CHAPTER XXXIV [The World’s Highest Pig Farm]

We hired the only guide left, to lead us on our way.  He was over seventy, but he could have given me nine-tenths of his strength and still had all his age entitled him to.  He shouldered our satchels, overcoats, and alpenstocks, and we set out up the steep path.  It was hot work.  The old man soon begged us to hand over our coats and waistcoats to him to carry, too, and we did it; one could not refuse so little a thing to a poor old man like that; he should have had them if he had been a hundred and fifty.

When we began that ascent, we could see a microscopic chalet perched away up against heaven on what seemed to be the highest mountain near us.  It was on our right, across the narrow head of the valley.  But when we got up abreast it on its own level, mountains were towering high above on every hand, and we saw that its altitude was just about that of the little Gasternthal which we had visited the evening before.  Still it seemed a long way up in the air, in that waste and lonely wilderness of rocks.  It had an unfenced grass-plot in front of it which seemed about as big as a billiard-table, and this grass-plot slanted so sharply downward, and was so brief, and ended so exceedingly soon at the verge of the absolute precipice, that it was a shuddery thing to think of a person’s venturing to trust his foot on an incline so situated at all.  Suppose a man stepped on an orange peel in that yard; there would be nothing for him to seize; nothing could keep him from rolling; five revolutions would bring him to the edge, and over he would go.  What a frightful distance he would fall!—­for there are very few birds that fly as high as his starting-point.  He would strike and bounce, two or three times, on his way down, but this would be no advantage to him.  I would as soon taking an airing on the slant of a rainbow as in such a front yard.  I would rather, in fact, for the distance down would be about the same, and it is pleasanter to slide than to bounce.  I could not see how the peasants got up to that chalet —­the region seemed too steep for anything but a balloon.

As we strolled on, climbing up higher and higher, we were continually bringing neighboring peaks into view and lofty prominence which had been hidden behind lower peaks before; so by and by, while standing before a group of these giants, we looked around for the chalet again; there it was, away down below us, apparently on an inconspicuous ridge in the valley!  It was as far below us, now, as it had been above us when we were beginning the ascent.