along, which took much time. The man of Tarascon began to
feel his strength give way under the brilliant sun which flooded the
whiteness of the landscape and was all the more fatiguing to his
eyes because he had dropped his green spectacles into the crevasse.
Presently, a dreadful sense of weakness seized him, that mountain
sickness which produces the same effects as sea-sickness. Exhausted, his
head empty, his legs flaccid, he stumbled and lost his feet, so that
the guides were forced to grasp him, one on each side, supporting and
hoisting him to the top of that wall of ice. Scarcely three hundred feet
now separated them from the summit of the Jungfrau; but although the
snow was hard and bore them, and the path much easier, this last stage
took an almost interminable time, the fatigue and the suffocation of the
P. C. A. increasing all the while.

Suddenly the mountaineers loosed their hold upon him, and waving their
caps began to yodel in a transport of joy. They were there! This spot in
immaculate space, this white crest, somewhat rounded, was the goal, and
for that good Tartarin the end of the somnambulic torpor in which he had
wandered for an hour or more.

"Scheideck! Scheideck!" shouted the guides, showing him far, far below,
on a verdant plateau emerging from the mists of the valley, the Hotel
Bellevue about the size of a thimble.

Thence to where they stood lay a wondrous panorama, an ascent of fields
of gilded snow, oranged by the sun, or else of a deep, cold blue,
a piling up of mounds of ice, fantastically structured into towers,
_fleches, aiguilles, aretes_, and gigantic heaps, under which one could
well believe that the lost megatherium or mastodon lay sleeping. All the
tints of the rainbow played there and met in the bed of vast glaciers
rolling down their immovable cascades, crossed by other little frozen
torrents, the surfaces of which the sun's warmth liquefied, making them
smoother and more glittering. But, at the great height at which they
stood, all this sparkling brilliance calmed itself; a light floated,
cold, ecliptic, which made Tartarin shudder even more than the sense of
silence and solitude in that white desert with its mysterious recesses.

A little smoke, with hollow detonations, rose from the hotel. They were
seen, a cannon was fired in their honour, and the thought that they
were being looked at, that his Alpinists were there, and the misses, the
illustrious Prunes and Rices, all with