MARK TWAIN SEES A SUNSET.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 379, 23 July 1880, Page 15

MARK TWAIN SEES A SUNSET.

We curled up iv the clammy beds, and went to sleep without rocking. We were so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor turned over till the booming; 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, aud 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 crackling in the fierce breeze. " Fifteen minutes too late, at least ! " 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 it's rising anyway." In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us, and dead to everything else. The groat 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 splendours, whilst through rifts in a 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 aud rich and sensuous paradise. We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaee in drunken ccstacy and drink it in. Presently Harris exclaimed — " Why, nation, it's going down .'" Perfectly true. We had missed the morning horn-blow, and slept all day. This was stupefying. Harris said — " Look here, the sun isn't the spectacle it's vs — stacked up here on the top of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets, and two hundred and fifty well dressed men and women down here gawking up atus and not caring a straw whether the sunrises or sets, so long as they've got such a ridiculous spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum booky. They seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there's one girl there that 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 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 those 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 uo end of people down here to boot : this isn't any place for the 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. — A Tramp Abroad.