A Tramp Abroad — Volume 04

  We told him to clear out, then, and leave the things at the uppermosthotel and say we should be along presently. He said he would secure us ahotel if he could, but if they were all full he would ask them to buildanother one and hurry up and get the paint and plaster dry against wearrived. Still gently chaffing us, he pushed ahead, up the trail, andsoon disappeared. By six o'clock we were pretty high up in the air,and the view of lake and mountains had greatly grown in breadth andinterest. We halted awhile at a little public house, where we had breadand cheese and a quart or two of fresh milk, out on the porch, with thebig panorama all before us--and then moved on again.

  Ten minutes afterward we met a hot, red-faced man plunging down themountain, making mighty strides, swinging his alpenstock ahead of him,and taking a grip on the ground with its iron point to support thesebig strides. He stopped, fanned himself with his hat, swabbed theperspiration from his face and neck with a red handkerchief, panteda moment or two, and asked how far to Waeggis. I said three hours. Helooked surprised, and said:

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

  I said it was.

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

  I asked:

  "Are we nearly to the top?"

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

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

  The German landlady gave us neat rooms and nice beds, and when I and myagent turned in, it was with the resolution to be up early and make theutmost of our first Alpine sunrise. But of course we were dead tired,and slept like policemen; so when we awoke in the morning and ran to thewindow it was already too late, because it was half past eleven. Itwas a sharp disappointment. However, we ordered breakfast and told thelandlady to call the Englishman, but she said he was already up and offat daybreak--and swearing like mad about something or other. We couldnot find out what the matter was. He had asked the landlady the altitudeof her place above the level of the lake, and she told him fourteenhundred and ninety-five feet. That was all that was said; then he losthis temper. He said that between ------fools and guide-books, a mancould acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours in a country likethis to last him a year. Harris believed our boy had been loading himup with misinformation; and this was probably the case, for his epithetdescribed that boy to a dot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  During breakfast our spirits came up a little, since we found by thisguide-book that in the hotels on the summit the tourist is not left totrust to luck for his sunrise, but is roused betimes by a man who goesthrough the halls with a great Alpine horn, blowing blasts that wouldraise the dead. And there was another consoling thing: the guide-booksaid 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. Thiswas good; this would be romantic; two hundred and fifty people groupedon the windy summit, with their hair flying and their red blanketsflapping, in the solemn presence of the coming sun, would be a strikingand memorable spectacle. So it was good luck, not ill luck, that we hadmissed those other sunrises.

  We were informed by the guide-book that we were now 3,228 feet abovethe level of the lake--therefore full two-thirds of our journey had beenaccomplished. We got away at a quarter past four P.M.; a hundred yardsabove the hotel the railway divided; one track went straight up thesteep hill, the other one turned square off to the right, with a veryslight 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 wehad gone on, we should have arrived at the summit, but Harrispreferred to ask a lot of questions--as usual, of a man who didn't knowanything--and he told us to go back and follow the other route. We didso. We could ill afford this loss of time.

  We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about fortysummits, but there was always another one just ahead. It came on torain, and it rained in dead earnest. We were soaked through and itwas bitter cold. Next a smoky fog of clouds covered the whole regiondensely, 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 thetrack, but by and by when the fog blew aside a little and we saw that wewere treading the rampart of a precipice and that our left elbows wereprojecting 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 theevening the fog lifted and showed us a well-worn path which led up avery steep rise to the left. We took it, and as soon as we had got farenough 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 rightalong, in order to keep warm, though we rather expected to go over aprecipice, sooner or later. About nine o'clock we made an importantdiscovery--that we were not in any path. We groped around a while on ourhands and knees, but we could not find it; so we sat down in the mud andthe wet scant grass to wait.

  We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted with a vastbody which showed itself vaguely for an instant and in the next instantwas 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 aprecipice, and decided not to try to claw up it.

  We sat there an hour, with chattering teeth and quivering bodies, andquarreled over all sorts of trifles, but gave most of our attention toabusing each other for the stupidity of deserting the railway-track. Wesat with our backs to the precipice, because what little wind there wascame 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 thethinness could not show; but at last Harris happened to look around, andthere stood a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been.One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys, and a dull blur oflights. Our first emotion was deep, unutterable gratitude, our next wasa foolish rage, born of the suspicion that possibly the hotel had beenvisible three-quarters of an hour while we sat there in those coldpuddles quarreling.

  Yes, it was the Rigi-Kulm hotel--the one that occupies the extremesummit, and whose remote little sparkle of lights we had often seenglinting high aloft among the stars from our balcony away down yonderin Lucerne. The crusty portier and the crusty clerks gave us thesurly reception which their kind deal out in prosperous times, but bymollifying them with an extra display of obsequiousness and servilitywe finally got them to show us to the room which our boy had engaged forus.

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

  We lounged into an apartment where there was a great crowd, to seewhat was going on. It was a memento-magazine. The tourists were eagerlybuying all sorts and styles of paper-cutters, marked "Souvenir of theRigi," with handles made of the little curved horn of the ostensiblechamois; there were all manner of wooden goblets and such things,similarly marked. I was going to buy a paper-cutter, but I believedI could remember the cold comfort of the Rigi-Kulm without it, so Ismothered 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 whichthey may find in his guide-books, I dropped him a line to inform him hemissed it by just about three days. I had previously informed him of hismistake about the distance from Allerheiligen to Oppenau, and had alsoinformed the Ordnance Depart of the German government of the same errorin the imperial maps. I will add, here, that I never got any answer tothose letters, or any thanks from either of those sources; and, what isstill more discourteous, these corrections have not been made, either inthe maps or the guide-books. But I will write again when I get time, formy letters may have miscarried.

  We curled up in the clammy beds, and went to sleep without rocking. Wewere so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor turned over tillthe blooming blasts of the Alpine horn aroused us.

  It may well be imagined that we did not lose any time. We snatched ona few odds and ends of clothing, cocooned ourselves in the proper redblankets, and plunged along the halls and out into the whistling windbareheaded. We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak of thesummit, a hundred yards away, and made for it. We rushed up the stairsto the top of this scaffolding, and stood there, above the vast outlyingworld, with hair flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in thefierce breeze.

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

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

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

  We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze indrunken 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 topof this gallows, in these idiotic blankets, and two hundred and fiftywell-dressed men and women down here gawking up at us and not caringa straw whether the sun rises or sets, as long as they've got such aridiculous spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books. Theyseem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there's one girl there thatappears 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 theevening 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
toget up with the lark, till I came under the petrifying influence of yourturgid intellect."

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