Tarascon, five minutes’ stop! The Club of the Alpines.
Explanation of P. C. A. Rabbits of warren and cabbage
rabbits. This is my last will and testament. The Sirop de
cadavre. First ascension, Tartarin takes out his spectacles.
When that name “Tarascon” sounds trumpetlike along the track of the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean, in the limpid, vibrant blue of a Provençal
sky, inquisitive heads are visible at all the doors of the express
train, and from carriage to carriage the travellers say to each other:
“Ah! here is Tarascon!.. Now, for a look at Tarascon.”
What they can see of it is, nevertheless, nothing more than a very
ordinary, quiet, clean little town with towers, roofs, and a bridge
across the Rhone. But the Tarasconese sun and its marvellous effects
of mirage, so fruitful in surprises, inventions, delirious absurdities,
this joyous little populace, not much larger than a chick-pea, which
reflects and sums up in itself the instincts of the whole French South,
lively, restless, gabbling, exaggerated, comical, impressionable--that
is what the people on the express-train look out for as they pass, and
it is that which has made the popularity of the place.
In memorable pages, which modesty prevents him from mentioning more
explicitly, the historiographer of Tarascon essayed, once upon a time,
to depict the happy days of the little town, leading its club life,
singing its romantic songs (each his own) and, for want of real game,
organizing curious cap-hunts. Then, war having come and the dark times,
Tarascon became known by its heroic defence, its torpedoed esplanade,
the club and the Café de la Comédie, both made impregnable; all the
inhabitants enrolled in guerilla companies, their breasts braided with
death’s head and cross-bones, all beards grown, and such a display
of battle-axes, boarding cutlasses, and American revolvers that the
unfortunate inhabitants ended by frightening themselves and no longer
daring to approach one another in the streets.
Many years have passed since the war, many a worthless almanac has been
put in the fire, but Tarascon has never forgotten; and, renouncing the
futile amusements of other days, it thinks of nothing now but how to
make blood and muscle for the service of future revenge. Societies for
pistol-shooting and gymnastics, costumed and equipped, all having band
and banners; armouries, boxing-gloves, single-sticks, list-shoes; foot
races and flat-hand fights between persons in the best society; these
things have taken the place of the former cap-hunts and the platonic
cynegetical discussions in the shop of the gunsmith Costecalde.
And finally the club, the old club itself, abjuring bouillotte and
bézique, is now transformed into a “Club Alpin” under the patronage of
the famous Alpine Club of London, which has borne even to India the fame
of its climbers. With this difference, that the Tarasconese, instead of
expatriating themselves on foreign summits, are content with those they
have in hand, or rather underfoot, at the gates of their town.
“The Alps of Tarascon?” you ask. No; but the Alpines, that chain of
mountainettes, redolent of thyme and lavender, not very dangerous, nor
yet very high (five to six hundred feet above sea-level), which make an
horizon of blue waves along the Provençal roads and are decorated by the
local imagination with the fabulous and characteristic names of: Mount
Terrible; The End of the World; The Peak of the Giants, etc.
‘T is a pleasure to see, of a Sunday morning, the gaitered Tarasconese,
pickaxe in hand, knapsack and tent on their backs, starting off, bugles
in advance, for ascensions, of which the _Forum_, the local
journal, gives full account with a descriptive luxury and wealth of
epithets--abysses, gulfs, terrifying gorges--as if the said ascension
were among the Himalayas. You can well believe that from this exercise
the aborigines have acquired fresh strength and the “double muscles”
heretofore reserved to the only Tartarin, the good, the brave, the
heroic Tartarin.
If Tarascon epitomizes the South, Tartarin epitomizes Tarascon. He is
not only the first citizen of the town, he is its soul, its genius, he
has all its finest whimseys. We know his former exploits, his triumphs
as a singer (oh! that duet of “Robert le Diable” in Bézuquet’s
pharmacy!), and the amazing odyssey of his lion-hunts, from which he
returned with that splendid camel, the last in Algeria, since deceased,
laden with honours and preserved in skeleton at the town museum among
other Tarasconese curiosities.
Tartarin himself has not degenerated; teeth still good and eyes good, in
spite of his fifties; still that amazing imagination which brings nearer
and enlarges all objects with the power of a telescope. He remains the
same man as he of whom the brave Commander Bravida used to say: “He’s a
_lapin_...”
