a watering-pot.

"Diou! what a lot of water!" sighed the man of the South. But it was
much worse when the pebbly path abruptly ceased and he was forced
to puddle along in the torrent or jump from rock to rock to save his
gaiters. Then a shower joined in, penetrating, steady, and seeming to
get colder the higher he went. When he stopped to recover breath he
could hear nothing else than a vast noise of waters in which he seemed
to be sunk, and he saw, as he turned round, the clouds descending into
the lake in delicate long filaments of spun glass through which the
chalets of Vitznau shone like freshly varnished toys.

Men and children passed him with lowered heads and backs bent beneath
hods of white-wood, containing provisions for some villa or _pension_,
the balconies of which could be distinguished on the slopes.
"Rigi-Kulm?" asked Tartarin, to be sure he was heading in the right
direction. But his extraordinary equipment, especially, that knitted
muffler which masked his face, cast terror along the way, and all
whom he addressed only opened their eyes wide and hastened their steps
without replying.

Soon these encounters became rare. The last human being whom he saw was
an old woman washing her linen in the hollowed trunk of a tree under the
shelter of an enormous red umbrella, planted in the ground.

"Rigi-Kulm?" asked the Alpinist.

The old woman raised an idiotic, cadaverous face, with a goitre swaying
upon her throat as large as the rustic bell of a Swiss cow. Then, after
gazing at him for a long time, she was seized with inextinguishable
laughter, which stretched her mouth from ear to ear, wrinkled up the
corners of her little eyes, and every time she opened them the sight of
Tartarin, planted before her with his ice-axe on his shoulder, redoubled
her joy.

"_Tron de l'air!_" growled the Tarasconese, "lucky for her that she's
a woman..." Snorting with anger, he continued his way and lost it in a
pine-wood, where his boots slipped on the oozing moss.

Beyond this point the landscape changed. No more paths, or trees, or
pastures. Gloomy, denuded slopes, great boulders of rock which he scaled
on his knees for fear of falling; sloughs full of yellow mud, which he
crossed slowly, feeling before him with his alpenstock and lifting his
feet like a knife-grinder. At every moment he looked at the compass
hanging to his broad watch-ribbon; but whether it were the altitude or
the variations of the temperature, the n