hand--being always particular to try and forget
that if the hook gives way he will never stop falling
till he arrives in some part of Switzerland where they
are not expecting him.  Another important thing--there
must be a rope to tie the whole party together with,
so that if one falls from a mountain or down a bottomless
chasm in a glacier, the others may brace back on the rope
and save him.  One must have a silk veil, to protect
his face from snow, sleet, hail and gale, and colored
goggles to protect his eyes from that dangerous enemy,
snow-blindness. Finally, there must be some porters,
to carry provisions, wine and scientific instruments,
and also blanket bags for the party to sleep in.

I closed my readings with a fearful adventure which
Mr. Whymper once had on the Matterhorn when he was prowling
around alone, five thousand feet above the town of Breil.
He was edging his way gingerly around the corner of a
precipice where the upper edge of a sharp declivity
of ice-glazed snow joined it.  This declivity swept
down a couple of hundred feet, into a gully which curved
around and ended at a precipice eight hundred feet high,
overlooking a glacier.  His foot slipped, and he fell.

He says:

"My knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into
some rocks about a dozen feet below; they caught something,
and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully;
the baton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downward
in a series of bounds, each longer than the last; now over ice,
now into rocks, striking my head four or five times,
each time with increased force.  The last bound sent me
spinning through the air in a leap of fifty or sixty feet,
from one side of the gully to the other, and I struck
the rocks, luckily, with the whole of my left side.
They caught my clothes for a moment, and I fell back on
to the snow with motion arrested.  My head fortunately
came the right side up, and a few frantic catches brought
me to a halt, in the neck of the gully and on the verge
of the precipice.  Baton, hat, and veil skimmed by
and disappeared, and the crash of the rocks--which I had
started--as they fell on to the glacier, told how narrow
had been the escape from utter destruction.  As it was,
I fell nearly two hundred feet in seven or eight bounds.
Ten feet more would have taken me in one gigantic leaps
of eight hundred feet on to the glacier below.

"The situation was sufficiently serious.  The rocks could
not be let go for a moment, and the blood was spurting
out of more than twenty cuts.  The most serious ones were
in the head, and I vainly tried to close them with one hand,
while holding on with the other.  It was useless;
the blood gushed out in blinding jets at each pulsation.
At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big
lump of snow and struck it as plaster on my head.
The idea was a happy one, and the flow of blood diminished.
Then, scrambling up, I got, not a moment too soon, to a
place of safety, and fainted away.  The sun was setting
when consciousness returned, and it was pitch-dark before
the Great Staircase was descended; but by a combination
of luck and care, the whole four thousand seven hundred
feet of descent to Breil was accomplished without a slip,
or once missing the way."

His wounds kept him abed some days.  Then he got up
and climbed that mountain again.  That is the way with
a true Alp-climber; the more fun he has, the more he wants.



CHAPTER XXXVII
[Our Imposing Column Starts Upward]

After I had finished my readings, I was no longer myself;
I was tranced, uplifted, intoxicated, by the almost
incredible perils and adventures I had been following
my authors through, and the triumphs I had been sharing
with them.  I sat silent some time, then turned to Harris
and said:

"My mind is made up."

Something in my tone struck him: and when he glanced
at my eye and read what was written there, his face
paled perceptibly.  He hesitated a moment, then said:

"Speak."

I answered, with perfect calmness:

"I will ascend the Riffelberg."

If I had shot my poor friend he could not have fallen from
his chair more suddenly.  If I had been his father he could
not have pleaded harder to get me to give up my purpose.
But I turned a deaf ear to all he said.  When he perceived
at last that nothing could alter my determination,
he ceased to urge, and for a while the deep silence was
broken only by his sobs.  I sat in marble resolution,
with my eyes fixed upon vacancy, for in spirit I was already
wrestling with the perils of the mountains, and my friend
sat gazing at me in adoring admiration through his tears.
At last he threw himself upon me in a loving embrace and
exclaimed in broken tones:

"Your Harris will never desert you.  We will die together."

I cheered the noble fellow with praises, and soon his
fears were forgotten and he was eager for the adventure.
He wanted to summon the guides at once and leave at
two in the morning, as he supposed the custom was;
but I explained that nobody was looking at that hour;
and that the start in the dark was not usually made from
the village but from the first night's resting-place
on the mountain side.  I said we would leave the village
at 3 or 4 P.M. on the morrow; meantime he could notify
the guides, and also let the public know of the attempt
which we proposed to make.

I went to bed, but not to sleep.  No man can sleep when he
is about to undertake one of these Alpine exploits.
I tossed feverishly all night long, and was glad enough
when I heard the clock strike half past eleven and knew it
was time to get up for dinner.  I rose, jaded and rusty,
and went to the noon meal, where I found myself the center
of interest and curiosity; for the news was already abroad.
It is not easy to eat calmly when you are a lion; but it is
very pleasant, nevertheless.

