ite walls of the tunnel.

"What a queer country, _pas mouain_, this Switzerland..." cried
Tartarin.

Bompard burst out laughing.

"Ah! _vai_, Switzerland!.. In the first place, there is no Switzerland."

V.

Confidences in a tunnel.

"Switzerland, in our day, _ve!_ Monsieur Tar-tarin, is nothing more than
a vast Kursaal, open from June to September, a panoramic casino, where
people come from all four quarters of the globe to amuse themselves, and
which is manipulated and managed by a Company _richissime_ by hundreds
of thousands of millions, which has its offices in London and Geneva.
It costs money, you may be sure, to lease and brush up and trick out all
this territory, lakes, forests, mountains, cascades, and to keep a whole
people of employes, supernumeraries, and what not, and set up miraculous
hotels on the highest summits, with gas, telegraphs, telephones..."

"That, at least, is true," said Tartarin, thinking aloud, and
remembering the Rigi.

"True!.. But you have seen nothing yet... Go on through the country and
you 'll not find one corner that is n't engineered and machine-worked
like the under stage of the Opera,--cascades lighted _a giorno_,
turnstiles at the entrance to the glaciers, and loads of railways,
hydraulic and funicular, for ascensions. To be sure, the Company, in
view of its clients the English and American climbers, keeps up on the
noted mountains, Jungfrau, Monk, Finsteraarhorn, an appearance of danger
and desolation, though in reality there is no more risk there than
elsewhere..."

"But the crevasses, my good fellow, those horrible crevasses... Suppose
one falls into them?"

"You fall on snow, Monsieur Tartarin, and you don't hurt yourself, and
there is always at the bottom a porter, a hunter, at any rate some one,
who picks you up, shakes and brushes you, and asks graciously: 'Has
monsieur any baggage?'"

"What stuff are you telling me now, Gonzague?"

Bompard redoubled in gravity.

"The keeping up of those crevasses is one of the heaviest expenses of
the Company."

Silence fell for a moment under the tunnel, the surroundings of which
were quieting down. No more varied fireworks, Bengal lights, or boats
on the water; but the moon had risen and made another conventional
landscape, bluish, liquides-cent, with masses of impenetrable shadow...

Tartarin hesitated to believe his companion on his word. Nevertheless,
he reflected on the extraordinary things he had seen