Or, rather, _two lapins!_ For in Tartarin, as in all the Tarasconese,
there is a warren race and a cabbage race, very clearly accentuated:
the roving rabbit of the warren, adventurous, headlong; and the
cabbage-rabbit, homekeeping, coddling, nervously afraid of fatigue, of
draughts, and of any and all accidents that may lead to death.
We know that this prudence did not prevent him from showing himself
brave and even heroic on occasion; but it is permissible to ask what
he was doing on the Rigi (_Regina Montium_) at his age, when he had so
dearly bought the right to rest and comfort.
To that inquiry the infamous Costecalde can alone reply.
Costecalde, gunsmith by trade, represents a type that is rather rare in
Tarascon. Envy, base, malignant envy, is visible in the wicked curve of
his thin lips, and a species of yellow bile, proceeding from his liver
in puffs, suffuses his broad, clean-shaven, regular face, with its
surface dented as if by a hammer, like an ancient coin of Tiberius or
Caracalla. Envy with him is a disease, which he makes no attempt
to hide, and, with the fine Tarasconese temperament that overlays
everything, he sometimes says in speaking of his infirmity: “You don’t
know how that hurts me...”
Naturally the curse of Costecalde is Tartarin. So much fame for a single
man! He everywhere! always he! And slowly, subterraneously, like a
worm within the gilded wood of an idol, he saps from below for the last
twenty years that triumphant renown, and gnaws it, and hollows it. When,
in the evening, at the club, Tartarin relates his encounters with lions
and his wanderings in the great Sahara, Costecalde sits by with mute
little laughs, and incredulous shakes of the head.
“But the skins, _au mouain_, Costecalde... those lions’ skins he sent
us, which are there, in the salon of the club?..”
“_Té! pardi_... Do you suppose there are no furriers in Algeria?..”
“But the marks of the balls, all round, in the heads?”
“_Et autremain_, did n’t we ourselves in the days of the cap-hunts see
ragged caps torn with bullets at the hatters’ for sale to clumsy shots?”
No doubt the long established fame of Tartarin as a slayer of wild
beasts resisted these attacks; but the Alpinist in himself was open to
criticism, and Costecalde did not deprive himself of the opportunity,
being furious that a man should be elected as president of the “Club
of the Alpines” whom age had visibly overweighted and whose liking,
acquired in Algeria, for Turkish slippers and flowing garments
predisposed to laziness.
In fact, Tartarin seldom took part in the ascensions; he was satisfied
to accompany them with votive wishes, and to read in full session, with
rolling eyes, and intonations that turned the ladies pale, the tragic
narratives of the expeditions.
Costecalde, on the contrary, wiry, vigorous “Cock-leg,” as they called
him, was always the foremost climber; he had done the Alpines, one by
one, planting on their summits inaccessible the banner of the Club, _La
Tarasque_, starred in silver. Nevertheless, he was only vice-president,
V. P. C. A. But he manipulated the place so well that evidently, at the
coming elections, Tartarin would be made to skip.
Warned by his faithfuls--Bézuquet the apothecary, Excourbaniès, the
brave Commander Bravida--the hero was at first possessed by black
disgust, by that indignant rancour which ingratitude and injustice
arouse in the noblest soul. He wanted to quit everything, to expatriate
himself, to cross the bridge and go and live in Beaucaire, among the
Volsci; after that, he grew calmer.
To quit his little house, his garden, his beloved habits, to renounce
his chair as president of the Club of the Alpines, founded by himself,
to resign that majestic P. C. A. which adorned and distinguished his
cards, his letter-paper, and even the lining of his hat! Not possible,
_vé!_ Suddenly there came into his head an electrifying idea...
In a word, the exploits of Costecalde were limited to excursions among
the Alpines. Why should not Tartarin, during the three months that
still intervened before the elections, why should he not attempt some
grandiose adventure? plant, for instance, the standard of the Club on
the highest peak of Europe, the Jungfrau or the Mont Blanc?
What triumph on his return! what a slap in the face to Costecalde when
the _Forum_ should publish an account of the ascension! Who would dare
to dispute his presidency after that?
Immediately he set to work; sent secretly to Paris for quantities of
works on Alpine adventure: Whymper’s “Scrambles,” Tyndall’s “Glaciers,”
the “Mont-Blanc” of Stephen d’Arve, reports of the Alpine Club,
English and Swiss; cramming his head with a mass of mountaineering
terms--chimneys, couloirs, moulins, névés, séracs, moraines,
rotures--without knowing very well what they meant.
