A Tramp Abroad
another, till she finished her dinner and went out; they wanted to see
her at full altitude, and they found it worth tarrying for. She filled
one's idea of what an empress ought to be, when she rose up in her
unapproachable grandeur and moved superbly out of that place.
We were not at Leuk in time to see her at her heaviest weight. She had
suffered from corpulence and had come there to get rid of her extra
flesh in the baths. Five weeks of soaking--five uninterrupted hours of
it every day--had accomplished her purpose and reduced her to the right
proportions.
Those baths remove fat, and also skin-diseases. The patients remain in
the great tanks for hours at a time. A dozen gentlemen and ladies occupy
a tank together, and amuse themselves with rompings and various games.
They have floating desks and tables, and they read or lunch or play
chess in water that is breast-deep. The tourist can step in and view
this novel spectacle if he chooses. There's a poor-box, and he will have
to contribute. There are several of these big bathing-houses, and you
can always tell when you are near one of them by the romping noises and
shouts of laughter that proceed from it. The water is running water, and
changes all the time, else a patient with a ringworm might take the bath
with only a partial success, since, while he was ridding himself of the
ringworm, he might catch the itch.
The next morning we wandered back up the green valley, leisurely, with
the curving walls of those bare and stupendous precipices rising
into the clouds before us. I had never seen a clean, bare precipice
stretching up five thousand feet above me before, and I never shall
expect to see another one. They exist, perhaps, but not in places where
one can easily get close to them. This pile of stone is peculiar. From
its base to the soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and all
its details vaguely suggest human architecture. There are rudimentary
bow-windows, cornices, chimneys, demarcations of stories, etc. One could
sit and stare up there and study the features and exquisite graces of
this grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never weary his
interest. The termination, toward the town, observed in profile, is the
perfection of shape. It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of
rounded, colossal, terracelike projections--a stairway for the gods; at
its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers, one after another,
with faint films of vapor curling always about them like spectral
banners. If there were a king whose realms included the whole world,
here would be the place meet and proper for such a monarch. He would
only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light. He could give
audience to a nation at a time under its roof.
Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with a glass
the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche that once swept down
from some pine-grown summits behind the town and swept away the houses
and buried the people; then we struck down the road that leads toward
the Rhone, to see the famous Ladders. These perilous things are built
against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or three hundred feet
high. The peasants, of both sexes, were climbing up and down them, with
heavy loads on their backs. I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I
could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he accomplished
the feat successfully, through a subagent, for three francs, which I
paid. It makes me shudder yet when I think of what I felt when I was
clinging there between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy. At
times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep from letting go,
so dizzying was the appalling danger. Many a person would have given up
and descended, but I stuck to my task, and would not yield until I had
accomplished it. I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not have
repeated it for the wealth of the world. I shall break my neck yet with
some such foolhardy performance, for warnings never seem to have any
lasting effect on me. When the people of the hotel found that I had
been climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of considerable
attention.
Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took the train for
Visp. There we shouldered our knapsacks and things, and set out on foot,
in a tremendous rain, up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt. Hour after
hour we slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble Lesser
Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green all the way up and
had little atomy Swiss homes perched upon grassy benches along their
mist-dimmed heights.
The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we continued
to enjoy both. At the one spot where this torrent tossed its white mane
highest, and thundered loudest, and lashed the big boulders fiercest,
the canton had done itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden
bridge that exists in the world. While we were walking over it, along
with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even the larger raindrops made
it shake. I called Harris's attention to it, and he noticed it, too.
It seemed to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake, and I
thought a good deal of him, I would think twice before I would ride him
over that bridge.
We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half past four
in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through the fertilizer-juice, and
stopped at a new and nice hotel close by the little church. We stripped
and went to bed, and sent our clothes down to be baked. And the horde
of soaked tourists did the same. That chaos of clothing got mixed in the
kitchen, and there were consequences.
I did not get back the same drawers I sent down, when our things came up
at six-fifteen; I got a pair on a new plan. They were merely a pair
of white ruffle-cuffed absurdities, hitched together at the top with
a narrow band, and they did not come quite down to my knees. They were
pretty enough, but they made me feel like two people, and disconnected
at that. The man must have been an idiot that got himself up like
that, to rough it in the Swiss mountains. The shirt they brought me
was shorter than the drawers, and hadn't any sleeves to it--at least
it hadn't anything more than what Mr. Darwin would call “rudimentary”
sleeves; these had “edging” around them, but the bosom was ridiculously
plain. The knit silk undershirt they brought me was on a new plan, and
was really a sensible thing; it opened behind, and had pockets in it to
put your shoulder-blades in; but they did not seem to fit mine, and so
I found it a sort of uncomfortable garment. They gave my bobtail coat
to somebody else, and sent me an ulster suitable for a giraffe. I had
to tie my collar on, because there was no button behind on that foolish
little shirt which I described a while ago.
