It was better to look at the ascension from the
Scheideck.

In all his life, naturally, the president of the Club of the Alpines
had never set foot on a glacier. There is nothing of that sort on the
mountainettes of Tarascon, little hills as balmy and dry as a packet of
lavender; and yet the approaches to the Guggi gave him the impression of
having already seen them, and wakened recollections of hunts in Provence
at the end of the Camargue, near to the sea. The same turf always
getting shorter and parched, as if seared by fire. Here and there were
puddles of water, infiltrations of the ground betrayed by puny reeds,
then came the moraine, like a sandy dune full of broken shells and
cinders, and, far at the end, the glacier, with its blue-green
waves crested with white and rounded in form, a silent, congealed
ground-swell. The wind which came athwart it, whistling and strong, had
the same biting, salubrious freshness as his own sea-breeze.

"No, thank you... I have my crampons..." said Tartarin to the guide,
who offered him woollen socks to draw on over his boots; "Kennedy
crampons... perfected... very convenient..." He shouted, as if to a deaf
person, in order to make himself understood by Christian Inebnit, who
knew no more French than his comrade Kaufmann; and then the P. C. A.
sat down upon the moraine and strapped on a species of sandal with three
enormous and very strong iron spikes. He had practised them a hundred
times, these Kennedy crampons, manoeuvring them in the garden of the
baobab; nevertheless, the present effect was unexpected. Beneath the
weight of the hero the spikes were driven into the ice with such force
that all efforts to withdraw them were vain. Behold him, therefore,
nailed to the glacier, sweating, swearing, making with arms and
alpenstock most desperate gymnastics and reduced finally to shouting for
his guides, who had gone forward, convinced that they had to do with an
experienced Alpinist.

Under the impossibility of uprooting him, they undid the straps, and,
the crampons, abandoned in the ice, being replaced by a pair of knitted
socks, the president continued his way, not without much difficulty and
fatigue. Unskilful in holding his stick, his legs stumbled over it, then
its iron point skated and dragged him along if he leaned upon it too
heavily. He tried the ice-axe--still harder to manoeuvre, the swell of
the glacier increasing by degrees, and pressing up, one above another,
its moti