elf. And the good
Tartarin, so warm, so living, was beginning to lose his liveliness when
the distant cry of a bird, the note of a "snow partridge" brought back
before his eyes a baked landscape, a copper-coloured setting sun, and
a band of Taras-conese sportsmen, mopping their faces, seated on their
empty game-bags, in the slender shade of an olive-tree. The recollection
was a comfort to him.

At the same moment Kaufmann pointed to something that looked like a
faggot of wood on the snow. 'T was the hut. It seemed as if they could
get to it in a few strides, but, in point of fact, it took a good
half-hour's walking. One of the guides went on ahead to light the fire.
Darkness had now come on; the north wind rattled on the cadaverous way,
and Tartarin, no longer paying attention to anything, supported by the
stout arm of the mountaineer, stumbled and bounded along without a dry
thread on him in spite of the falling temperature. All of a sudden a
flame shot up before him, together with an appetizing smell of onion
soup.

They were there.

Nothing can be more rudimentary than these halting-places established on
the mountains by the Alpine Club of Switzerland. A single room, in which
an inclined plane of hard wood serves as a bed and takes up nearly all
the space, leaving but little for the stove and the long table, screwed
to the floor like the benches that are round it. The table was already
laid; three bowls, pewter spoons, the reed-lamp to heat the coffee, two
cans of Chicago preserved meats already opened. Tartarin thought the
dinner delicious although the fumes of the onion soup infected the
atmosphere, and the famous spirit-lamp, which ought to have made its
pint of coffee in three minutes, refused to perform its functions.

At the dessert he sang; that was his only means of conversing with his
guides. He sang them the airs of his native land: _La Tarasque_, and
_Les Filles d'Avignon_. To which the guides responded with local songs
in German patois: _Mi Vater isch en Appenzeller... aou... aou_... Worthy
fellows with hard, weather-beaten features as if cut from the rock,
beards in the hollows that looked like moss and those clear eyes, used
to great spaces, like the eyes of sailors. The same sensation of the sea
and the open, which he had felt just now on approaching Guggi, Tartarin
again felt here, in presence of these mariners of the glacier in this
close cabin, low and smoky, the regular forecastle of a ship; in