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<h2> CHAPTER XLIII </h2>
<h3> [My Poor Sick Friend Disappointed] </h3>
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<p>Everybody was out-of-doors; everybody was in the principal street of the
village—not on the sidewalks, but all over the street; everybody was
lounging, loafing, chatting, waiting, alert, expectant, interested—for
it was train-time. That is to say, it was diligence-time—the
half-dozen big diligences would soon be arriving from Geneva, and the
village was interested, in many ways, in knowing how many people were
coming and what sort of folk they might be. It was altogether the
livest-looking street we had seen in any village on the continent.</p>
<p>The hotel was by the side of a booming torrent, whose music was loud and
strong; we could not see this torrent, for it was dark, now, but one could
locate it without a light. There was a large enclosed yard in front of the
hotel, and this was filled with groups of villagers waiting to see the
diligences arrive, or to hire themselves to excursionists for the morrow.
A telescope stood in the yard, with its huge barrel canted up toward the
lustrous evening star. The long porch of the hotel was populous with
tourists, who sat in shawls and wraps under the vast overshadowing bulk of
Mont Blanc, and gossiped or meditated.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Never did a mountain seem so close; its big sides seemed at one's very
elbow, and its majestic dome, and the lofty cluster of slender minarets
that were its neighbors, seemed to be almost over one's head. It was night
in the streets, and the lamps were sparkling everywhere; the broad bases
and shoulders of the mountains were in a deep gloom, but their summits
swam in a strange rich glow which was really daylight, and yet had a
mellow something about it which was very different from the hard white
glare of the kind of daylight I was used to. Its radiance was strong and
clear, but at the same time it was singularly soft, and spiritual, and
benignant. No, it was not our harsh, aggressive, realistic daylight; it
seemed properer to an enchanted land—or to heaven.</p>
<p>I had seen moonlight and daylight together before, but I had not seen
daylight and black night elbow to elbow before. At least I had not seen
the daylight resting upon an object sufficiently close at hand, before, to
make the contrast startling and at war with nature.</p>
<p>The daylight passed away. Presently the moon rose up behind some of those
sky-piercing fingers or pinnacles of bare rock of which I have spoken—they
were a little to the left of the crest of Mont Blanc, and right over our
heads—but she couldn't manage to climb high enough toward heaven to
get entirely above them. She would show the glittering arch of her upper
third, occasionally, and scrape it along behind the comblike row;
sometimes a pinnacle stood straight up, like a statuette of ebony, against
that glittering white shield, then seemed to glide out of it by its own
volition and power, and become a dim specter, while the next pinnacle
glided into its place and blotted the spotless disk with the black
exclamation-point of its presence. The top of one pinnacle took the
shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit's head, in the inkiest silhouette,
while it rested against the moon. The unillumined peaks and minarets,
hovering vague and phantom-like above us while the others were painfully
white and strong with snow and moonlight, made a peculiar effect.</p>
<p>But when the moon, having passed the line of pinnacles, was hidden behind
the stupendous white swell of Mont Blanc, the masterpiece of the evening
was flung on the canvas. A rich greenish radiance sprang into the sky from
behind the mountain, and in this some airy shreds and ribbons of vapor
floated about, and being flushed with that strange tint, went waving to
and fro like pale green flames. After a while, radiating bars—vast
broadening fan-shaped shadows—grew up and stretched away to the
zenith from behind the mountain. It was a spectacle to take one's breath,
for the wonder of it, and the sublimity.</p>
<p>Indeed, those mighty bars of alternate light and shadow streaming up from
behind that dark and prodigious form and occupying the half of the dull
and opaque heavens, was the most imposing and impressive marvel I had ever
looked upon. There is no simile for it, for nothing is like it. If a child
had asked me what it was, I should have said, "Humble yourself, in this
presence, it is the glory flowing from the hidden head of the Creator."
