There was a very attractive little
hotel close by, but our energies were not conquered yet,
so we went on.
Three hours afterward we came to the railway-track. It
was planted straight up the mountain with the slant
of a ladder that leans against a house, and it seemed
to us that man would need good nerves who proposed
to travel up it or down it either.
During the latter part of the afternoon we cooled our
roasting interiors with ice-cold water from clear streams,
the only really satisfying water we had tasted since we
left home, for at the hotels on the continent they
merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in,
and that only modifies its hotness, doesn't make it cold.
Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by
being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.
Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion. How do they
know? - they never drink any.
At ten minutes past six we reached the Kaltbad station,
where there is a spacious hotel with great verandas which
command a majestic expanse of lake and mountain scenery.
We were pretty well fagged out, now, but as we did
not wish to miss the Alpine sunrise, we got through our
dinner as quickly as possible and hurried off to bed.
It was unspeakably comfortable 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 instant 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 as 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.