As usual, at Zermatt, when a great ascent is about to
be undertaken, everybody, native and foreign, laid aside
his own projects and took up a good position to observe
the start.  The expedition consisted of 198 persons,
including the mules; or 205, including the cows.
As follows:

CHIEFS OF SERVICE SUBORDINATES

Myself 1 Veterinary Surgeon Mr. Harris 1 Butler 17
Guides 12 Waiters 4 Surgeons 1 Footman 1 Geologist 1
Barber 1 Botanist 1 Head Cook 3 Chaplains 9 Assistants
15 Barkeepers 1 Confectionery Artist 1 Latinist

TRANSPORTATION, ETC.

27 Porters 3 Coarse Washers and Ironers 44 Mules 1 Fine
ditto 44 Muleteers 7 Cows 2 Milkers

Total, 154 men, 51 animals.  Grand Total, 205.

RATIONS, ETC.  APPARATUS

16 Cases Hams 25 Spring Mattresses 2 Barrels Flour 2
Hair ditto 22 Barrels Whiskey Bedding for same 1 Barrel
Sugar 2 Mosquito-nets 1 Keg Lemons 29 Tents 2,000 Cigars
Scientific Instruments 1 Barrel Pies 97 Ice-axes 1 Ton
of Pemmican 5 Cases Dynamite 143 Pair Crutches 7 Cans
Nitroglycerin 2 Barrels Arnica 22 40-foot Ladders 1 Bale
of Lint 2 Miles of Rope 27 Kegs Paregoric 154 Umbrellas

It was full four o'clock in the afternoon before my cavalcade
was entirely ready.  At that hour it began to move.
In point of numbers and spectacular effect, it was the most
imposing expedition that had ever marched from Zermatt.

I commanded the chief guide to arrange the men and animals
in single file, twelve feet apart, and lash them all
together on a strong rope.  He objected that the first
two miles was a dead level, with plenty of room, and that
the rope was never used except in very dangerous places.
But I would not listen to that.  My reading had taught
me that many serious accidents had happened in the Alps
simply from not having the people tied up soon enough;
I was not going to add one to the list.  The guide then
obeyed my order.

When the procession stood at ease, roped together,
and ready to move, I never saw a finer sight.  It was 3,122
feet long--over half a mile; every man and me was on foot,
and had on his green veil and his blue goggles, and his
white rag around his hat, and his coil of rope over one
shoulder and under the other, and his ice-ax in his belt,
and carried his alpenstock in his left hand, his umbrella
(closed) in his right, and his crutches slung at his back.
The burdens of the pack-mules and the horns of the cows
were decked with the Edelweiss and the Alpine rose.

I and my agent were the only persons mounted.  We were
in the post of danger in the extreme rear, and tied
securely to five guides apiece.  Our armor-bearers carried
our ice-axes, alpenstocks, and other implements for us.
We were mounted upon very small donkeys, as a measure
of safety; in time of peril we could straighten our legs
and stand up, and let the donkey walk from under.
Still, I cannot recommend this sort of animal--at least
for excursions of mere pleasure--because his ears interrupt
the view.  I and my agent possessed the regulation
mountaineering costumes, but concluded to leave them behind.
Out of respect for the great numbers of tourists of both
sexes who would be assembled in front of the hotels
to see us pass, and also out of respect for the many
tourists whom we expected to encounter on our expedition,
we decided to make the ascent in evening dress.

We watered the caravan at the cold stream which rushes
down a trough near the end of the village, and soon
afterward left the haunts of civilization behind us.
About half past five o'clock we arrived at a bridge which
spans the Visp, and after throwing over a detachment to see
if it was safe, the caravan crossed without accident.
The way now led, by a gentle ascent, carpeted with
fresh green grass, to the church at Winkelmatten.
Without stopping to examine this edifice, I executed
a flank movement to the right and crossed the bridge
over the Findelenbach, after first testing its strength.
Here I deployed to the right again, and presently entered
an inviting stretch of meadowland which was unoccupied save
by a couple of deserted huts toward the furthest extremity.
These meadows offered an excellent camping-place. We
pitched our tents, supped, established a proper grade,
recorded the events of the day, and then went to bed.

We rose at two in the morning and dressed by candle-light. It
was a dismal and chilly business.  A few stars were shining,
but the general heavens were overcast, and the great shaft
of the Matterhorn was draped in a cable pall of clouds.
The chief guide advised a delay; he said he feared it
was going to rain.  We waited until nine o'clock, and then
got away in tolerably clear weather.

Our course led up some terrific steeps, densely wooded with
larches and cedars, and traversed by paths which the rains
had guttered and which were obstructed by loose stones.
To add to the danger and inconvenience, we were constantly
meeting returning tourists on foot and horseback,
and as constantly being crowded and battered by ascending
tourists who were in a hurry and wanted to get by.

Our troubles thickened.  About the middle of the afternoon
the seventeen guides called a halt and held a consultation.
After consulting an hour they said their first suspicion
remained intact--that is to say, they believed they
were lost.  I asked if they did not KNOW it? No, they said,
they COULDN'T absolutely know whether they were lost or not,
because none of them had ever been in that part of the
country before.  They had a strong instinct that they
were lost, but they had no proofs--except that they
did not know where they were.  They had met no tourists
for some time, and they considered that a suspicious sign.