One falls shorter of the truth than that, sometimes, in trying to explain
mysteries to the little people. I could have found out the cause of this
awe-compelling miracle by inquiring, for it is not infrequent at Mont
Blanc,—but I did not wish to know. We have not the reverent feeling
for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have
lost as much as we gained by prying into the matter.</p>
<p>We took a walk down street, a block or two, and a place where four streets
met and the principal shops were clustered, found the groups of men in the
roadway thicker than ever—for this was the Exchange of Chamonix.
These men were in the costumes of guides and porters, and were there to be
hired.</p>
<p>The office of that great personage, the Guide-in-Chief of the Chamonix
Guild of Guides, was near by. This guild is a close corporation, and is
governed by strict laws. There are many excursion routes, some dangerous
and some not, some that can be made safely without a guide, and some that
cannot. The bureau determines these things. Where it decides that a guide
is necessary, you are forbidden to go without one. Neither are you allowed
to be a victim of extortion: the law states what you are to pay. The
guides serve in rotation; you cannot select the man who is to take your
life into his hands, you must take the worst in the lot, if it is his
turn. A guide's fee ranges all the way up from a half-dollar (for some
trifling excursion of a few rods) to twenty dollars, according to the
distance traversed and the nature of the ground. A guide's fee for taking
a person to the summit of Mont Blanc and back, is twenty dollars—and
he earns it. The time employed is usually three days, and there is enough
early rising in it to make a man far more "healthy and wealthy and wise"
than any one man has any right to be. The porter's fee for the same trip
is ten dollars. Several fools—no, I mean several tourists—usually
go together, and divide up the expense, and thus make it light; for if
only one f—tourist, I mean—went, he would have to have several
guides and porters, and that would make the matter costly.</p>
<p>We went into the Chief's office. There were maps of mountains on the
walls; also one or two lithographs of celebrated guides, and a portrait of
the scientist De Saussure.</p>
<p>In glass cases were some labeled fragments of boots and batons, and other
suggestive relics and remembrances of casualties on Mount Blanc. In a book
was a record of all the ascents which have ever been made, beginning with
Nos. 1 and 2—being those of Jacques Balmat and De Saussure, in 1787,
and ending with No. 685, which wasn't cold yet. In fact No. 685 was
standing by the official table waiting to receive the precious official
diploma which should prove to his German household and to his descendants
that he had once been indiscreet enough to climb to the top of Mont Blanc.
He looked very happy when he got his document; in fact, he spoke up and
said he <i>was</i> happy.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I tried to buy a diploma for an invalid friend at home who had never
traveled, and whose desire all his life has been to ascend Mont Blanc, but
the Guide-in-Chief rather insolently refused to sell me one. I was very
much offended. I said I did not propose to be discriminated against on the
account of my nationality; that he had just sold a diploma to this German
gentleman, and my money was a good as his; I would see to it that he
couldn't keep his shop for Germans and deny his produce to Americans; I
would have his license taken away from him at the dropping of a
handkerchief; if France refused to break him, I would make an
international matter of it and bring on a war; the soil should be drenched
with blood; and not only that, but I would set up an opposition show and
sell diplomas at half price.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>For two cents I would have done these things, too; but nobody offered me
two cents. I tried to move that German's feelings, but it could not be
done; he would not give me his diploma, neither would he sell it to me. I
<i>told</i> him my friend was sick and could not come himself, but he said he did
not care a <i>verdammtes pfennig</i>, he wanted his diploma for himself—did
I suppose he was going to risk his neck for that thing and then give it to
a sick stranger? Indeed he wouldn't, so he wouldn't. I resolved, then,
that I would do all I could to injure Mont Blanc.</p>
<p>In the record-book was a list of all the fatal accidents which happened on
the mountain. It began with the one in 1820 when the Russian Dr. Hamel's
three guides were lost in a crevice of the glacier, and it recorded the
delivery of the remains in the valley by the slow-moving glacier forty-one
years later. The latest catastrophe bore the date 1877.</p>
<p>We stepped out and roved about the village awhile. In front of the little
church was a monument to the memory of the bold guide Jacques Balmat, the
first man who ever stood upon the summit of Mont Blanc. He made that wild
trip solitary and alone. He accomplished the ascent a number of times
afterward. A stretch of nearly half a century lay between his first ascent
and his last one. At the ripe old age of seventy-two he was climbing
around a corner of a lofty precipice of the Pic du Midi—nobody with
him—when he slipped and fell. So he died in the harness.</p>
<p>He had grown very avaricious in his old age, and used to go off stealthily
to hunt for non-existent and impossible gold among those perilous peaks
and precipices. He was on a quest of that kind when he lost his life.
