A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

the soil should be drenched with blood; and not only that,

but I would set up an opposition show and sell diplomas

at half price.

For two cents I would have done these things, too;

but nobody offered me two cents. I tried to move that

German’s feelings, but it could not be done; he would

not give me his diploma, neither would he sell it to me.

I TOLD him my friend was sick and could not come himself,

but he said he did not care a VERDAMMTES PFENNIG,

he wanted his diploma for himself–did I suppose he was

going to risk his neck for that thing and then give it

to a sick stranger? Indeed he wouldn’t, so he wouldn’t.

I resolved, then, that I would do all I could to injure

Mont Blanc.

In the record-book was a list of all the fatal accidents

which happened on the mountain. It began with the one

in 1820 when the Russian Dr. Hamel’s three guides were

lost in a crevice of the glacier, and it recorded the

delivery of the remains in the valley by the slow-moving

glacier forty-one years later. The latest catastrophe

bore the date 1877.

We stepped out and roved about the village awhile.

In front of the little church was a monument to the memory

of the bold guide Jacques Balmat, the first man who ever

stood upon the summit of Mont Blanc. He made that wild

trip solitary and alone. He accomplished the ascent

a number of times afterward. A stretch of nearly half

a century lay between his first ascent and his last one.

At the ripe old age of seventy-two he was climbing

around a corner of a lofty precipice of the Pic du

Midi–nobody with him–when he slipped and fell.

So he died in the harness.

He had grown very avaricious in his old age, and used to go

off stealthily to hunt for non-existent and impossible

gold among those perilous peaks and precipices.

He was on a quest of that kind when he lost his life.

There was a statue to him, and another to De Saussure,

in the hall of our hotel, and a metal plate on the door

of a room upstairs bore an inscription to the effect

that that room had been occupied by Albert Smith.

Balmat and De Saussure discovered Mont Blanc–so to

speak–but it was Smith who made it a paying property.

His articles in BLACKWOOD and his lectures on Mont Blanc

in London advertised it and made people as anxious to see it

as if it owed them money.

As we strolled along the road we looked up and saw a red

signal-light glowing in the darkness of the mountainside.

It seemed but a trifling way up–perhaps a hundred yards,

a climb of ten minutes. It was a lucky piece of sagacity

in us that we concluded to stop a man whom we met and get

a light for our pipes from him instead of continuing the climb

to that lantern to get a light, as had been our purpose.

The man said that that lantern was on the Grands Mulets,

some sixty-five hundred feet above the valley! I know

by our Riffelberg experience, that it would have taken us

a good part of a week to go up there. I would sooner not

smoke at all, than take all that trouble for a light.

Even in the daytime the foreshadowing effect of this

mountain’s close proximity creates curious deceptions.

For instance, one sees with the naked eye a cabin up

there beside the glacier, and a little above and beyond

he sees the spot where that red light was located;

he thinks he could throw a stone from the one place to

the other. But he couldn’t, for the difference between

the two altitudes is more than three thousand feet.

It looks impossible, from below, that this can be true,

but it is true, nevertheless.

While strolling around, we kept the run of the moon all

the time, and we still kept an eye on her after we got back

to the hotel portico. I had a theory that the gravitation

of refraction, being subsidiary to atmospheric compensation,