go
anywhere without danger."

"Where is he? How could I find him?"

"At the Kaltbad, monsieur, preparing the rooms for his party... I could
telephone to him."

A telephone! on the Rigi!

That was the climax. But Tartarin could no longer be amazed.

Five minutes later the man returned bringing an answer.

The courier of the Peruvian party had just started for the Tellsplatte,
where he would certainly pass the night.

The Tellsplatte is a memorial chapel, to which pilgrimages are made in
honour of William Tell. Some persons go there to see the mural pictures
which a famous painter of Bale has lately executed in the chapel...

As it only took by boat an hour or an hour and a half to reach the
place, Tartarin did not hesitate. It would make him lose a day, but he
owed it to himself to render that homage to William Tell, for whom he
had always felt a peculiar predilection. And, besides, what a chance if
he could there pick up this marvellous guide and induce him to do the
Jungfrau with him.

Forward, _zou!_

He paid his bill, in which the setting and the rising sun were reckoned
as extras, also the candles and the attendance. Then, still preceded by
the rattle of his metals, which sowed surprise and terror on his way,
he went to the railway station, because to descend the Rigi as he had
ascended it, on foot, would have been lost time, and, really, it was
doing too much honour to that very artificial mountain.

IV.

On the boat. It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the
Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin
of Tarascon never existed. "Te! Bompard."

He had left the snows of the Rigi-Kulm; down below, on the lake, he
returned to rain, fine, close, misty, a vapour of water through which
the mountains stumped themselves in, graduating in the distance to the
form of clouds.

The "Foehn" whistled, raising white caps on the lake where the gulls,
flying low, seemed borne upon the waves; one might have thought one's
self on the open ocean.

Tartarin recalled to mind his departure from the port of Marseilles,
fifteen years earlier, when he started to hunt the lion--that spotless
sky, dazzling with silvery light, that sea so blue, blue as the water of
dye-works, blown back by the mistral in sparkling white saline crystals,
the bugles of the forts and the bells of all the steeples echoing joy,
rapture, sun--the fairy world of a first journey.

What a contrast to this black