There was a statue to him, and another to De Saussure, in the hall of our
hotel, and a metal plate on the door of a room upstairs bore an
inscription to the effect that that room had been occupied by Albert
Smith. Balmat and De Saussure discovered Mont Blanc—so to speak—but
it was Smith who made it a paying property. His articles in <i>Blackwood</i> and
his lectures on Mont Blanc in London advertised it and made people as
anxious to see it as if it owed them money.</p>
<p>As we strolled along the road we looked up and saw a red signal-light
glowing in the darkness of the mountainside. It seemed but a trifling way
up—perhaps a hundred yards, a climb of ten minutes. It was a lucky
piece of sagacity in us that we concluded to stop a man whom we met and
get a light for our pipes from him instead of continuing the climb to that
lantern to get a light, as had been our purpose. The man said that that
lantern was on the Grands Mulets, some sixty-five hundred feet above the
valley! I know by our Riffelberg experience, that it would have taken us a
good part of a week to go up there. I would sooner not smoke at all, than
take all that trouble for a light.</p>
<p>Even in the daytime the foreshadowing effect of this mountain's close
proximity creates curious deceptions. For instance, one sees with the
naked eye a cabin up there beside the glacier, and a little above and
beyond he sees the spot where that red light was located; he thinks he
could throw a stone from the one place to the other. But he couldn't, for
the difference between the two altitudes is more than three thousand feet.
It looks impossible, from below, that this can be true, but it is true,
nevertheless.</p>
<p>While strolling around, we kept the run of the moon all the time, and we
still kept an eye on her after we got back to the hotel portico. I had a
theory that the gravitation of refraction, being subsidiary to atmospheric
compensation, the refrangibility of the earth's surface would emphasize
this effect in regions where great mountain ranges occur, and possibly so
even-handed impact the odic and idyllic forces together, the one upon the
other, as to prevent the moon from rising higher than 12,200 feet above
sea-level. This daring theory had been received with frantic scorn by some
of my fellow-scientists, and with an eager silence by others. Among the
former I may mention Prof. H——y; and among the latter Prof. T——l.