At night, his dreams were fearful with interminable slides and sudden
falls into bottomless crevasses. Avalanches rolled him down, icy arêtes
caught his body on the descent; and long after his waking and the
chocolate he always took in bed, the agony and the oppression of that
nightmare clung to him. But all this did not hinder him, once afoot,
from devoting his whole morning to the most laborious training
exercises.
Around Tarascon is a promenade planted with trees which, in the local
dictionary, is called the “Tour de Ville.” Every Sunday afternoon,
the Tarasconese, who, in spite of their imagination, are a people of
routine, make the tour of their town, and always in the same direction.
Tartarin now exercised himself by making it eight times, ten times, of
a morning, and often reversed the way. He walked, his hands behind
his back, with short-mountain-steps, both slow and sure, till the
shopkeepers, alarmed by this infraction of local habits, were lost in
suppositions of all possible kinds.
At home, in his exotic garden, he practised the art of leaping
crevasses, by jumping over the basin in which a few gold-fish were
swimming about among the water-weeds. On two occasions he fell in, and
was forced to change his clothes. Such mishaps inspired him only the
more, and, being subject to vertigo, he practised walking on the
narrow masonry round the edge of the water, to the terror of his old
servant-woman, who understood nothing of these performances.
During this time, he ordered, _in Avignon_, from an excellent locksmith,
crampons of the Whymper pattern, and a Kennedy ice-axe; also he procured
himself a reed-wick lamp, two impermeable coverlets, and two hundred
feet of rope of his own invention, woven with iron wire.
The arrival of these different articles from Avignon, the mysterious
goings and comings which their construction required, puzzled the
Taras-conese much, and it was generally said about town: “The president
is preparing a stroke.” But what? Something grand, you may be sure, for,
in the beautiful words of the brave and sententious Commander Bravida,
retired captain of equipment, who never spoke except in apothegms:
“Eagles hunt no flies.”
With his closest intimates Tartarin remained impenetrable. Only, at the
sessions of the Club, they noticed the quivering of his voice and
the lightning flash of his eyes whenever he addressed Costecalde--the
indirect cause of this new expedition, the dangers and fatigues of which
became more pronounced to his mind the nearer he approached it. The
unfortunate man did not attempt to disguise them; in fact he took so
black a view of the matter that he thought it indispensable to set his
affairs in order, to write those last wishes, the expression of which
is so trying to the Tarasconese, lovers of life, that most of them die
intestate.
On a radiant morning in June, beneath a cloudless arched and splendid
sky, the door of his study open upon the neat little garden with
its gravelled paths, where the exotic plants stretched forth their
motionless lilac shadows, where the fountain tinkled its silvery note
‘mid the merry shouts of the Savoyards, playing at marbles before the
gate, behold Tartarin! in Turkish slippers, wide flannel under-garments,
easy in body, his pipe at hand, reading aloud as he wrote the words:--
“This is my last will and testament.”
Ha! one may have one’s heart in the right place and solidly hooked
there, but these are cruel moments. Nevertheless, neither his hand nor
his voice trembled while he distributed among his fellow-citizens all
the ethnographical riches piled in his little home, carefully dusted and
preserved in immaculate order.
“To the Club of the Alpines, my baobab (_arbos gigantea_) to stand on
the chimney-piece of the hall of sessions;”
To Bravida, his carbines, revolvers, hunting knives, Malay krishes,
tomahawks, and other murderous weapons;
To Excourbaniès, all his pipes, calumets, narghilés, and pipelets for
smoking kif and opium;
To Costecalde--yes, Costecalde himself had his legacy--the famous
poisoned arrows (Do not touch).
Perhaps beneath this gift was the secret hope that the traitor would
touch and die; but nothing of the kind was exhaled by the will, which
closed with the following words, of a divine meekness:
“I beg my dear Alpinists not to forget their president... I wish them
to forgive my enemy as I have forgiven him, although it is he who has
caused my death...”
Here Tartarin was forced to stop, blinded by a flood of tears. For a
minute he beheld himself crushed, lying in fragments at the foot of
a high mountain, his shapeless remains gathered up in a barrow, and
brought back to Tarascon. Oh, the power of that Provençal imagination!
he was present at his own funeral; he heard the lugubrious chants, and
the talk above his grave: “Poor Tartarin, _péchère!_” and, mingling with
the crowd of his faithful friends, he wept for himself.
