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 sunrises.

We were informed by the guide-book that we were now 3,228 feet above the level of the lake—­therefore full two-thirds of our journey had been accomplished.  We got away at a quarter past four, P.M.; a hundred yards above the hotel the railway divided; one track went straight up the steep hill, the other one turned square off to the right, with a very slight grade.  We took the latter, and followed it more than a mile, turned a rocky corner, 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 as 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.