 This is Chapter 35 of A Tramp Abroad. 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 Schwarzenbach 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 worshipped 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 at rope together with a gossamer thread. We skirted the lonely little lake called Dobancie, 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 Schwarzenbach 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 bay's 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 its cork-screw 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 the 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 the 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 post 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 traveller, 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 instance thought he threw his weight upon that crazy board. It went outward a foot. I never made a gasp before that came so near to 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 corner 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 quarters. 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 lead 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 heights 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. Baddaker, with his customary overtursedness, begins and ends the tale thus. The descent on horse-pack should be avoided. In 1861 a conteste d'Helicourt fell from her saddle over the precipice and was killed on a 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 conteste 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 brides. 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 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 a 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, we cannot find it again if it is smaller than a sabre. 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 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 Leuch 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 my money by it. Harris argued in favour of his proposition against mine, I argued in favour 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 banding of epithets I said, It seems to me that you are taking on a good many heirs 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 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 were 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 Loik, or Loikerbat. We pointed our course toward it, down a verdant slope which was adorned with fringed gensions 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 shammy pasture. His person was populous with little hungry pests. His skin, when he stripped, was splotched like a scarlet fever-patience. So when we were about to enter one of the Loikerbat inns, he noticed its signs, Shammy Hotel. He refused to stop there. He said the shammy was plentiful enough without hunting up hotels where they made a specialty of it. I was indifferent, for the shammy is a creature that will neither bite me nor abide with me. But to calm Harris we went to the Hotel des Alpes. At the table d'hote 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 a while, and 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 little lady who sat at his right. Shook his head as much to say, Now! 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 and injured an 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, �They've got it all!� Then he set the bottle down, resignedly, and took the rest of his dinner dry. �It was at that tabledote, 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, monsieur, 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, perfectly 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, until 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 loyke 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 removed fat and also skin diseases. The patients remained 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 with a 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 shall never 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, terrace-like 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 meat 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 assent, so I could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he accomplished the feat successfully, through a sub-agent, 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 and 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 at 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 Rhon 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 towards Zermatt. Hour after hour we slopped along by the roaring torrent, and under noble lesser alps, which were closed in rich velvety green all the way up and had little atomy Swiss homes perched upon grassy benches along their mis-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 main highest and thundered loudest and lashed the big boulders fiercest, the canton had done itself the honour to build the flimsiest wooden bridge that existed 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 on 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 all together I felt slovenly and ill-conditioned. However the people at the tabla d'hote 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 tabla d'hote at all. His britches 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 britches was almost sure to excite remark. CHAPTER XXXVI. 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 there 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 in all the other six days of the week put together, and it is of a more bitter and malignant character than the weekday profanity, too. It is produced by the cracked-pot clanger 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, and 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 towards 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 Strasbourg 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 the 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-ear 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 cheerfulness 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 find 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 a 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 Roan Glacier. It is fifteen miles long and seven hundred feet thick. Hey, 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 Roan 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 vispe, 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 strikingly 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 Bedaker 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, it actually seemed 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 laterally 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 and 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 of two miles high. This is what the Matterhorn is. A monument. Its office, henceforth for all time, will be to 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. The accident which cost Lord Douglas his life, C. 