But immediately after, the sight of the sun streaming into his study and
glittering on the weapons and pipes in their usual order, the song of
that thread of a fountain in the middle of the garden recalled him to
the actual state of things. _Différemment_, why die? Why go, even? Who
obliged him? What foolish vanity! Risk his life for a presidential chair
and three letters!..
‘Twas a passing weakness, and it lasted no longer than any other. At the
end of five minutes the will was finished, signed, the flourish added,
sealed with an enormous black seal, and the great man had concluded his
last preparations for departure.
Once more had the warren Tartarin triumphed over the cabbage Tartarin.
It could be said of the Tarasconese hero, as was said of Turenne: “His
body was not always willing to go into battle, but his will led him
there in spite of himself.”
The evening of that same day, as the last stroke of ten was sounding
from the tower of the town-hall, the streets being already deserted, a
man, after brusquely slamming a door, glided along through the
darkened town, where nothing lighted the fronts of the houses, save
the hanging-lamps of the streets and the pink and green bottles of the
pharmacy Bézuquet, which projected their reflections on the pavement,
together with a silhouette of the apothecary himself resting his elbows
on his desk and sound asleep on the Codex;--a little nap, which he took
every evening from nine to ten, to make himself, so he said, the fresher
at night for those who might need his services. That, between ourselves,
was a mere tarasconade, for no one ever waked him at night, in fact
he himself had cut the bell-wire, in order that he might sleep more
tranquilly.
Suddenly Tartarin entered, loaded with rugs, carpet-bag in hand, and
so pale, so discomposed, that the apothecary, with that fiery local
imagination from which the pharmacy was no preservative, jumped to the
conclusion of some alarming misadventure and was terrified. “Unhappy
man!” he cried, “what is it?.. you are poisoned?.. Quick! quick! some
ipeca...”
And he sprang forward, bustling among his bottles. To stop him, Tartarin
was forced to catch him round the waist. “Listen to me, _qué diable!_”
and his voice grated with the vexation of an actor whose entrance
has been made to miss fire. As soon as the apothecary was rendered
motionless behind the counter by an iron wrist, Tartarin said in a low
voice:--
“Are we alone, Bézuquet?”
“_Bé_! yes,” ejaculated the other, looking about in vague alarm...
“Pascalon has gone to bed.” [ Pascalon was his pupil.] “Mamma too; why do
you ask?”
“Shut the shutters,” commanded Tartarin, without replying; “we might be
seen from without.”
Bézuquet obeyed, trembling. An old bachelor, living with his mother,
whom he never quitted, he had all the gentleness and timidity of a
girl, contrasting oddly with his swarthy skin, his hairy lips, his
great hooked nose above a spreading moustache; in short, the head of an
Algerine pirate before the conquest. These antitheses are frequent in
Tarascon, where heads have too much character, Roman or Saracen, heads
with the expression of models for a school of design, but quite out
of place in bourgeois trades among the manners and customs of a little
town.
For instance, Excourbaniès, who has all the air of a _conquistador_,
companion of Pizarro, rolls flaming eyes in selling haberdashery
to induce the purchase of two sous’ worth of thread. And Bézuquet,
labelling liquorice and _sirupus gummi_, resembles an old sea-rover of
the Barbary coast.
When the shutters were put up and secured by iron bolts and transversal
bars, “Listen, Ferdinand...” said Tartarin, who was fond of calling
people by their Christian names. And thereupon he unbosomed himself,
emptied his heart full of bitterness at the ingratitude of his
compatriots, related the manoeuvres of “Cock-leg,” the trick about to
be played upon him at the coming elections, and the manner in which he
expected to parry the blow.
Before all else, the matter must be kept very secret; it must not
be revealed until the moment when success was assured, unless some
unforeseen accident, one of those frightful catastrophes--“Hey,
Bézuquet! don’t whistle in that way when I talk to you.”
This was one of the apothecary’s ridiculous habits. Not talkative by
nature (a negative quality seldom met with in Tarascon, and which won
him this confidence of the president), his thick lips, always in the
form of an O, had a habit of perpetually whistling that gave him an
appearance of laughing in the nose of the world, even on the gravest
occasions.
So that, while the hero made allusion to his possible death, saying, as
he laid upon the counter a large sealed envelope, “This is my last will
and testament, Bézuquet; it is you whom I have chosen as testamentary
executor...” “Hui... hui... hui...” whistled the apothecary, carried
away by his mania, while at heart he was deeply moved and fully
conscious of the grandeur of his rôle.
