If I ever take that journey again I shall wear a smoke helmet and be comfortable.  But always between tunnels there were views to be seen that would have revived one of the Seven Sleepers.  Now, on the great-granddaddy-longlegs of all the spidery trestles that ever were built, we would go roaring across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud-daubers’ nests beneath an eave.  Now, perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw, would be a deserted tower, making a fellow think of the good old feudal days when the robber barons robbed the traveler instead of as at present, when the job is so completely attended to by the pirates who weigh and register baggage in these parts.

Then—­whish, roar, eclipse, darkness and sulphureted hydrogen!—­we would dive into another tunnel and out again—­gasping—­on a breathtaking panorama of mountains.  Some of them would be standing up against the sky like the jagged top of a half-finished cutout puzzle, and some would be buried so deeply in clouds that only their peaked blue noses showed sharp above the featherbed mattresses of mist in which they were snuggled, as befitted mountains of Teutonic extraction.  And nearly every eminence was crowned with a ruined castle or a hotel.  It was easy to tell a hotel from a ruin—­it had a sign over the door.

At one of those hotels I met up with a homesick American.  He was marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp.  By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place.  He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations.  But he said he could show me something that was even a greater curiosity than a bathtub, and he led me to where a moonfaced barometer hung alongside the front entrance of the hotel.

He said he had been there a week now and had about lost hope; but every time he threatened to move on, the proprietor would take him out there and prove that they were bound to have clearing weather within a few hours, because the barometer registered fair.  At that moment streams of chilly rain-water were coursing down across the dial of the barometer, but it registered fair even then.  He said—­the American did—­that it was the most stationary barometer he had ever seen, and the most reliable—­not vacillating and given to moods, like most barometers, but fixed and unchangeable in its habits.