stones and the pine-needles. Never
had Tartarin seen so much water.

He entered an inn and ordered a _cafe au lait_ with honey and butter,
the only really good things he had as yet tasted during his journey.
Then, reinvigorated, and his beard sticky with honey, cleaned on a
corner of his napkin, he prepared to attempt his first ascension.

"_Et autremain_" he asked, as he shifted his knapsack, "how long does it
take to ascend the Rigi?"

"One hour, one hour and a quarter, monsieur; but make haste about it;
the train is just starting."

"A train upon the Rigi!.. you are joking!.."

Through the leaded panes of the tavern window he was shown the train
that was really starting. Two great covered carriages, windowless,
pushed by a locomotive with a short, corpulent chimney, in shape like a
saucepan, a monstrous insect, clinging to the mountain and clambering,
breathless up its vertiginous slopes.

The two Tartarins, cabbage and warren, both, at the same instant,
revolted at the thought of going up in that hideous mechanism. One
of them thought it ridiculous to climb the Alps in a lift; as for
the other, those aerial bridges on which the track was laid, with the
prospect of a fall of 4000 feet at the slightest derailment, inspired
him with all sorts of lamentable reflections, justified by the little
cemetery of Vitzgau, the white tombs of which lay huddled together at
the foot of the slope, like linen spread out to bleach in the yard of
a wash-house. Evidently the cemetery is there by way of precaution, so
that, in case of accident, the travellers may drop on the very spot.

"I'll go afoot," the valiant Tarasconese said to himself; "'twill
exercise me... zou!"

And he started, wholly preoccupied with manoeuvring his alpenstock
in presence of the staff of the hotel, collected about the door and
shouting directions to him about the path, to which he did not listen.
He first followed an ascending road, paved with large irregular, pointed
stones like a lane at the South, and bordered with wooden gutters to
carry off the rains.

To right and left were great orchards, fields of rank, lush grass
crossed by the same wooden conduits for irrigation through hollowed
trunks of trees. All this made a constant rippling from top to bottom
of the mountain, and every time that the ice-axe of the Alpinist
became hooked as he walked along in the lower branches of an oak or a
walnut-tree, his cap crackled as if beneath the nozzle of