The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tartarin On The Alps, by Alphonse Daudet

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Title: Tartarin On The Alps

Author: Alphonse Daudet

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: June 12, 2008 [EBook #25768]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TARTARIN ON THE ALPS ***

Produced by David Widger

TARTARIN ON THE ALPS.

By Alphonse Daudet

TARTARIN ON THE ALPS.

I.

Apparition on the Rigi-Kulm. Who is it? What was said around
a table of six hundred covers. Rice and Prunes, An
improvised ball. The Unknown signs his name on the hotel
register, P. C. A.

On the 10th of August, 1880, at that fabled hour of the setting sun so
vaunted by the guide-books Joanne and Baedeker, an hermetic yellow fog,
complicated with a flurry of snow in white spirals, enveloped the summit
of the Rigi (_Regina monhum_) and its gigantic hotel, extraordinary to
behold on the arid waste of those heights,--that Rigi-Kulm, glassed-in
like a conservatory, massive as a citadel, where alight for a night and
a day a flock of tourists, worshippers of the sun.

While awaiting the second dinner-gong, the transient inmates of the
vast and gorgeous caravansary, half frozen in their chambers above, or
gasping on the divans of the reading-rooms in the damp heat of lighted
furnaces, were gazing, in default of the promised splendours, at the
whirling white atoms and the lighting of the great lamps on the portico,
the double glasses of which were creaking in the wind.

To climb so high, to come from all four corners of the earth to see
that... Oh, Baedeker!..

Suddenly, something emerged from the fog and advanced toward the hotel
with a rattling of metal, an exaggeration of motions, caused by strange
accessories.

At a distance of twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their
noses against the panes, the _misses_ with curious little heads trimmed
like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for a
tinker bearing his utensils.

Ten feet nearer the apparition changed again, showing a crossbow on the
shoulder, and the visored cap of an archer of the middle ages, with
t