A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

At this point it is like a sea whose deep swales and long,

rolling swells have been caught in mid-movement and

frozen solid; but further up it is broken up into wildly

tossing billows of ice.

We descended a ticklish path in the steep side of the moraine,

and invaded the glacier. There were tourists of both

sexes scattered far and wide over it, everywhere, and it

had the festive look of a skating-rink.

The Empress Josephine came this far, once. She ascended

the Montanvert in 1810–but not alone; a small army

of men preceded her to clear the path–and carpet it,

perhaps–and she followed, under the protection

of SIXTY-EIGHT guides.

Her successor visited Chamonix later, but in far different style.

It was seven weeks after the first fall of the Empire,

and poor Marie Louise, ex-Empress was a fugitive.

She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants,

and stood before a peasant’s hut, tired, bedraggled,

soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still

girdling her brow, ” and implored admittance–and was

refused! A few days before, the adulations and applauses

of a nation were sounding in her ears, and now she was come to

this!

We crossed the Mer de Glace in safety, but we had misgivings.

The crevices in the ice yawned deep and blue and mysterious,

and it made one nervous to traverse them. The huge

round waves of ice were slippery and difficult to climb,

and the chances of tripping and sliding down them and

darting into a crevice were too many to be comfortable.

In the bottom of a deep swale between two of the biggest

of the ice-waves, we found a fraud who pretended

to be cutting steps to insure the safety of tourists.

He was “soldiering” when we came upon him, but he hopped

up and chipped out a couple of steps about big enough

for a cat, and charged us a franc or two for it.

Then he sat down again, to doze till the next party

should come along. He had collected blackmail from two

or three hundred people already, that day, but had not

chipped out ice enough to impair the glacier perceptibly.

I have heard of a good many soft sinecures, but it seems

to me that keeping toll-bridge on a glacier is the softest

one I have encountered yet.

That was a blazing hot day, and it brought a persistent

and persecuting thirst with it. What an unspeakable luxury

it was to slake that thirst with the pure and limpid

ice-water of the glacier! Down the sides of every great rib

of pure ice poured limpid rills in gutters carved by their

own attrition; better still, wherever a rock had lain,

there was now a bowl-shaped hole, with smooth white sides

and bottom of ice, and this bowl was brimming with water

of such absolute clearness that the careless observer would

not see it at all, but would think the bowl was empty.

These fountains had such an alluring look that I often

stretched myself out when I was not thirsty and dipped my

face in and drank till my teeth ached. Everywhere among

the Swiss mountains we had at hand the blessing–not

to be found in Europe EXCEPT in the mountains–of water

capable of quenching thirst. Everywhere in the Swiss

highlands brilliant little rills of exquisitely cold water

went dancing along by the roadsides, and my comrade and I

were always drinking and always delivering our deep gratitude.

But in Europe everywhere except in the mountains, the water

is flat and insipid beyond the power of words to describe.

It is served lukewarm; but no matter, ice could not help it;

it is incurably flat, incurably insipid. It is only good

to wash with; I wonder it doesn’t occur to the average

inhabitant to try it for that. In Europe the people

say contemptuously, “Nobody drinks water here.” Indeed,

they have a sound and sufficient reason. In many places

they even have what may be called prohibitory reasons.

In Paris and Munich, for instance, they say, “Don’t drink

the water, it is simply poison.”

Either America is healthier than Europe, notwithstanding her