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.”

“What have I done?” I answered, with heat.

“What have you done?  You’ve got up at half past seven o’clock in the evening to see the sun rise, that’s what you’ve done.”

“And have you done any better, I’d like to know?  I’ve always used to get up with the lark, till I came under the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect.”

“You used to get up with the lark—­Oh, no doubt —­you’ll get up with the hangman one of these days.  But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this, in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top of the Alps.  And no end of people down here to boot; this isn’t any place for an exhibition of temper.”

And so the customary quarrel went on.  When the sun was fairly down, we slipped back to the hotel in the charitable gloaming, and went to bed again.  We had encountered the horn-blower on the way, and he had tried to collect compensation, not only for announcing the sunset, which we did see, but for the sunrise, which we had totally missed; but we said no, we only took our solar rations on the “European plan”—­pay for what you get.  He promised to make us hear his horn in the morning, if we were alive.