Then - Whish, Roar, Eclipse, Darkness And Sulphureted Hydrogen!
- We
would dive into another tunnel and out again - gasping - on a
breathtaking panorama of mountains.
Some of them would be standing
up against the sky like the jagged top of a half-finished cutout
puzzle, and some would be buried so deeply in clouds that only their
peaked blue noses showed sharp above the featherbed mattresses of
mist in which they were snuggled, as befitted mountains of Teutonic
extraction. And nearly every eminence was crowned with a ruined
castle or a hotel. It was easy to tell a hotel from a ruin - it
had a sign over the door.
At one of those hotels I met up with a homesick American. He was
marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he
could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy
from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had
become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered
any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes
was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct;
so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show
me something that was even a greater curiosity than a bathtub, and
he led me to where a moonfaced barometer hung alongside the front
entrance of the hotel.
He said he had been there a week now and had about lost hope; but
every time he threatened to move on, the proprietor would take him
out there and prove that they were bound to have clearing weather
within a few hours, because the barometer registered fair.
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