Plainly we were in an ugly fix.  The guides were naturally
unwilling to go alone and seek a way out of the difficulty;
so we all went together.  For better security we moved
slow and cautiously, for the forest was very dense.
We did not move up the mountain, but around it, hoping to
strike across the old trail.  Toward nightfall, when we
were about tired out, we came up against a rock as big
as a cottage.  This barrier took all the remaining spirit
out of the men, and a panic of fear and despair ensued.
They moaned and wept, and said they should never see
their homes and their dear ones again.  Then they began
to upbraid me for bringing them upon this fatal expedition.
Some even muttered threats against me.

Clearly it was no time to show weakness.  So I made
a speech in which I said that other Alp-climbers had been
in as perilous a position as this, and yet by courage
and perseverance had escaped.  I promised to stand by them,
I promised to rescue them.  I closed by saying we had plenty
of provisions to maintain us for quite a siege--and did they
suppose Zermatt would allow half a mile of men and mules
to mysteriously disappear during any considerable time,
right above their noses, and make no inquiries? No,
Zermatt would send out searching-expeditions and we should be
saved.

This speech had a great effect.  The men pitched the tents
with some little show of cheerfulness, and we were snugly
under cover when the night shut down.  I now reaped
the reward of my wisdom in providing one article which is
not mentioned in any book of Alpine adventure but this.
I refer to the paregoric.  But for that beneficent drug,
would have not one of those men slept a moment during that
fearful night.  But for that gentle persuader they must
have tossed, unsoothed, the night through; for the whiskey
was for me.  Yes, they would have risen in the morning
unfitted for their heavy task.  As it was, everybody slept
but my agent and me--only we and the barkeepers.
I would not permit myself to sleep at such a time.
I considered myself responsible for all those lives.
I meant to be on hand and ready, in case of avalanches
up there, but I did not know it then.

We watched the weather all through that awful night,
and kept an eye on the barometer, to be prepared for
the least change.  There was not the slightest change
recorded by the instrument, during the whole time.
Words cannot describe the comfort that that friendly,
hopeful, steadfast thing was to me in that season
of trouble.  It was a defective barometer, and had no hand
but the stationary brass pointer, but I did not know that
until afterward.  If I should be in such a situation again,
I should not wish for any barometer but that one.

All hands rose at two in the morning and took breakfast,
and as soon as it was light we roped ourselves together
and went at that rock.  For some time we tried the hook-rope
and other means of scaling it, but without success--that is,
without perfect success.  The hook caught once, and Harris
started up it hand over hand, but the hold broke and if
there had not happened to be a chaplain sitting underneath
at the time, Harris would certainly have been crippled.
As it was, it was the chaplain.  He took to his crutches,
and I ordered the hook-rope to be laid aside.
It was too dangerous an implement where so many people
are standing around.

We were puzzled for a while; then somebody thought of
the ladders.  One of these was leaned against the rock,
and the men went up it tied together in couples.
Another ladder was sent up for use in descending.
At the end of half an hour everybody was over, and that rock
was conquered.  We gave our first grand shout of triumph.
But the joy was short-lived, for somebody asked how we were
going to get the animals over.

This was a serious difficulty; in fact, it was an impossibility.
The courage of the men began to waver immediately; once more
we were threatened with a panic.  But when the danger
was most imminent, we were saved in a mysterious way.
A mule which had attracted attention from the beginning
by its disposition to experiment, tried to eat a five-pound
can of nitroglycerin.  This happened right alongside
the rock.  The explosion threw us all to the ground,
and covered us with dirt and debris; it frightened
us extremely, too, for the crash it made was deafening,
and the violence of the shock made the ground tremble.
However, we were grateful, for the rock was gone.
Its place was occupied by a new cellar, about thirty
feet across, by fifteen feet deep.  The explosion was
heard as far as Zermatt; and an hour and a half afterward,
many citizens of that town were knocked down and quite
seriously injured by descending portions of mule meat,
frozen solid.  This shows, better than any estimate
in figures, how high the experimenter went.

We had nothing to do, now, but bridge the cellar and proceed
on our way.  With a cheer the men went at their work.
I attended to the engineering, myself.  I appointed a strong
detail to cut down trees with ice-axes and trim them for
piers to support the bridge.  This was a slow business,
for ice-axes are not good to cut wood with.  I caused
my piers to be firmly set up in ranks in the cellar,
and upon them I laid six of my forty-foot ladders,
side by side, and laid six more on top of them.
Upon this bridge I caused a bed of boughs to be spread,
and on top of the boughs a bed of earth six inches deep.
I stretched ropes upon either side to serve as railings,
and then my bridge was complete.  A train of elephants
could have crossed it in safety and comfort.  By nightfall
the caravan was on the other side and the ladders were
taken up.

Next morning we went on in good spirits for a while,
though our way was slow and difficult, by reason of the
steep and rocky nature of the ground and the thickness
of the forest; but at last a dull despondency crept into
the men's faces and it was apparent that not only they,
but even the guides, were now convinced that we were lost.
The fact that we still met no tourists was a circumstance
that was but too significant.  Another thing seemed to
suggest that we were not only lost, but very badly lost;
for there must surely be searching-parties on the road
before this time, yet we had seen no sign of them.

