atter part of the afternoon we cooled our roasting interiors
with ice-cold water from clear streams, the only really satisfying water
we had tasted since we left home, for at the hotels on the continent
they merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in, and that
only modifies its hotness, doesn't make it cold. Water can only be made
cold enough for summer comfort by being prepared in a refrigerator or
a closed ice-pitcher. Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion. How do
they know?--they never drink any.

At ten minutes past six we reached the Kaltbad station, where there is
a spacious hotel with great verandas which command a majestic expanse of
lake and mountain scenery. We were pretty well fagged out, now, but as
we did not wish to miss the Alpine sunrise, we got through our dinner
as quickly as possible and hurried off to bed. It was unspeakably
comfortable to stretch our weary limbs between the cool, damp sheets.
And how we did sleep!--for there is no opiate like Alpine pedestrianism.

In the morning we both awoke and leaped out of bed at the same instant
and ran and stripped aside the window-curtains; but we suffered a bitter
disappointment again: it was already half past three in the afternoon.

We dressed sullenly and in ill spirits, each accusing the other of
oversleeping. Harris said if we had brought the courier along, as we
ought to have done, we should not have missed these sunrises. I said he
knew very well that one of us would have to sit up and wake the
courier; and I added that we were having trouble enough to take care
of ourselves, on this climb, without having to take care of a courier
besides.

During breakfast our spirits came up a little, since we found by this
guide-book that in the hotels on the summit the tourist is not left to
trust to luck for his sunrise, but is roused betimes by a man who goes
through the halls with a great Alpine horn, blowing blasts that would
raise the dead. And there was another consoling thing: the guide-book
said that up there on the summit the guests did not wait to dress much,
but seized a red bed blanket and sailed out arrayed like an Indian. This
was good; this would be romantic; two hundred and fifty people grouped
on the windy summit, with their hair flying and their red blankets
flapping, in the solemn presence of the coming sun, would be a striking
and memorable spectacle. So it was good luck, not ill luck, that we had
missed those other sunr