A Tramp Abroad
and ran and stripped aside the window-curtains; but we suffered a bitter
disappointment again: it was already half past three in the afternoon.
We dressed sullenly and in ill spirits, each accusing the other of
oversleeping. Harris said if we had brought the courier along, as we
ought to have done, we should not have missed these sunrises. I said he
knew very well that one of us would have to sit up and wake the
courier; and I added that we were having trouble enough to take care
of ourselves, on this climb, without having to take care of a courier
besides.
During breakfast our spirits came up a little, since we found by this
guide-book that in the hotels on the summit the tourist is not left to
trust to luck for his sunrise, but is roused betimes by a man who goes
through the halls with a great Alpine horn, blowing blasts that would
raise the dead. And there was another consoling thing: the guide-book
said that up there on the summit the guests did not wait to dress much,
but seized a red bed blanket and sailed out arrayed like an Indian. This
was good; this would be romantic; two hundred and fifty people grouped
on the windy summit, with their hair flying and their red blankets
flapping, in the solemn presence of the coming sun, would be a striking
and memorable spectacle. So it was good luck, not ill luck, that we had
missed those other sunrises.
We were informed by the guide-book that we were now 3,228 feet above
the level of the lake--therefore full two-thirds of our journey had been
accomplished. We got away at a quarter past four P.M.; a hundred yards
above the hotel the railway divided; one track went straight up the
steep hill, the other one turned square off to the right, with a very
slight grade. We took the latter, and followed it more than a mile,
turned a rocky corner, and came in sight of a handsome new hotel. If we
had gone on, we should have arrived at the summit, but Harris
preferred to ask a lot of questions--as usual, of a man who didn't know
anything--and he told us to go back and follow the other route. We did
so. We could ill afford this loss of time.
We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty
summits, but there was always another one just ahead. It came on to
rain, and it rained in dead earnest. We were soaked through and it
was bitter cold. Next a smoky fog of clouds covered the whole region
densely, and we took to the railway-ties to keep from getting lost.
Sometimes we slopped along in a narrow path on the left-hand side of the
track, but by and by when the fog blew aside a little and we saw that we
were treading the rampart of a precipice and that our left elbows were
projecting over a perfectly boundless and bottomless vacancy, we gasped,
and jumped for the ties again.
The night shut down, dark and drizzly and cold. About eight in the
evening the fog lifted and showed us a well-worn path which led up a
very steep rise to the left. We took it, and as soon as we had got far
enough from the railway to render the finding it again an impossibility,
the fog shut down on us once more.
We were in a bleak, unsheltered place, now, and had to trudge right
along, in order to keep warm, though we rather expected to go over a
precipice, sooner or later. About nine o'clock we made an important
discovery--that we were not in any path. We groped around a while on our
hands and knees, but we could not find it; so we sat down in the mud and
the wet scant grass to wait.
We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted with a vast
body which showed itself vaguely for an instant and in the next instant
was smothered in the fog again. It was really the hotel we were after,
monstrously magnified by the fog, but we took it for the face of a
precipice, and decided not to try to claw up it.
We sat there an hour, with chattering teeth and quivering bodies, and
quarreled over all sorts of trifles, but gave most of our attention to
abusing each other for the stupidity of deserting the railway-track. We
sat with our backs to the precipice, because what little wind there was
came from that quarter. At some time or other the fog thinned a little;
we did not know when, for we were facing the empty universe and the
thinness could not show; but at last Harris happened to look around, and
there stood a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been.
One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys, and a dull blur of
lights. Our first emotion was deep, unutterable gratitude, our next was
a foolish rage, born of the suspicion that possibly the hotel had been
visible three-quarters of an hour while we sat there in those cold
puddles quarreling.
Yes, it was the Rigi-Kulm hotel--the one that occupies the extreme
summit, and whose remote little sparkle of lights we had often seen
glinting high aloft among the stars from our balcony away down yonder
in Lucerne. The crusty portier and the crusty clerks gave us the
surly reception which their kind deal out in prosperous times, but by
mollifying them with an extra display of obsequiousness and servility
we finally got them to show us to the room which our boy had engaged for
us.
We got into some dry clothing, and while our supper was preparing we
loafed forsakenly through a couple of vast cavernous drawing-rooms,
one of which had a stove in it. This stove was in a corner, and densely
walled around with people. We could not get near the fire, so we moved
at large in the artic spaces, among a multitude of people who sat
silent, smileless, forlorn, and shivering--thinking what fools they were
to come, perhaps. There were some Americans and some Germans, but one
could see that the great majority were English.
We lounged into an apartment where there was a great crowd, to see
what was going on. It was a memento-magazine. The tourists were eagerly
buying all sorts and styles of paper-cutters, marked “Souvenir of the
Rigi,” with handles made of the little curved horn of the ostensible
chamois; there were all manner of wooden goblets and such things,
similarly marked. I was going to buy a paper-cutter, but I believed
I could remember the cold comfort of the Rigi-Kulm without it, so I
smothered the impulse.