Demoralization was spreading; something must be done,
and done quickly, too.  Fortunately, I am not unfertile
in expedients.  I contrived one now which commended itself
to all, for it promised well.  I took three-quarters
of a mile of rope and fastened one end of it around
the waist of a guide, and told him to go find the road,
while the caravan waited.  I instructed him to guide himself
back by the rope, in case of failure; in case of success,
he was to give the rope a series of violent jerks,
whereupon the Expedition would go to him at once.
He departed, and in two minutes had disappeared among
the trees.  I payed out the rope myself, while everybody
watched the crawling thing with eager eyes.  The rope
crept away quite slowly, at times, at other times with
some briskness.  Twice or thrice we seemed to get the signal,
and a shout was just ready to break from the men's lips
when they perceived it was a false alarm.  But at last,
when over half a mile of rope had slidden away, it stopped
gliding and stood absolutely still--one minute--two
minutes--three--while we held our breath and watched.

Was the guide resting? Was he scanning the country from
some high point? Was he inquiring of a chance mountaineer?
Stop,--had he fainted from excess of fatigue and anxiety?

This thought gave us a shock.  I was in the very first act
of detailing an Expedition to succor him, when the cord
was assailed with a series of such frantic jerks that I
could hardly keep hold of it.  The huzza that went up,
then, was good to hear.  "Saved! saved!" was the word
that rang out, all down the long rank of the caravan.

We rose up and started at once.  We found the route to be
good enough for a while, but it began to grow difficult,
by and by, and this feature steadily increased.  When we
judged we had gone half a mile, we momently expected
to see the guide; but no, he was not visible anywhere;
neither was he waiting, for the rope was still moving,
consequently he was doing the same.  This argued that he
had not found the road, yet, but was marching to it
with some peasant.  There was nothing for us to do but
plod along--and this we did.  At the end of three hours
we were still plodding.  This was not only mysterious,
but exasperating.  And very fatiguing, too; for we had
tried hard, along at first, to catch up with the guide,
but had only fagged ourselves, in vain; for although he
was traveling slowly he was yet able to go faster than the
hampered caravan over such ground.

At three in the afternoon we were nearly dead with
exhaustion--and still the rope was slowly gliding out.
The murmurs against the guide had been growing steadily,
and at last they were become loud and savage.
A mutiny ensued.  The men refused to proceed.  They declared
that we had been traveling over and over the same ground
all day, in a kind of circle.  They demanded that our
end of the rope be made fast to a tree, so as to halt
the guide until we could overtake him and kill him.
This was not an unreasonable requirement, so I gave the order.

As soon as the rope was tied, the Expedition moved
forward with that alacrity which the thirst for
vengeance usually inspires.  But after a tiresome march
of almost half a mile, we came to a hill covered thick
with a crumbly rubbish of stones, and so steep that no
man of us all was now in a condition to climb it.
Every attempt failed, and ended in crippling somebody.
Within twenty minutes I had five men on crutches.
Whenever a climber tried to assist himself by the rope,
it yielded and let him tumble backward.  The frequency
of this result suggested an idea to me.  I ordered
the caravan to 'bout face and form in marching order;
I then made the tow-rope fast to the rear mule, and gave
the command:

"Mark time--by the right flank--forward--march!"

The procession began to move, to the impressive strains
of a battle-chant, and I said to myself, "Now, if the rope
don't break I judge THIS will fetch that guide into the camp."
I watched the rope gliding down the hill, and presently
when I was all fixed for triumph I was confronted
by a bitter disappointment; there was no guide tied
to the rope, it was only a very indignant old black ram.
The fury of the baffled Expedition exceeded all bounds.
They even wanted to wreak their unreasoning vengeance on this
innocent dumb brute.  But I stood between them and their prey,
menaced by a bristling wall of ice-axes and alpenstocks,
and proclaimed that there was but one road to this murder,
and it was directly over my corpse.  Even as I spoke I
saw that my doom was sealed, except a miracle supervened
to divert these madmen from their fell purpose.  I see
the sickening wall of weapons now; I see that advancing
host as I saw it then, I see the hate in those cruel eyes;
I remember how I drooped my head upon my breast,
I feel again the sudden earthquake shock in my rear,
administered by the very ram I was sacrificing myself to save;
I hear once more the typhoon of laughter that burst from
the assaulting column as I clove it from van to rear
like a Sepoy shot from a Rodman gun.

I was saved.  Yes, I was saved, and by the merciful instinct
of ingratitude which nature had planted in the breast
of that treacherous beast.  The grace which eloquence
had failed to work in those men's hearts, had been wrought
by a laugh.  The ram was set free and my life was spared.

We lived to find out that that guide had deserted us as soon
as he had placed a half-mile between himself and us.
To avert suspicion, he had judged it best that the line
should continue to move; so he caught that ram, and at
the time that he was sitting on it making the rope fast
to it, we were imagining that he was lying in a swoon,
overcome by fatigue and distress.  When he allowed the ram
to get up it fell to plunging around, trying to rid itself
of the rope, and this was the signal which we had risen
up with glad shouts to obey.  We had followed this ram
round and round in a circle all day--a thing which was
proven by the discovery that we had watered the Expedition
seven times at one and same spring in seven hours.
As expert a woodman as I am, I had somehow failed to notice
this until my attention was called to it by a hog.
This hog was always wallowing there, and as he was the
only hog we saw, his frequent repetition, together with
his unvarying similarity to himself, finally caused me
to reflect that he must be the same hog, and this led
me to the deduction that this must be the same spring,
also--which indeed it was.