Then, the hour of departure being at hand, he desired to drink to the
enterprise, “something good, _qué?_ a glass of the elixir of Garus,
hey?” After several closets had been opened and searched, he remembered
that mamma had the keys of the Garus. To get them it would be necessary
to awaken her and tell who was there. The elixir was therefore changed
to a glass of the _sirop de Calabre_, a summer drink, inoffensive
and modest, which Bézuquet invented, advertising it in the _Forum_
as follows: _Sirop de Calabre, ten sous a bottle, including the glass
(verre)_. “Sirop de Cadavre, including the worms (_vers_),” said that
infernal Costecalde, who spat upon all success. But, after all,
that horrid play upon words only served to swell the sale, and the
Tarasconese to this day delight in their _sirop de cadavre_.
Libations made and a few last words exchanged, they embraced, Bézuquet
whistling as usual in his moustache, adown which rolled great tears.
“Adieu, _au mouain_”... said Tartarin in a rough tone, feeling that
he was about to weep himself, and as the shutter of the door had been
lowered the hero was compelled to creep out of the pharmacy on his hands
and knees.
This was one of the trials of the journey now about to begin.
Three days later he landed in Vitznau at the foot of the Rigi. As the
mountain for his début, the Rigi had attracted him by its low altitude
(5900 feet, about ten times that of Mount Terrible, the highest of the
Alpines) and also on account of the splendid panorama to be seen from
the summit--the Bernese Alps marshalled in line, all white and rosy,
around the lakes, awaiting the moment when the great ascensionist should
cast his ice-axe upon one of them.
Certain of being recognized on the way and perhaps followed--‘t was
a foible of his to believe that throughout all France his fame was as
great and popular as it was at Tarascon--he had made a great détour
before entering Switzerland and did not don his accoutrements until
after he had crossed the frontier. Luckily for him; for never could his
armament have been contained in one French railway-carriage.
But, however convenient the Swiss compartments might be, the Alpinist,
hampered with utensils to which he was not, as yet, accustomed, crushed
toe-nails with his crampons, harpooned travellers who came in his way
with the point of his alpenstock, and wherever he went, in the stations,
the steamers, and the hotel salons, he excited as much amazement as he
did maledictions, avoidance, and angry looks, which he could not explain
to himself though his affectionate and communicative nature suffered
from them. To complete his discomfort, the sky was always gray, with
flocks of clouds and a driving rain.
It rained at Bâle, on the little white houses, washed and rewashed by
the hands of a maid and the waters of heaven. It rained at Lucerne, on
the quay where the trunks and boxes appeared to be saved, as it were,
from shipwreck, and when he arrived at the station of Vitznau, on the
shore of the lake of the Four-Cantons, the same deluge was descending
on the verdant slopes of the Rigi, straddled by inky clouds and striped
with torrents that leaped from rock to rock in cascades of misty sleet,
bringing down as they came the loose stones and the pine-needles. Never
had Tartarin seen so much water.
He entered an inn and ordered a _café au lait_ with honey and butter,
the only really good things he had as yet tasted during his journey.
Then, reinvigorated, and his beard sticky with honey, cleaned on a
corner of his napkin, he prepared to attempt his first ascension.
“_Et autremain_” he asked, as he shifted his knapsack, “how long does it
take to ascend the Rigi?”
“One hour, one hour and a quarter, monsieur; but make haste about it;
the train is just starting.”
“A train upon the Rigi!.. you are joking!..”
Through the leaded panes of the tavern window he was shown the train
that was really starting. Two great covered carriages, windowless,
pushed by a locomotive with a short, corpulent chimney, in shape like a
saucepan, a monstrous insect, clinging to the mountain and clambering,
breathless up its vertiginous slopes.
The two Tartarins, cabbage and warren, both, at the same instant,
revolted at the thought of going up in that hideous mechanism. One
of them thought it ridiculous to climb the Alps in a lift; as for
the other, those aerial bridges on which the track was laid, with the
prospect of a fall of 4000 feet at the slightest derailment, inspired
him with all sorts of lamentable reflections, justified by the little
cemetery of Vitzgau, the white tombs of which lay huddled together at
the foot of the slope, like linen spread out to bleach in the yard of
a wash-house. Evidently the cemetery is there by way of precaution, so
that, in case of accident, the travellers may drop on the very spot.
