onless waves with all the appearance of a furious and petrified
tempest.

Apparent immobility only, for hollow crackings, subterranean gurgles,
enormous masses of ice displacing themselves slowly, as if moved by the
machinery of a stage, indicated the inward life of this frozen mass and
its treacherous elements. To the eyes of our Alpinist, wherever he cast
his axe crevasses were opening, bottomless pits, where masses of ice
in fragments rolled indefinitely. The hero fell repeatedly; once to his
middle in one of those greenish gullies, where his broad shoulders alone
kept him from going to the bottom.

On seeing him so clumsy, and yet so tranquil, so sure of himself,
laughing, singing, gesticulating, as he did while breakfasting, the
guides imagined that Swiss champagne had made an impression upon him.
What else could they suppose of the president of an Alpine Club, a
renowned ascensionist, of whom his friends spoke only with "Ahs!" and
exultant gestures. After taking him each by the arm with the respectful
firmness of policemen putting into a carriage an overcome heir to a
title, they endeavoured, by the help of monosyllables and gestures, to
rouse his mind to a sense of the dangers of the route, the necessity
of reaching the hut before nightfall, with threats of crevasses, cold,
avalanches. Finally, with the point of their ice-picks they showed him
the enormous accumulation of ice, of _neve_ not yet transformed into
glacier rising before them to the zenith in blinding repetition.

But the worthy Tartarin laughed at all that: "Ha! _vai!_ crevasses!..
Ha! _vai!_ those avalanches!.." and he burst out laughing, winked his
eye, and prodded their sides with his elbows to let them know they could
not fool him, for _he_ was in the secret of the comedy.

The guides at last ended by making merry with the Tarasconese songs, and
when they rested a moment on a solid block to let their monsieur get his
breath, they yodelled in the Swiss way, though not too loudly, for fear
of avalanches, nor very long, for time was getting on. They knew the
coming of night by the sharper cold, but especially by the singular
change in hue of these snows and ice-packs, heaped-up, overhanging,
which always keep, even under misty skies, a rainbow tinge of colour
until the daylight fades, rising higher and higher to the vanishing
summits, where the snows take on the livid, spectral tints of the lunar
universe. Pallor, petrifaction, silence, death its