I made a note of this curious thing, as showing
in a striking manner the relative difference between
glacial action and the action of the hog.  It is now
a well-established fact that glaciers move; I consider
that my observations go to show, with equal conclusiveness,
that a hog in a spring does not move.  I shall be glad
to receive the opinions of other observers upon this point.

To return, for an explanatory moment, to that guide,
and then I shall be done with him.  After leaving the ram
tied to the rope, he had wandered at large a while,
and then happened to run across a cow.  Judging that
a cow would naturally know more than a guide, he took
her by the tail, and the result justified his judgment.
She nibbled her leisurely way downhill till it was near
milking-time, then she struck for home and towed him
into Zermatt.



CHAPTER XXXVIII
[I Conquer the Gorner Grat]

We went into camp on that wild spot to which that ram
had brought us.  The men were greatly fatigued.
Their conviction that we were lost was forgotten in the cheer
of a good supper, and before the reaction had a chance
to set in, I loaded them up with paregoric and put them to bed.

Next morning I was considering in my mind our desperate
situation and trying to think of a remedy, when Harris
came to me with a Baedeker map which showed conclusively
that the mountain we were on was still in Switzerland--yes,
every part of it was in Switzerland.  So we were not lost,
after all.  This was an immense relief; it lifted the weight
of two such mountains from my breast.  I immediately
had the news disseminated and the map was exhibited.
The effect was wonderful.  As soon as the men saw with
their own eyes that they knew where they were, and that it
was only the summit that was lost and not themselves,
they cheered up instantly and said with one accord,
let the summit take care of itself.

Our distresses being at an end, I now determined to rest
the men in camp and give the scientific department of the
Expedition a chance.  First, I made a barometric observation,
to get our altitude, but I could not perceive that there
was any result.  I knew, by my scientific reading,
that either thermometers or barometers ought to be boiled,
to make them accurate; I did not know which it was,
so I boiled them both.  There was still no result;
so I examined these instruments and discovered that they
possessed radical blemishes: the barometer had no hand
but the brass pointer and the ball of the thermometer was
stuffed with tin-foil. I might have boiled those things
to rags, and never found out anything.

I hunted up another barometer; it was new and perfect.
I boiled it half an hour in a pot of bean soup which
the cooks were making.  The result was unexpected: the
instrument was not affecting at all, but there was such
a strong barometer taste to the soup that the head cook,
who was a most conscientious person, changed its name
in the bill of fare.  The dish was so greatly liked by all,
that I ordered the cook to have barometer soup every day.
It was believed that the barometer might eventually
be injured, but I did not care for that.  I had demonstrated
to my satisfaction that it could not tell how high
a mountain was, therefore I had no real use for it.
Changes in the weather I could take care of without it;
I did not wish to know when the weather was going to be good,
what I wanted to know was when it was going to be bad,
and this I could find out from Harris's corns.  Harris had
had his corns tested and regulated at the government
observatory in Heidelberg, and one could depend upon them
with confidence.  So I transferred the new barometer to
the cooking department, to be used for the official mess.
It was found that even a pretty fair article of soup could
be made from the defective barometer; so I allowed that one
to be transferred to the subordinate mess.

I next boiled the thermometer, and got a most excellent result;
the mercury went up to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the opinion of the other scientists of the Expedition,
this seemed to indicate that we had attained the extraordinary
altitude of two hundred thousand feet above sea-level.
Science places the line of eternal snow at about ten thousand
feet above sea-level. There was no snow where we were,
consequently it was proven that the eternal snow-line
ceases somewhere above the ten-thousand-foot level and
does not begin any more.  This was an interesting fact,
and one which had not been observed by any observer before.
It was as valuable as interesting, too, since it would open
up the deserted summits of the highest Alps to population
and agriculture.  It was a proud thing to be where we were,
yet it caused us a pang to reflect that but for that ram we
might just as well been two hundred thousand feet higher.

The success of my last experiment induced me to try an
experiment with my photographic apparatus.  I got it out,
and boiled one of my cameras, but the thing was a failure;
it made the wood swell up and burst, and I could not see
that the lenses were any better than they were before.

I now concluded to boil a guide.  It might improve him,
it could not impair his usefulness.  But I was not
allowed to proceed.  Guides have no feeling for science,
and this one would not consent to be made uncomfortable
in its interest.

In the midst of my scientific work, one of those
needless accidents happened which are always occurring
among the ignorant and thoughtless.  A porter shot
at a chamois and missed it and crippled the Latinist.
This was not a serious matter to me, for a Latinist's
duties are as well performed on crutches as otherwise--
but the fact remained that if the Latinist had not
happened to be in the way a mule would have got
that load.  That would have been quite another matter,
for when it comes down to a question of value there is
a palpable difference between a Latinist and a mule.
I could not depend on having a Latinist in the right
place every time; so, to make things safe, I ordered
that in the future the chamois must not be hunted within
limits of the camp with any other weapon than the forefinger.