When I was dressed for dinner at six-thirty, I was too loose in some
places and too tight in others, and altogether I felt slovenly and
ill-conditioned. However, the people at the table d'hôte were no better
off than I was; they had everybody's clothes but their own on. A
long stranger recognized his ulster as soon as he saw the tail of it
following me in, but nobody claimed my shirt or my drawers, though I
described them as well as I was able. I gave them to the chambermaid
that night when I went to bed, and she probably found the owner, for my
own things were on a chair outside my door in the morning.
There was a lovable English clergyman who did not get to the table
d'hôte at all. His breeches had turned up missing, and without any
equivalent. He said he was not more particular than other people, but he
had noticed that a clergyman at dinner without any breeches was almost
sure to excite remark.
A TRAMP ABROAD, Part 6.
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
236. A SUNDAY MORNING'S DEMON
237. JUST SAVED
238. SCENE IN VALLEY OF ZERMATT
239. ARRIVAL AT ZERMATT
240. FITTED OUT
241. A FEARFUL FALL
242. TAIL PIECE
243. ALL READY
244. THE MARCH
245. THE CARAVAN
246. THE HOOK
247. THE DISABLED CHAPLAIN
248. TRYING EXPERIMENTS
249. SAVED! SAVED!
250. TWENTY MINUTES WORK
251. THE BLACK RAM
252. THE MIRACLE
253. THE NEW GUIDE
251. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES
255. MOUNTAIN CHALET
256. THE GRANDSON
257. OCCASIONLY MET WITH
258. SUMMIT OF THE GORNER GRAT
259. CHIEFS OF THE ADVANCE GUARD
260. MY PICTURE OF THE MATTERHORN
261. EVERYBODY HAD AN EXCUSE
262. SPRUNG A LEAK
263. A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION
264. A TERMINAL MORAINE
265. FRONT OF GLACIER
266. AN OLD MORAINE
267. GLACIER OF ZERMATT WITH LATERAL MORAINE
269. UNEXPECTED MEETING OF FRIENDS
269. VILLAGE OF CHAMONIX
270. THE MATTERHORN
271. ON THE SUMMIT
272. ACCIDENT ON THE MATTERHORN (1865)
273. ROPED TOGETHER
274. STORAGE OF ANCESTORS
275. FALLING OUT OF HIS FARM
276. CHILD LIFE IN SWITZERLAND
277. A SUNDAY PLAY
278. THE COMBINATION
279. CHILLON
280. THE TETE NOIR
281. MONT BLANC'S NEIGHBORS
282. AN EXQUISITE THING
283. A WILD RIDE
284. SWISS PEASANT GIRL
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER XXXVI Sunday Church Bells--A Cause of
Profanity--A Magnificent Glacier--Fault Finding by Harris--Almost
an Accident--Selfishness of Harris--Approaching Zermatt--The
Matterhorn--Zermatt--Home of Mountain Climbers--Fitted out for
Climbing--A Fearful Adventure --Never Satisfied
CHAPTER XXXVII A Calm Decision--“I Will Ascend the
Riffelberg”--Preparations for the Trip--All Zermatt on the
Alert--Schedule of Persons and Things--An Unprecedented Display--A
General Turn--out--Ready for a Start--The Post of Danger--The Advance
Directed--Grand Display of Umbrellas--The First Camp--Almost a
Panic--Supposed to be Lost--The First Accident--A Chaplain Disabled--An
Experimenting Mule--Good Effects of a Blunder--Badly Lost--A
Reconnoiter--Mystery and Doubt--Stern Measures Taken--A Black Ram--Saved
by a Miracle--The Guide's Guide
CHAPTER XXXVIII Our Expedition Continued--Experiments with the
Barometer--Boiling Thermometer--Barometer Soup--An Interesting
Scientific Discovery--Crippling a Latinist--A Chaplain Injured--Short
of Barkeepers--Digging a Mountain Cellar--A Young American
Specimen--Somebody's Grandson--Arrival at Riffelberg Botel--Ascent of
Gorner Grat--Faith in Thermometers--The Matterhorn
CHAPTER XXXIX Guide Books--Plans for the Return of the Expedition--A
Glacier Train--Parachute Descent from Gorner Grat--Proposed Honors
to Harris Declined--All had an Excuse--A Magnificent Idea
Abandoned--Descent to the Glacier--A Supposed Leak--A Slow Train--The
Glacier Abandoned--Journey to Zermatt--A Scientific Question
CHAPTER XL Glaciers--Glacier Perils--Moraines--Terminal
Moraines--Lateral Moraines--Immense Size of Glacier--Traveling
Glacier----General Movements of Glaciers--Ascent of Mont Blacc--Loss
of Guides--Finding of Remains--Meeting of Old Friends--The Dead and
Living--Proposed Museum--The Relics at Chamonix
CHAPTER XLI The Matterhorn Catastrophe of 1563--Mr Whymper's
Narrative--Ascent of the Matterhorn--The Summit--The Matterhorn
Conquered--The Descent Commenced--A Fearful Disaster--Death of Lord
Douglas and Two Others--The Graves of the Two
CHAPTER XLII Switzerland--Graveyard at Zermatt--Balloting for
Marriage--Farmers as Heroes--Falling off a Farm--From St Nicholas to