[Illustration]

CHAPTER VII

At Last!

    “A Jack-o’-lantern, a fairy fire,
     A dare, a bliss, and a desire.” 
    —­BLISS CARMAN.

    “Here a great personal deed has room.” 
    —­WALT WHITMAN.

The further I penetrated into the mountains, the more like a vast engineering workshop did the long Alpine valley become.  Yet, curiously enough, instead of destroying romance, this gave a certain majestic romance of its own; the romance of man’s struggle to conquer the stupendous forces of Nature with his science.  It was as if Vulcan’s stithy had been dropped down into a profound ravine of the Alps, and the drone of machinery mingled with the music of the fleeting river—­a strange diapason.

On the right of the highroad, the flat mountain face opened a black, egg-shaped mouth at me.  I got out of the carriage to approach it, and while I stood peering down the dark throat, as if I were a Lilliputian doctor examining the tongue of Giant Gulliver, I was suddenly clapped upon the shoulder.  It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was forbidden to stare at the tunnel-in-making; and turning to defend myself from a lash of red tape, with the adage that “a cat may look at a king,” I saw a man I had known years ago smiling at me.

[Illustration:  “I WAS SUDDENLY CLAPPED UPON THE SHOULDER".]

I have a worldly-minded cousin who says that she is always nice to girls, because “you never know whom they may marry.”  It might be equally diplomatic to be nice to foreigners who are at Oxford with you, because you don’t know that they may not become famous engineers, able to show you interesting things when you visit their country.  Giovanni Bolzano had been at Balliol with me, studying English, and now it turned out that he was second engineer to the works for the new tunnel.  I recalled with poignant regret that Jack Winston and I had once made hay of his room; but evidently he bore no malice, for after saying that he was not surprised to see me, as everybody came this way sooner or later, he offered to show me his tunnel, of which this was the Italian mouth.  It had another at Brig, twelve miles away, and boasted the longest throat in the world, but as it was marvellously ventilated, it would never choke in its own smoke, and Bolzano was very proud of the engineering achievement.  Having discharged my carriage, I went with him into a workshop, heard the humming of dynamos, and the buzzing of tremendous turbines, actuated by the fall of the river Diveria, and gazed with the fascination of a mouse for a cat at a huge and diabolical fan, driving air into the tunnel.  This fearful beast had a house to itself, with a passage down which you could venture like Theseus entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur; but such was the volume of breath which it drew into its mighty lungs that you must use all your strength not to be sucked in and hurled against the shafting; all your self-control not to be confused by its loud, unceasing roar.