My nerves had hardly grown quiet after this affair when
they got another shake-up--one which utterly unmanned
me for a moment: a rumor swept suddenly through the camp
that one of the barkeepers had fallen over a precipice!

However, it turned out that it was only a chaplain.
I had laid in an extra force of chaplains, purposely to
be prepared for emergencies like this, but by some
unaccountable oversight had come away rather short-handed
in the matter of barkeepers.

On the following morning we moved on, well refreshed and in
good spirits.  I remember this day with peculiar pleasure,
because it saw our road restored to us.  Yes, we found
our road again, and in quite an extraordinary way.
We had plodded along some two hours and a half, when we came
up against a solid mass of rock about twenty feet high.
I did not need to be instructed by a mule this time.
I was already beginning to know more than any mule in
the Expedition.  I at once put in a blast of dynamite,
and lifted that rock out of the way.  But to my surprise
and mortification, I found that there had been a chalet
on top of it.

I picked up such members of the family as fell in my vicinity,
and subordinates of my corps collected the rest.
None of these poor people were injured, happily, but they
were much annoyed.  I explained to the head chaleteer
just how the thing happened, and that I was only searching
for the road, and would certainly have given him timely
notice if I had known he was up there.  I said I had
meant no harm, and hoped I had not lowered myself in
his estimation by raising him a few rods in the air.
I said many other judicious things, and finally when I
offered to rebuild his chalet, and pay for the breakages,
and throw in the cellar, he was mollified and satisfied.
He hadn't any cellar at all, before; he would not have
as good a view, now, as formerly, but what he had lost
in view he had gained in cellar, by exact measurement.
He said there wasn't another hole like that in the mountains--
and he would have been right if the late mule had not tried
to eat up the nitroglycerin.

I put a hundred and sixteen men at work, and they rebuilt
the chalet from its own debris in fifteen minutes.
It was a good deal more picturesque than it was before,
too.  The man said we were now on the Feil-Stutz, above
the Schwegmatt--information which I was glad to get,
since it gave us our position to a degree of particularity
which we had not been accustomed to for a day or so.
We also learned that we were standing at the foot
of the Riffelberg proper, and that the initial chapter
of our work was completed.

We had a fine view, from here, of the energetic Visp,
as it makes its first plunge into the world from under a huge
arch of solid ice, worn through the foot-wall of the great
Gorner Glacier; and we could also see the Furggenbach,
which is the outlet of the Furggen Glacier.

The mule-road to the summit of the Riffelberg passed right
in front of the chalet, a circumstance which we almost
immediately noticed, because a procession of tourists was
filing along it pretty much all the time.  [1] The chaleteer's
business consisted in furnishing refreshments to tourists.
My blast had interrupted this trade for a few minutes,
by breaking all the bottles on the place; but I gave
the man a lot of whiskey to sell for Alpine champagne,
and a lot of vinegar which would answer for Rhine wine,
consequently trade was soon as brisk as ever.

1.  "Pretty much" may not be elegant English, but it is
    high time it was.  There is no elegant word or phrase
    which means just what it means.--M.T.

Leaving the Expedition outside to rest, I quartered myself
in the chalet, with Harris, proposing to correct my journals
and scientific observations before continuing the ascent.
I had hardly begun my work when a tall, slender, vigorous
American youth of about twenty-three, who was on his
way down the mountain, entered and came toward me with
that breeze self-complacency which is the adolescent's
idea of the well-bred ease of the man of the world.
His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle,
and he had all the look of an American person who would
be likely to begin his signature with an initial,
and spell his middle name out.  He introduced himself,
smiling a smirky smile borrowed from the courtiers
of the stage, extended a fair-skinned talon, and while
he gripped my hand in it he bent his body forward
three times at the hips, as the stage courtier does,
and said in the airiest and most condescending
and patronizing way--I quite remember his exact language:

"Very glad to make your acquaintance, 'm sure; very glad indeed,
assure you.  I've read all your little efforts and greatly
admired them, and when I heard you were here, I ..."

I indicated a chair, and he sat down.  This grandee was
the grandson of an American of considerable note in his day,
and not wholly forgotten yet--a man who came so near
being a great man that he was quite generally accounted
one while he lived.

I slowly paced the floor, pondering scientific problems,
and heard this conversation:

GRANDSON.  First visit to Europe?

HARRIS.  Mine? Yes.

G.S. (With a soft reminiscent sigh suggestive of bygone
joys that may be tasted in their freshness but once.)
Ah, I know what it is to you.  A first visit!--ah,
the romance of it! I wish I could feel it again.

H. Yes, I find it exceeds all my dreams.  It is enchantment.
I go...

G.S. (With a dainty gesture of the hand signifying "Spare
me your callow enthusiasms, good friend.") Yes, _I_ know,
I know; you go to cathedrals, and exclaim; and you drag
through league-long picture-galleries and exclaim; and you
stand here, and there, and yonder, upon historic ground,
and continue to exclaim; and you are permeated with
your first crude conceptions of Art, and are proud
and happy.  Ah, yes, proud and happy--that expresses it.
Yes-yes, enjoy it--it is right--it is an innocent revel.