Supper warmed us, and we went immediately to bed--but first, as Mr.
Baedeker requests all tourists to call his attention to any errors which
they may find in his guide-books, I dropped him a line to inform him he
missed it by just about three days. I had previously informed him of his
mistake about the distance from Allerheiligen to Oppenau, and had also
informed the Ordnance Depart of the German government of the same error
in the imperial maps. I will add, here, that I never got any answer to
those letters, or any thanks from either of those sources; and, what is
still more discourteous, these corrections have not been made, either in
the maps or the guide-books. But I will write again when I get time, for
my letters may have miscarried.
We curled up in the clammy beds, and went to sleep without rocking. We
were so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor turned over till
the blooming blasts of the Alpine horn aroused us.
It may well be imagined that we did not lose any time. We snatched on
a few odds and ends of clothing, cocooned ourselves in the proper red
blankets, and plunged along the halls and out into the whistling wind
bareheaded. We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak of the
summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it. We rushed up the stairs
to the top of this scaffolding, and stood there, above the vast outlying
world, with hair flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the
fierce breeze.
“Fifteen minutes too late, at last!” said Harris, in a vexed voice. “The
sun is clear above the horizon.”
“No matter,” I said, “it is a most magnificent spectacle, and we will
see it do the rest of its rising anyway.”
In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us, and dead to
everything else. The great cloud-barred disk of the sun stood just above
a limitless expanse of tossing white-caps--so to speak--a billowy chaos
of massy mountain domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and
flooded with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors,
while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun, radiating
lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith. The cloven valleys of the
lower world swam in a tinted mist which veiled the ruggedness of their
crags and ribs and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region
into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.
We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze in
drunken ecstasy and drink in it. Presently Harris exclaimed:
“Why--nation, it's going DOWN!”
Perfectly true. We had missed the MORNING hornblow, and slept all day.
This was stupefying.
Harris said:
“Look here, the sun isn't the spectacle--it's US--stacked up here on top
of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets, and two hundred and fifty
well-dressed men and women down here gawking up at us and not caring
a straw whether the sun rises or sets, as long as they've got such a
ridiculous spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books. They
seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there's one girl there that
appears to be going all to pieces. I never saw such a man as you before.
I think you are the very last possibility in the way of an ass.”
“What have I done?” I answered, with heat.
“What have you done? You've got up at half past seven o'clock in the
evening to see the sun rise, that's what you've done.”
“And have you done any better, I'd like to know? I've always used to
get up with the lark, till I came under the petrifying influence of your
turgid intellect.”
“YOU used to get up with the lark--Oh, no doubt--you'll get up with the
hangman one of these days. But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing
here like this, in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top of the
Alps. And no end of people down here to boot; this isn't any place for
an exhibition of temper.”
And so the customary quarrel went on. When the sun was fairly down, we
slipped back to the hotel in the charitable gloaming, and went to bed
again. We had encountered the horn-blower on the way, and he had tried
to collect compensation, not only for announcing the sunset, which we
did see, but for the sunrise, which we had totally missed; but we said
no, we only took our solar rations on the “European plan”--pay for what
you get. He promised to make us hear his horn in the morning, if we were
alive.
A TRAMP ABROAD, Part 5.
By Mark Twain
(Samuel L. Clemens)
First published in 1880
Illustrations taken from an 1880 First Edition
* * * * * *
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
2. TITIAN'S MOSES
3. THE AUTHOR'S MEMORIES
178. EXCEEDINGLY COMFORTABLE
179. THE SUNRISE
180. THE RIGI-KULM
181. AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
182. TAIL PIECE
183. RAILWAY DOWN THE MOUNTAIN
184. SOURCE OF THE RHONE
185. A GLACIER TABLE
186. GLACIER OF GRINDELWALD
187. DAWN ON THE MOUNTAINS
188. TAIL PIECE
189. NEW AND OLD STYLE
190. ST NICHOLAS, AS A HERMIT
191. A LANDSLIDE
192. GOLDAU VALLEY BEFORE AND AFTER THE LANDSLIDE
193. THE WAY THEY DO IT
194. OUR GALLANT DRIVER
195. A MOUNTAIN PASS
196. “I'M OFUL DRY”
197. IT'S THE FASHION
198. WHAT WE EXPECTED
199. WE MISSED THE SCENERY
200. THE TOURISTS
201. THE YOUNG BRIDE
202. “IT WAS A FAMOUS VICTORY
203. PROMENADE IN INTERLAKEN
204. THE JUNGFRAU BY M.T.
205. STREET IN INTERLAKEN
206. WITHOUT A COURIER
207. TRAVELING WITH A COURIER
208. TAIL PIECE