Such is professional jealousy; a scientist will never show any kindness
for a theory which he did not start himself. There is no feeling of
brotherhood among these people. Indeed, they always resent it when I call
them brother. To show how far their ungenerosity can carry them, I will
state that I offered to let Prof. H——y publish my great theory
as his own discovery; I even begged him to do it; I even proposed to print
it myself as his theory. Instead of thanking me, he said that if I tried
to fasten that theory on him he would sue me for slander. I was going to
offer it to Mr. Darwin, whom I understood to be a man without prejudices,
but it occurred to me that perhaps he would not be interested in it since
it did not concern heraldry.</p>
<p>But I am glad now, that I was forced to father my intrepid theory myself,
for, on the night of which I am writing, it was triumphantly justified and
established. Mont Blanc is nearly sixteen thousand feet high; he hid the
moon utterly; near him is a peak which is 12,216 feet high; the moon slid
along behind the pinnacles, and when she approached that one I watched her
with intense interest, for my reputation as a scientist must stand or fall
by its decision. I cannot describe the emotions which surged like tidal
waves through my breast when I saw the moon glide behind that lofty needle
and pass it by without exposing more than two feet four inches of her
upper rim above it; I was secure, then. I knew she could rise no higher,
and I was right. She sailed behind all the peaks and never succeeded in
hoisting her disk above a single one of them.</p>
<p>While the moon was behind one of those sharp fingers, its shadow was flung
athwart the vacant heavens—a long, slanting, clean-cut, dark ray—with
a streaming and energetic suggestion of <i>force</i> about it, such as the
ascending jet of water from a powerful fire-engine affords. It was curious
to see a good strong shadow of an earthly object cast upon so intangible a
field as the atmosphere.</p>
<p>We went to bed, at last, and went quickly to sleep, but I woke up, after
about three hours, with throbbing temples, and a head which was physically
sore, outside and in. I was dazed, dreamy, wretched, seedy, unrefreshed. I
recognized the occasion of all this: it was that torrent. In the mountain
villages of Switzerland, and along the roads, one has always the roar of
the torrent in his ears. He imagines it is music, and he thinks poetic
things about it; he lies in his comfortable bed and is lulled to sleep by
it. But by and by he begins to notice that his head is very sore—he
cannot account for it; in solitudes where the profoundest silence reigns,
he notices a sullen, distant, continuous roar in his ears, which is like
what he would experience if he had sea-shells pressed against them—he
cannot account for it; he is drowsy and absent-minded; there is no
tenacity to his mind, he cannot keep hold of a thought and follow it out;
if he sits down to write, his vocabulary is empty, no suitable words will
come, he forgets what he started to do, and remains there, pen in hand,
head tilted up, eyes closed, listening painfully to the muffled roar of a
distant train in his ears; in his soundest sleep the strain continues, he
goes on listening, always listening intently, anxiously, and wakes at
last, harassed, irritable, unrefreshed. He cannot manage to account for
these things.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Day after day he feels as if he had spent his nights in a sleeping-car. It
actually takes him weeks to find out that it is those persecuting torrents
that have been making all the mischief. It is time for him to get out of
Switzerland, then, for as soon as he has discovered the cause, the misery
is magnified several fold. The roar of the torrent is maddening, then, for
his imagination is assisting; the physical pain it inflicts is exquisite.
When he finds he is approaching one of those streams, his dread is so
lively that he is disposed to fly the track and avoid the implacable foe.<br/>
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<p>Eight or nine months after the distress of the torrents had departed from
me, the roar and thunder of the streets of Paris brought it all back
again. I moved to the sixth story of the hotel to hunt for peace. About
midnight the noises dulled away, and I was sinking to sleep, when I heard
a new and curious sound; I listened: evidently some joyous lunatic was
softly dancing a "double shuffle" in the room over my head. I had to wait
for him to get through, of course. Five long, long minutes he smoothly
shuffled away—a pause followed, then something fell with a thump on
the floor. I said to myself "There—he is pulling off his boots—thank
heavens he is done." Another slight pause—he went to shuffling
again! I said to myself, "Is he trying to see what he can do with only one
boot on?" Presently came another pause and another thump on the floor. I
said "Good, he has pulled off his other boot—<i>now</i> he is done." But he
wasn't. The next moment he was shuffling again. I said, "Confound him, he
is at it in his slippers!" After a little came that same old pause, and
right after it that thump on the floor once more. I said, "Hang him, he
had on <i>two</i> pair of boots!" For an hour that magician went on shuffling and
pulling off boots till he had shed as many as twenty-five pair, and I was
hovering on the verge of lunacy. I got my gun and stole up there. The
fellow was in the midst of an acre of sprawling boots, and he had a boot
in his hand, shuffling it—no, I mean <i>polishing</i> it. The mystery was
explained. He hadn't been dancing. He was the "Boots" of the hotel, and
was attending to business.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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