H. And you? Don't you do these things now?

G.S. I! Oh, that is VERY good! My dear sir, when you
are as old a traveler as I am, you will not ask such
a question as that.  _I_ visit the regulation gallery,
moon around the regulation cathedral, do the worn round
of the regulation sights, YET?--Excuse me!

H. Well, what DO you do, then?

G.S. Do? I flit--and flit--for I am ever on the wing--but I
avoid the herd.  Today I am in Paris, tomorrow in Berlin,
anon in Rome; but you would look for me in vain in the
galleries of the Louvre or the common resorts of the
gazers in those other capitals.  If you would find me,
you must look in the unvisited nooks and corners where
others never think of going.  One day you will find me
making myself at home in some obscure peasant's cabin,
another day you will find me in some forgotten castle
worshiping some little gem or art which the careless eye
has overlooked and which the unexperienced would despise;
again you will find me as guest in the inner sanctuaries
of palaces while the herd is content to get a hurried
glimpse of the unused chambers by feeing a servant.

H. You are a GUEST in such places?

G.S. And a welcoming one.

H. It is surprising.  How does it come?

G.S. My grandfather's name is a passport to all the courts
in Europe.  I have only to utter that name and every
door is open to me.  I flit from court to court at my
own free will and pleasure, and am always welcome.
I am as much at home in the palaces of Europe as you are
among your relatives.  I know every titled person in Europe,
I think.  I have my pockets full of invitations all the time.
I am under promise to go to Italy, where I am to be the
guest of a succession of the noblest houses in the land.
In Berlin my life is a continued round of gaiety in the
imperial palace.  It is the same, wherever I go.

H. It must be very pleasant.  But it must make Boston
seem a little slow when you are at home.

G.S. Yes, of course it does.  But I don't go home much.
There's no life there--little to feed a man's higher nature.
Boston's very narrow, you know.  She doesn't know it, and you
couldn't convince her of it--so I say nothing when I'm
there: where's the use? Yes, Boston is very narrow, but she
has such a good opinion of herself that she can't see it.
A man who has traveled as much as I have, and seen as much
of the world, sees it plain enough, but he can't cure it,
you know, so the best is to leave it and seek a sphere
which is more in harmony with his tastes and culture.
I run across there, one a year, perhaps, when I have
nothing important on hand, but I'm very soon back again.
I spend my time in Europe.

H. I see.  You map out your plans and ...

G.S. No, excuse me.  I don't map out any plans.  I simply
follow the inclination of the day.  I am limited by no ties,
no requirements, I am not bound in any way.  I am too old
a traveler to hamper myself with deliberate purposes.
I am simply a traveler--an inveterate traveler--a man of
the world, in a word--I can call myself by no other name.
I do not say, "I am going here, or I am going there"--I
say nothing at all, I only act.  For instance, next week
you may find me the guest of a grandee of Spain, or you
may find me off for Venice, or flitting toward Dresden.
I shall probably go to Egypt presently; friends will say
to friends, "He is at the Nile cataracts"--and at that
very moment they will be surprised to learn that I'm away
off yonder in India somewhere.  I am a constant surprise
to people.  They are always saying, "Yes, he was in Jerusalem
when we heard of him last, but goodness knows where he
is now."

Presently the Grandson rose to leave--discovered he
had an appointment with some Emperor, perhaps.  He did
his graces over again: gripped me with one talon,
at arm's-length, pressed his hat against his stomach
with the other, bent his body in the middle three times,
murmuring:

"Pleasure, 'm sure; great pleasure, 'm sure.  Wish you
much success."

Then he removed his gracious presence.  It is a great
and solemn thing to have a grandfather.

I have not purposed to misrepresent this boy in any way,
for what little indignation he excited in me soon
passed and left nothing behind it but compassion.
One cannot keep up a grudge against a vacuum.
I have tried to repeat this lad's very words;
if I have failed anywhere I have at least not failed
to reproduce the marrow and meaning of what he said.
He and the innocent chatterbox whom I met on the Swiss
lake are the most unique and interesting specimens of
Young America I came across during my foreign tramping.
I have made honest portraits of them, not caricatures.
The Grandson of twenty-three referred to himself five
or six times as an "old traveler,"and as many as three
times (with a serene complacency which was maddening)
as a "man of the world." There was something very delicious
about his leaving Boston to her "narrowness," unreproved
and uninstructed.

I formed the caravan in marching order, presently,
and after riding down the line to see that it was
properly roped together, gave the command to proceed.
In a little while the road carried us to open, grassy land.
We were above the troublesome forest, now, and had an
uninterrupted view, straight before us, of our summit--
the summit of the Riffelberg.

We followed the mule-road, a zigzag course, now to the right,
now to the left, but always up, and always crowded and
incommoded by going and coming files of reckless tourists
who were never, in a single instance, tied together.
I was obliged to exert the utmost care and caution,
for in many places the road was not two yards wide,
and often the lower side of it sloped away in slanting
precipices eight and even nine feet deep.  I had to
encourage the men constantly, to keep them from giving
way to their unmanly fears.

We might have made the summit before night, but for a
delay caused by the loss of an umbrella.  I was allowing
the umbrella to remain lost, but the men murmured,
and with reason, for in this exposed region we stood
in peculiar need of protection against avalanches;
so I went into camp and detached a strong party to go
after the missing article.

