They took refuge in the hotel, but that also was invaded by the damp, chill atmosphere, wrapped in and pervaded by the clouds.  From the windows nothing more was to be seen than is visible in a Russian steam bath.  But the tourists did not mind.  They addressed themselves to the business in hand.  This was registering their names.  A daily newspaper called Among the Clouds is published here, and every person who gets his name on the register in time can see it in print before the train goes.  When the train descends, every passenger has one of these two-cent certificates of his exploit.  When our party entered, there was a great run on the register, especially by women, who have a repugnance, as is well known, to seeing their names in print.  In the room was a hot stove, which was more attractive than the cold clouds, but unable to compete in interest with the register.  The artist, who seemed to be in a sardonic mood, and could get no chance to enter his name, watched the scene, while his friends enjoyed the view of the stove.  After registering, the visitors all bought note-paper with a chromo heading, “Among the Clouds,” and a natural wild-flower stuck on the corner, and then rushed to the writing-room in order to indite an epistle “from the summit.”  This is indispensable.

After that they were ready for the Signal Station.  This is a great attraction.  The sergeant in charge looked bored to death, and in the mood to predict the worst kind of weather.  He is all day beset with a crowd craning their necks to look at him, and bothered with ten thousand questions.  He told King that the tourists made his life miserable; they were a great deal worse than the blizzards in the winter.  And the government, he said, does not take this into account in his salary.

Occasionally there was an alarm that the mist was getting thin, that the clouds were about to break, and a rush was made out-of-doors, and the tourists dispersed about on the rocks.  They were all on the qui vine to see the hotel or the boarding-house they had left in the early morning.  Excursionists continually swarmed in by rail or by carriage road.  The artist, who had one of his moods for wanting to see nature, said there were too many women; he wanted to know why there were always so many women on excursions.  “You can see nothing but excursionists; whichever way you look, you see their backs.”  These backs, looming out of the mist, or discovered in a rift, seemed to enrage him.

At length something actually happened.  The curtain of cloud slowly lifted, exactly as in a theatre; for a moment there was a magnificent view of peaks, forests, valleys, a burst of sunshine on the lost world, and then the curtain dropped, amid a storm of “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and intense excitement.  Three or four times, as if in response to the call of the spectators, this was repeated, the curtain lifting every time on a different scene, and then it was all over, and the heavy mist shut down on the registered and the unregistered alike.  But everybody declared that they preferred it this way; it was so much better to have these wonderful glimpses than a full view.  They would go down and brag over their good-fortune.