A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

in a noble excitement and said the ropes and the guides

were secured, and asked if I was ready. I said I

believed I wouldn’t ascend the Altels this time.

I said Alp-climbing was a different thing from what I had

supposed it was, and so I judged we had better study its

points a little more before we went definitely into it.

But I told him to retain the guides and order them to

follow us to Zermatt, because I meant to use them there.

I said I could feel the spirit of adventure beginning

to stir in me, and was sure that the fell fascination

of Alp-climbing would soon be upon me. I said he could

make up his mind to it that we would do a deed before we

were a week older which would make the hair of the timid

curl with fright.

This made Harris happy, and filled him with ambitious

anticipations. He went at once to tell the guides to

follow us to Zermatt and bring all their paraphernalia

with them.

CHAPTER XXXV

[Swindling the Coroner]

A great and priceless thing is a new interest! How

it takes possession of a man! how it clings to him,

how it rides him! I strode onward from the Schwarenback

hostelry a changed man, a reorganized personality.

I walked into a new world, I saw with new eyes.

I had been looking aloft at the giant show-peaks only as

things to be worshiped for their grandeur and magnitude,

and their unspeakable grace of form; I looked up at

them now, as also things to be conquered and climbed.

My sense of their grandeur and their noble beauty

was neither lost nor impaired; I had gained a new

interest in the mountains without losing the old ones.

I followed the steep lines up, inch by inch, with my eye,

and noted the possibility or impossibility of following

them with my feet. When I saw a shining helmet of ice

projecting above the clouds, I tried to imagine I saw

files of black specks toiling up it roped together with a

gossamer thread.

We skirted the lonely little lake called the Daubensee,

and presently passed close by a glacier on the right–

a thing like a great river frozen solid in its flow

and broken square off like a wall at its mouth.

I had never been so near a glacier before.

Here we came upon a new board shanty, and found some men

engaged in building a stone house; so the Schwarenback was

soon to have a rival. We bought a bottle or so of beer here;

at any rate they called it beer, but I knew by the price

that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the

taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.

We were surrounded by a hideous desolation. We stepped

forward to a sort of jumping-off place, and were confronted

by a startling contrast: we seemed to look down into fairyland.

Two or three thousand feet below us was a bright green level,

with a pretty town in its midst, and a silvery stream

winding among the meadows; the charming spot was walled

in on all sides by gigantic precipices clothed with pines;

and over the pines, out of the softened distances,

rose the snowy domes and peaks of the Monte Rosa region.

How exquisitely green and beautiful that little valley

down there was! The distance was not great enough to

obliterate details, it only made them little, and mellow,

and dainty, like landscapes and towns seen through the

wrong end of a spy-glass.

Right under us a narrow ledge rose up out of the valley,

with a green, slanting, bench-shaped top, and grouped

about upon this green-baize bench were a lot of black

and white sheep which looked merely like oversized worms.

The bench seemed lifted well up into our neighborhood,

but that was a deception–it was a long way down to it.

We began our descent, now, by the most remarkable road I

have ever seen. It wound it corkscrew curves down the face

of the colossal precipice–a narrow way, with always

the solid rock wall at one elbow, and perpendicular