A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and

all its details vaguely suggest human architecture.

There are rudimentary bow-windows, cornices, chimneys,

demarcations of stories, etc. One could sit and stare up

there and study the features and exquisite graces of this

grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never

weary his interest. The termination, toward the town,

observed in profile, is the perfection of shape.

It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of rounded,

colossal, terracelike projections–a stairway for the gods;

at its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers,

one after another, with faint films of vapor curling

always about them like spectral banners. If there were

a king whose realms included the whole world, here would

be the place meet and proper for such a monarch. He would

only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light.

He could give audience to a nation at a time under its roof.

Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with

a glass the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche

that once swept down from some pine-grown summits behind

the town and swept away the houses and buried the people;

then we struck down the road that leads toward the Rhone,

to see the famous Ladders. These perilous things are

built against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or

three hundred feet high. The peasants, of both sexes,

were climbing up and down them, with heavy loads on

their backs. I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I

could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he

accomplished the feat successfully, though a subagent,

for three francs, which I paid. It makes me shudder yet

when I think of what I felt when I was clinging there

between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy.

At times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep

from letting go, so dizzying was the appalling danger.

Many a person would have given up and descended, but I stuck

to my task, and would not yield until I had accomplished it.

I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not

have repeated it for the wealth of the world. I shall

break my neck yet with some such foolhardy performance,

for warnings never seem to have any lasting effect on me.

When the people of the hotel found that I had been

climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of

considerable attention.

Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took

the train for Visp. There we shouldered our knapsacks

and things, and set out on foot, in a tremendous rain,

up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt. Hour after hour we

slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble

Lesser Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green

all the way up and had little atomy Swiss homes perched

upon grassy benches along their mist-dimmed heights.

The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we

continued to enjoy both. At the one spot where this torrent

tossed its white mane highest, and thundered loudest,

and lashed the big boulders fiercest, the canton had done

itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden bridge

that exists in the world. While we were walking over it,

along with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even

the larger raindrops made it shake. I called Harris’s

attention to it, and he noticed it, too. It seemed

to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake,

and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice

before I would ride him over that bridge.

We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half

past four in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through

the fertilizer-juice, and stopped at a new and nice hotel

close by the little church. We stripped and went to bed,

and sent our clothes down to be baked. And the horde

of soaked tourists did the same. That chaos of clothing

got mixed in the kitchen, and there were consequences.

I did not get back the same drawers I sent down, when our