orner, and came in sight of a handsome new hotel. If we
had gone on, we should have arrived at the summit, but Harris
preferred to ask a lot of questions--as usual, of a man who didn't know
anything--and he told us to go back and follow the other route. We did
so. We could ill afford this loss of time.

We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty
summits, but there was always another one just ahead. It came on to
rain, and it rained in dead earnest. We were soaked through and it
was bitter cold. Next a smoky fog of clouds covered the whole region
densely, and we took to the railway-ties to keep from getting lost.
Sometimes we slopped along in a narrow path on the left-hand side of the
track, but by and by when the fog blew aside a little and we saw that we
were treading the rampart of a precipice and that our left elbows were
projecting over a perfectly boundless and bottomless vacancy, we gasped,
and jumped for the ties again.

The night shut down, dark and drizzly and cold. About eight in the
evening the fog lifted and showed us a well-worn path which led up a
very steep rise to the left. We took it, and as soon as we had got far
enough from the railway to render the finding it again an impossibility,
the fog shut down on us once more.

We were in a bleak, unsheltered place, now, and had to trudge right
along, in order to keep warm, though we rather expected to go over a
precipice, sooner or later. About nine o'clock we made an important
discovery--that we were not in any path. We groped around a while on our
hands and knees, but we could not find it; so we sat down in the mud and
the wet scant grass to wait.

We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted with a vast
body which showed itself vaguely for an instant and in the next instant
was smothered in the fog again. It was really the hotel we were after,
monstrously magnified by the fog, but we took it for the face of a
precipice, and decided not to try to claw up it.

We sat there an hour, with chattering teeth and quivering bodies, and
quarreled over all sorts of trifles, but gave most of our attention to
abusing each other for the stupidity of deserting the railway-track. We
sat with our backs to the precipice, because what little wind there was
came from that quarter. At some time or other the fog thinned a little;
we did not know when, for we were facing the empty universe and the
thinness could not show; but at la