Baedeker requests all tourists to call his attention to any errors which
they may find in his guide-books, I dropped him a line to inform him he
missed it by just about three days. I had previously informed him of his
mistake about the distance from Allerheiligen to Oppenau, and had also
informed the Ordnance Depart of the German government of the same error
in the imperial maps. I will add, here, that I never got any answer to
those letters, or any thanks from either of those sources; and, what is
still more discourteous, these corrections have not been made, either in
the maps or the guide-books. But I will write again when I get time, for
my letters may have miscarried.

We curled up in the clammy beds, and went to sleep without rocking. We
were so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor turned over till
the blooming blasts of the Alpine horn aroused us.

It may well be imagined that we did not lose any time. We snatched on
a few odds and ends of clothing, cocooned ourselves in the proper red
blankets, and plunged along the halls and out into the whistling wind
bareheaded. We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak of the
summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it. We rushed up the stairs
to the top of this scaffolding, and stood there, above the vast outlying
world, with hair flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the
fierce breeze.

"Fifteen minutes too late, at last!" said Harris, in a vexed voice. "The
sun is clear above the horizon."

"No matter," I said, "it is a most magnificent spectacle, and we will
see it do the rest of its rising anyway."

In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us, and dead to
everything else. The great cloud-barred disk of the sun stood just above
a limitless expanse of tossing white-caps--so to speak--a billowy chaos
of massy mountain domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and
flooded with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors,
while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun, radiating
lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith. The cloven valleys of the
lower world swam in a tinted mist which veiled the ruggedness of their
crags and ribs and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region
into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.

We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze in
drunken ecstasy and drink in it. Presently Harris exclaimed:

"Why--nation, it's going DOWN!"