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, once they were born to Zermatt, and buried in the churchyard. The remains of Lord Douglas have never been found. The secret of his sepulchre, 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 guidebook 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 an 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 every 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. Gertelstone himself, a famous Englishman who hunts his way to the most formidable alpine summits without a guide. I was not equal to imagining a Gertelstone. It was all I could do to even realize him while looking straight at him at short range. I would rather face whole, hide 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. Gertelstone 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 vice-horn once more, for he had heard of a new and utterly impossible rout up it. His baggage was unpacked at once, and now he and a friend, laden with knapsacks, ice-picks, 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. Gertelstone 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 vice-horn a few days before our arrival, and she and her guides had lost their way in a snowstorm high up among the peaks and glaciers and had 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 gemmy, were already at Zermatt when we reached there, so there was nothing to interfere with our getting up and 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 alpine stock must be of the best wood, for if it should break loss of life might be the result. One should carry an axe 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 which could not be surmounted without it. Such an obstruction has compelled the tourists 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 silt 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. Wimper 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 800 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 a hole of my left side. They caught my clothes for a moment and I fell back 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 onto 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 leap 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 stuck 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 Braille was accomplished without a slip or once missing the way. His wounds kept him a bed some days. Then he got up and climbed that mountain again. That is the way with a true Alp climber. The more funny he has, the more he wants. End of Chapter 36 This is Chapter 37. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain, Chapter 37. 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 Rifleburg. 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 mountainside. I said we would leave the village at three or four 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 a hundred and ninety-eight persons, including the mules, or two hundred and five, including the cows, as follows, chiefs of service, myself, Mr. Harris, seventeen guides, four surgeons, one geologist, one botanist, three chaplains, two draftsmen, fifteen barkeepers, one latinist, subordinates, one veterinary surgeon, one butler, twelve waiters, one footman, one barber, one head cook, nine assistants, four pastry cooks, one confectionary artist, transportation, etc., twenty-seven porters, forty-four mules, forty-four mule tears, three coarse washers and ironers, one fine ditto, seven cows, two milkers, total, one hundred and fifty-four men, fifty-one animals, grand total, two hundred and five, rations, etc., sixteen cases hams, two barrels flour, twenty-two barrels whiskey, one barrel sugar, one keg lemons, two thousand cigars, one barrel pies, one ton of pemekin, one hundred and forty-three pair crutches, two barrels arnica, one bale of lint, twenty-seven kegs paragoric, apparatus, twenty-five spring mattresses, two hair ditto, bedding for same, two mosquito nets, twenty-nine tents, scientific instruments, ninety-seven ice axes, five cases dynamite, seven cans nitroglycerin, twenty-two forty-foot ladders, two miles of rope, one hundred and fifty-four 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 processions stood at ease, roped together and ready to move, I never saw a finer sight. It was three thousand one hundred and twenty-two 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-axe 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 Adelweiss 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 Winklamutton. 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 saved by a couple of deserted huts toward the furthest extremity. These meadows offered an excellent camping-place. We pitched our tents, soft, 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 candlelight. 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 away 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 upbrade 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 and promise 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 referred to the Paragoric, but for that beneficent drug not one of those men would have slept a moment during that fearful night. But for that gentle persuader they must have tossed, ensued, the night through, for the whisky 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 at 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 30 feet across by 15 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 40 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 expedience. 