“I’ll go afoot,” the valiant Tarasconese said to himself; “‘twill
exercise me... zou!”
And he started, wholly preoccupied with manoeuvring his alpenstock
in presence of the staff of the hotel, collected about the door and
shouting directions to him about the path, to which he did not listen.
He first followed an ascending road, paved with large irregular, pointed
stones like a lane at the South, and bordered with wooden gutters to
carry off the rains.
To right and left were great orchards, fields of rank, lush grass
crossed by the same wooden conduits for irrigation through hollowed
trunks of trees. All this made a constant rippling from top to bottom
of the mountain, and every time that the ice-axe of the Alpinist
became hooked as he walked along in the lower branches of an oak or a
walnut-tree, his cap crackled as if beneath the nozzle of a watering-pot.
“Diou! what a lot of water!” sighed the man of the South. But it was
much worse when the pebbly path abruptly ceased and he was forced
to puddle along in the torrent or jump from rock to rock to save his
gaiters. Then a shower joined in, penetrating, steady, and seeming to
get colder the higher he went. When he stopped to recover breath he
could hear nothing else than a vast noise of waters in which he seemed
to be sunk, and he saw, as he turned round, the clouds descending into
the lake in delicate long filaments of spun glass through which the
chalets of Vitznau shone like freshly varnished toys.
Men and children passed him with lowered heads and backs bent beneath
hods of white-wood, containing provisions for some villa or _pension_,
the balconies of which could be distinguished on the slopes.
“Rigi-Kulm?” asked Tartarin, to be sure he was heading in the right
direction. But his extraordinary equipment, especially, that knitted
muffler which masked his face, cast terror along the way, and all
whom he addressed only opened their eyes wide and hastened their steps
without replying.
Soon these encounters became rare. The last human being whom he saw was
an old woman washing her linen in the hollowed trunk of a tree under the
shelter of an enormous red umbrella, planted in the ground.
“Rigi-Kulm?” asked the Alpinist.
The old woman raised an idiotic, cadaverous face, with a goitre swaying
upon her throat as large as the rustic bell of a Swiss cow. Then, after
gazing at him for a long time, she was seized with inextinguishable
laughter, which stretched her mouth from ear to ear, wrinkled up the
corners of her little eyes, and every time she opened them the sight of
Tartarin, planted before her with his ice-axe on his shoulder, redoubled
her joy.
“_Tron de l’air!_” growled the Tarasconese, “lucky for her that she’s
a woman...” Snorting with anger, he continued his way and lost it in a
pine-wood, where his boots slipped on the oozing moss.
Beyond this point the landscape changed. No more paths, or trees, or
pastures. Gloomy, denuded slopes, great boulders of rock which he scaled
on his knees for fear of falling; sloughs full of yellow mud, which he
crossed slowly, feeling before him with his alpenstock and lifting his
feet like a knife-grinder. At every moment he looked at the compass
hanging to his broad watch-ribbon; but whether it were the altitude or
the variations of the temperature, the needle seemed untrue. And how
could he find his bearings in a thick yellow fog that hindered him
from seeing ten steps about him--steps that were now, within a moment,
covered with an icy glaze that made the ascent more difficult.
Suddenly he stopped; the ground whitened vaguely before him... Look out
for your eyes!..
He had come to the region of snows...
Immediately he pulled out his spectacles, took them from their case, and
settled them securely on his nose. The moment was a solemn one. Slightly
agitated, yet proud all the same, it seemed to Tar-tarin that in
one bound he had risen 3000 feet toward the summits and his greatest
dangers.
He now advanced with more precaution, dreaming of crevasses and fissures
such as the books tell of, and cursing in the depths of his heart those
people at the inn who advised him to mount straight and take no guide.
After all, perhaps he had mistaken the mountain! More than six hours had
he tramped, and the Rigi required only three. The wind blew, a chilling
wind that whirled the snow in that crepuscular fog.
Night was about to overtake him. Where find a hut? or even a projecting
rock to shelter him? All of a sudden, he saw before his nose on the
arid, naked plain a species of wooden chalet, bearing, on a long placard
in gigantic type, these letters, which he deciphered with difficulty:
PHO... TO... GRA... PHIE DU RI... GI KULM. At the same instant the vast
hotel with its three hundred windows loomed up before him between the
great lamp-posts, the globes of which were now being lighted in the fog.