Supper warmed us, and we went immediately to bed—­but first, as Mr. 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!”

Perfectly true.  We had missed the morning hornblow, and slept all day.  This was stupefying.

Harris said: 

“Look here, the sun isn’t the spectacle—­it’s us—­stacked up here on top of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets, and two hundred and fifty well-dressed men and women down here gawking up at us and not caring a straw whether the sun rises or sets, as long as they’ve got such a ridiculous spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books.  They seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there’s one girl there at appears to be going all to pieces.  I never saw such a man as you before.  I think you are the very last possibility in the way of an ass.”