The difficulties of the next morning were severe,
but our courage was high, for our goal was near.
At noon we conquered the last impediment--we stood
at last upon the summit, and without the loss of a
single man except the mule that ate the glycerin.
Our great achievement was achieved--the possibility of
the impossible was demonstrated, and Harris and I walked
proudly into the great dining-room of the Riffelberg
Hotel and stood our alpenstocks up in the corner.

Yes, I had made the grand ascent; but it was a mistake
to do it in evening dress.  The plug hats were battered,
the swallow-tails were fluttering rags, mud added no grace,
the general effect was unpleasant and even disreputable.

There were about seventy-five tourists at the hotel--
mainly ladies and little children--and they gave us
an admiring welcome which paid us for all our privations
and sufferings.  The ascent had been made, and the names
and dates now stand recorded on a stone monument there
to prove it to all future tourists.

I boiled a thermometer and took an altitude, with a most
curious result: THE SUMMIT WAS NOT AS HIGH AS THE POINT ON
THE MOUNTAINSIDE WHERE I HAD TAKEN THE FIRST ALTITUDE.
Suspecting that I had made an important discovery,
I prepared to verify it.  There happened to be a still
higher summit (called the Gorner Grat), above the hotel,
and notwithstanding the fact that it overlooks a glacier
from a dizzy height, and that the ascent is difficult
and dangerous, I resolved to venture up there and boil
a thermometer.  So I sent a strong party, with some
borrowed hoes, in charge of two chiefs of service, to dig
a stairway in the soil all the way up, and this I ascended,
roped to the guides.  This breezy height was the summit
proper--so I accomplished even more than I had originally
purposed to do.  This foolhardy exploit is recorded on
another stone monument.

I boiled my thermometer, and sure enough, this spot,
which purported to be two thousand feet higher than the
locality of the hotel, turned out to be nine thousand
feet LOWER.  Thus the fact was clearly demonstrated that,
ABOVE A CERTAIN POINT, THE HIGHER A POINT SEEMS TO BE,
THE LOWER IT ACTUALLY IS.  Our ascent itself was a
great achievement, but this contribution to science was
an inconceivably greater matter.

Cavilers object that water boils at a lower and lower
temperature the higher and higher you go, and hence the
apparent anomaly.  I answer that I do not base my theory
upon what the boiling water does, but upon what a boiled
thermometer says.  You can't go behind the thermometer.

I had a magnificent view of Monte Rosa, and apparently
all the rest of the Alpine world, from that high place.
All the circling horizon was piled high with a mighty
tumult of snowy crests.  One might have imagined he
saw before him the tented camps of a beleaguering host
of Brobdingnagians.

But lonely, conspicuous, and superb, rose that wonderful
upright wedge, the Matterhorn.  Its precipitous sides were
powdered over with snow, and the upper half hidden in thick
clouds which now and then dissolved to cobweb films and gave
brief glimpses of the imposing tower as through a veil.
[2] A little later the Matterhorn took to himself the
semblance of a volcano; he was stripped naked to his apex--
around this circled vast wreaths of white cloud which strung
slowly out and streamed away slantwise toward the sun,
a twenty-mile stretch of rolling and tumbling vapor,
and looking just as if it were pouring out of a crater.
Later again, one of the mountain's sides was clean and clear,
and another side densely clothed from base to summit in
thick smokelike cloud which feathered off and flew around
the shaft's sharp edge like the smoke around the corners of
a burning building.  The Matterhorn is always experimenting,
and always gets up fine effects, too.  In the sunset,
when all the lower world is palled in gloom, it points
toward heaven out of the pervading blackness like a finger
of fire.  In the sunrise--well, they say it is very fine
in the sunrise.

2.  NOTE.--I had the very unusual luck to catch one little
    momentary glimpse of the Matterhorn wholly unencumbered
    by clouds.  I leveled my photographic apparatus at it
    without the loss of an instant, and should have got
    an elegant picture if my donkey had not interfered.
    It was my purpose to draw this photograph all by myself
    for my book, but was obliged to put the mountain part
    of it into the hands of the professional artist because
    I found I could not do landscape well.

Authorities agree that there is no such tremendous "layout"
of snowy Alpine magnitude, grandeur, and sublimity to be
seen from any other accessible point as the tourist may see
from the summit of the Riffelberg.  Therefore, let the
tourist rope himself up and go there; for I have shown
that with nerve, caution, and judgment, the thing can be done.

I wish to add one remark, here--in parentheses, so to speak
--suggested by the word "snowy," which I have just used.
We have all seen hills and mountains and levels with snow
on them, and so we think we know all the aspects and
effects produced by snow.  But indeed we do not until
we have seen the Alps.  Possibly mass and distance add
something--at any rate, something IS added.  Among other
noticeable things, there is a dazzling, intense whiteness
about the distant Alpine snow, when the sun is on it,
which one recognizes as peculiar, and not familiar to
the eye.  The snow which one is accustomed to has a tint
to it--painters usually give it a bluish cast--but there
is no perceptible tint to the distant Alpine snow when it
is trying to look its whitest.  As to the unimaginable
splendor of it when the sun is blazing down on it--well,
it simply IS unimaginable.