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, where upon the expedition would go to him at once. He departed, and in two minutes had disappeared among the trees. I paid out the rope myself, while everybody watched the crawling thing with eager eyes. The rope crept away quite slowly at times, and 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 slid in a way, 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 sucker him, when the cord was assailed with a series of such frantic jerks that I could hardly keep hold of it. The hazzah 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 momentarily 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 travelling 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 travelling 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 led 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 supervene 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 the guide had deserted us as soon as he had placed a half a 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 in the 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 equiclusiveness 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. End of Chapter 37 This is Chapter 38 of A Tramp Abroad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain Chapter 38 I Conquer a Gornergrat 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 Paragork 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 Bedecker 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 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 the 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 a thermometer and got a most excellent result. The mercury went up to about two hundred 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 snowline 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 have 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 shorthanded 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 plotted 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 core collected the rest. None of these poor people were injured, happily, but they were much annoyed. I explained to the head chaletier 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 of you 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 Faelstuts, above the Svegmat, 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 vispe, 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 Furgenbach, which is the outlet of the Furgen Glacier. The mule rode to the summit of the Riffelberg past 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. Footnote one. 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. End of Footnote. The chaletiers 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 rind wine. Consequently, trade was soon as brisk as ever. 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 breezy self-complacency which is the adolescence 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, Miss 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 to visit 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 enthusiasm's good friend. Yes, I know, I know, you go to the 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 traveller 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 sites yet? Excuse me! H. Well, what do you do then? G.S. Do? Well, I flit and flit, for I am ever on the wing, but I avoid the herd. Today I am in Paris, tomorrow in Berlin, and on 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, worshipping some little jam or art, which the careless I 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 feying 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 travelled 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 once 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, 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 traveller to hamper myself with deliberate purposes. I am simply a traveller, an inveterate traveller, 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 am 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, I am sure, a great pleasure, I am 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 purported 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 traveller, 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 the little while the road carried us to open grassy land. We were above the Troubleson 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 incommoted 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 descent, but it was a mistake to do it in the evening dress. The plug-hats were battered, the swallow-tails were fluttering rags, mud added no grace, a 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 Gornegrat 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 hose 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 proposed 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. Cavalers 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 thick clouds which now and then dissolved to cobweb films, and gave brief glimpses of the imposing tower as through a veil. 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. End of footnote, too. 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 closed from base to summit in thick smoke-like 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 pawled and 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—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 tourists may see from the summit of the Riffelburg. 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 at its whitest. As to the unimaginable splendor of it when the sun is blazing down on it, well, it simply is unimaginable. A Guidebook is a queer thing. The reader has just seen what a man who undertakes the great ascent from Zermatt to the Riffelberg Hotel must experience, yet Bettecher makes these strange statements concerning this matter. One, distance, three hours. Two, the road cannot be mistaken. Three, guide unnecessary. Four, distance from Riffelberg Hotel to Gornagrat, one hour and a half. Five, ascent, simple and easy, guide unnecessary. Six, elevation of Zermatt above sea level five thousand three hundred and fifteen feet. Seven, elevation of Riffelberg Hotel above sea level eight thousand four hundred and twenty-nine feet. Eight, elevation of the Gornagrat above sea level ten thousand two hundred and eighty-nine feet. I have pretty effectually throttled these errors by sending him the following demonstrated facts. One, distance from Zermatt to Riffelberg Hotel seven days. Two, the road can be mistaken. If I am the first that did it, I want the credit of it too. Three, guides are necessary, for none but a native can read those finger boards. Four, the estimate of the elevation of the several localities above sea level is pretty correct for Bettecher. He only misses it about a hundred and eighty or ninety thousand feet. I found