he visor lowered, an object even more unlikely to meet with on these
heights than a strayed cow or an ambulating tinker.

On the portico the archer was no longer anything but a fat, squat,
broad-backed man, who stopped to get breath and to shake the snow from
his leggings, made like his cap of yellow cloth, and from his knitted
comforter, which allowed scarcely more of his face to be seen than a few
tufts of grizzling beard and a pair of enormous green spectacles made as
convex as the glass of a stereoscope. An alpenstock, knapsack, coil of
rope worn in saltire, crampons and iron hooks hanging to the belt of
an English blouse with broad pleats, completed the accoutrement of this
perfect Alpinist.

On the desolate summits of Mont Blanc or the Finsteraarhorn this
clambering apparel would have seemed very natural, but on the Rigi-Kulm
ten feet from a railway track!--

The Alpinist, it is true, came from the side opposite to the station,
and the state of his leggings testified to a long march through snow and
mud.

For a moment he gazed at the hotel and its surrounding buildings,
seemingly stupefied at finding, two thousand and more yards above the
sea, a building of such importance, glazed galleries, colonnades, seven
storeys of windows, and a broad portico stretching away between two
rows of globe-lamps which gave to this mountain-summit the aspect of the
Place de l'Opera of a winter's evening.

But, surprised as he may have been, the people in the hotel were
more surprised still, and when he entered the immense antechamber an
inquisitive hustling took place in the doorways of all the salons:
gentlemen armed with billiard-cues, others with open newspapers, ladies
still holding their book or their work pressed forward, while in the
background, on the landing of the staircase, heads leaned over the
baluster and between the chains of the lift.

The man said aloud, in a powerful deep bass voice, the chest voice of
the South, resounding like cymbals:--

"_Coquin de bon sort!_ what an atmosphere!"

Then he stopped short, to take off his cap and his spectacles.

He was suffocating.

The dazzle of the lights, the heat of the gas and furnace, in contrast
with the cold darkness without, and this sumptuous display, these lofty
ceilings, these porters bedizened with _Regina Montium_ in letters
of gold on their naval caps, the white cravats of the waiters and the
battalion of Swiss girls in their native costumes coming for