my Arnica invaluable. My men were suffering excruciatingly from the friction of sitting down so much. During two or three days not one of them was able to do more than lie down or walk about. Yet so effective was the Arnica that on the fourth all were able to sit up. I consider that more than to anything else. I owe the success of our great undertaking to Arnica and Paragoric. My men are being restored to health and strength. My main perplexity now was how to get them down the mountain again. I was not willing to expose the brave fellows to the perils, fatigues, and hardships of that fearful root again, if it could be helped. First I thought of balloons, but of course I had to give that idea up, for balloons were not procurable. I thought of several other expedients, but upon consideration discarded them for cause. But at last I hit it. I was aware that the movement of glaciers is an established fact, for I had read it in Bedaker. So I resolved to take passage for Zermatt on the Great Corner Glacier. Very good! The next thing was how to get down the glacier comfortably, for the mule road to it was long and winding and wearysome. I set my mind at work and soon thought out a plan. One looks straight down upon the vast frozen river called the Corner Glacier from the Gornegrat, a sheer precipice twelve hundred feet high. We had one hundred and fifty-four umbrellas. And what is an umbrella but a parachute? I mentioned this noble idea to Harris with enthusiasm and was about to order the expedition to form on the Gornegrat with their umbrellas and prepare for flight by platoons, each platoon in command of a guide, when Harris stopped me and urged me not to be too hasty. He asked me if this method of descending the Alps had ever been tried before. I said, no, I had not heard of an instance. Then, in his opinion, it was a matter of considerable gravity. In his opinion, it would not be well to send the whole command over the cliff at once. A better way would be to send down a single individual first and see how he fared. I saw the wisdom in this idea instantly. I said as much and thanked my agent cordially, and told him to take his umbrella and try the thing right away, and wave his hat when he got down, if he struck in a soft place, and then I would ship the rest right along. Harris was greatly touched with this mark of confidence and said so, in a voice that had a perceptible tremble in it. But at the same time he said he did not feel himself worthy of so conspicuous a favour, that it might cause jealousy in the command, for there were plenty who would not hesitate to say he had used underhanded means to get the appointment, whereas his conscience would bear him witness that he had not sought it at all, nor even in his secret heart desired it. I said these words did him extreme credit, but that he must not throw away the imperishable distinction of being the first man to descend an out per parachute simply to save the feelings of some envious underlings. No, I said, he must accept the appointment, it was no longer an invitation, it was a command. He thanked me with a fusion and said that putting the thing in this form removed every objection. He retired and soon returned with his umbrella, his eye flaming with gratitude and his cheeks pallid with joy. Just then the head-guide passed along. Harris's expression changed to one of infinite tenderness and he said, That man did me a cruel injury four days ago, and I said in my heart he should live to perceive and confess that the only noble revenge a man can take upon his enemy is to return good for evil. I resign in his favour, appoint him. I threw my arms around the generous fellow and said, Harris, you are the noblest soul that lives. You shall not regret this sublime act. Neither shall the world fail to know of it. You shall have opportunity far transcending this one too, if I live. Remember that. I called the head-guide to me and appointed him on the spot, but the thing aroused no enthusiasm in him. He did not take to the idea at all. He said, Tie myself to an umbrella and jump over the Gornegrat. Excuse me, there are a great many pleasanter roads to the devil than that. Upon a discussion of the subject with him it appeared that he considered the project distinctly and decidedly dangerous. I was not convinced, yet I was not willing to try the experiment in any risky way, that is, in a way that might cripple the strength and efficiency of the expedition. I was about at my wit's end when it occurred to me to try it on the Latinist. He was called in, but he declined, on the plea of inexperience, diffidence in public, lack of curiosity, and I didn't know what all. Another man declined on account of a cold in the head, thought he ought to avoid exposure. Another could not jump well, never could jump well, did not believe he could jump so far without long and patient practice. Another was afraid it was going to rain, and his umbrella had a hole in it. Everybody had an excuse. The result was what the reader has by this time guessed, the most magnificent idea that was ever conceived, had to be abandoned, from sheer lack of a person with enterprise enough to carry it out. Yes, I actually had to give that thing up, while doubtless I should live to see somebody use it and take all the credit from me. Well, I had to go over land, there was no other way. I marched the expedition down the steep and tedious mule path and took up as good a position as I could upon the middle of the glacier, because Bedeker said the middle part travels the fastest. As a measure of economy, however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts to go as slow freight. I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move. Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather. Still, we did not budge. It occurred to me then that there might be a timetable in Bedeker. It would be well to find out the hours of starting. I called for the book. It could not be found. Bradshaw would certainly contain a timetable, but no Bradshaw could be found. Very well, I must make the best of the situation, so I pitched the tents, picketed the animals, milked the cows, had supper, paragorked the men, established the watch, and went to bed, with orders to call me as soon as we came in sight of Zermatt. I woke about half-past ten next morning and looked around. We hadn't budged a peg. At first I could not understand it. Then it occurred to me that the old thing must be aground. So I cut down some trees and rigged a spar on the starboard, and another on the port side, and I fooled away upward of three hours trying to spar her off. But it was of no use. She was half a mile wide and fifteen or twenty miles long, and there was no telling just whereabouts she was aground. The men began to show uneasiness too, and presently they came flying to me with ashy faces, saying she had sprung a leak. Nothing but my cool behavior at this critical time saved us from another panic. I ordered them to show me the place. They led me to a spot where a huge boulder lay in a deep pool of clear and brilliant water. It did look like a pretty bad leak, but I kept that to myself. I made a pump and set the men to work to pump out the glacier. We made a success of it. I perceived then that it was not a leak at all. This boulder had descended from a precipice and stopped on the ice in the middle of the glacier, and the sun had warmed it up every day, and consequently it had melted its way deeper and deeper into the ice. Until at last it reposed, as we had found it, in a deep pool of the clearest and coldest water. Presently Bettaker was found again, and I hunted eagerly for the timetable. There was none. The book simply said the glacier was moving all the time. This was satisfactory, so I shut up the book and chose a good position to view the scenery as we passed along. I stood there some time enjoying the trip, but at last it occurred to me that we did not seem to be gaining any on the scenery. I said to myself, This confounded all things aground again, sure, and opened Bettaker to see if I could run across any remedy for these annoying interruptions. I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter. It said, The Garner Glacier travels in an average rate of a little less than an inch a day. I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed. I made a small calculation, one inch a day, say, thirty feet a year, estimated distance to Zermatt, three and one eighteenth miles. Time required to go by glacier? A little over five hundred years. I said to myself, I can walk it quicker, and before I will patronize such a fraud as this I will do it. When I revealed to Harris the fact that the passenger part of this glacier, the central part, the lightning express part, so to speak, was not due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378 and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later, he burst out with, That is European management all over. An inch a day, think of that, five hundred years to go a trifle over three miles. But I am not a bit surprised. It's a Catholic glacier. You can tell by the look of it, and the management. I said, No, I believed nothing but the extreme end of it was in a Catholic canton. Well, then it's a government glacier, said Harris. It's all the same. Over here the government runs everything, so everything's slow, slow and ill-managed. But with us everything's done by private enterprise, and then there ain't much lolling around so you can depend on it. I wish Tom Scott could get his hands on this torpedo slab once. You'd see it take a different gait from this. I said I was sure he would increase the speed if there was trade enough to justify it. He'd make trade, said Harris. That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care. Individuals do. Tom Scott would take all the trade. In two years, Garner's stock would go to two hundred, and inside of two more you would see all the other glaciers under the hammer for taxes. After a reflective pause, Harris added, a little less than an inch a day, a little less than an inch, mind you. Well, I'm losing my reverence for glaciers. I was feeling much the same way myself. I have traveled by canal boat, ox wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and Smyrna Railway. But when it comes down to good old solid honest slow motion I bet my money on the glacier. As a means of passenger transportation I consider the glacier a failure. And as a vehicle of slow freight I think she fills the bill. In the matter of putting the fine shades on that line of business I judge she could teach the Germans something. I ordered the men to break camp and prepare for the land journey to Zermatt. At this moment a most interesting find was made. A dark object, bedded in the glacial ice, was cut out with the ice axes, and it proved to be a piece of the undressed skin of some animal, a hair-trunk perhaps. But a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory, and further discussion and examination exploded entirely. That is, in the opinion of all the scientists except the one who had advanced it. This one clung to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic of originators of scientific theories, and afterward won many of the first scientists of the age to his view by a very able pamphlet which he wrote entitled, Evidence is going to show that the hair-trunk in a wild state belonged to the early glacial period and roamed the wastes of chaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man, and the other olytics of the old Silurian family. Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put forward an animal of his own as a candidate for the skin. I sided with the geologist of the expedition, in the belief that this patch of skin had once helped to cover a Siberian elephant in some old forgotten age, but we divided there the geologist believing that this discovery proved that Siberia had formerly been located where Switzerland is now, whereas I held the opinion that it merely proved that the primeval Swiss was not the dull savage he is represented to have been, but was a being of high intellectual development who liked to go to the menagerie. We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures, in some fields close to the great ice-arch where the mad beast boils and surges out from under the foot of the great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped, our perils over, and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed. We marched into Zermatt the next day and were received with the most lavish honors and applause. A document signed and sealed by the authorities was given to me, which established and endorsed the fact that I had made the ascent of the Riffelberg. This I wear around my neck, and it will be buried with me when I am no more.