I boiled my thermometer, and sure enough, this spot, which purported to be two thousand feet higher than the locality of the hotel, turned out to be nine thousand feet lower.  Thus the fact was clearly demonstrated that, above A certain point, the higher A point seems to be, the lower it actually is.  Our ascent itself was a great achievement, but this contribution to science was an inconceivably greater matter.

Cavilers object that water boils at a lower and lower temperature the higher and higher you go, and hence the apparent anomaly.  I answer that I do not base my theory upon what the boiling water does, but upon what a boiled thermometer says.  You can’t go behind the thermometer.

I had a magnificent view of Monte Rosa, and apparently all the rest of the Alpine world, from that high place.  All the circling horizon was piled high with a mighty tumult of snowy crests.  One might have imagined he saw before him the tented camps of a beleaguering host of Brobdingnagians.

But lonely, conspicuous, and superb, rose that wonderful upright wedge, the Matterhorn.  Its precipitous sides were powdered over with snow, and the upper half hidden in thick clouds which now and then dissolved to cobweb films and gave brief glimpses of the imposing tower as through a veil. [2] A little later the Matterhorn took to himself the semblance of a volcano; he was stripped naked to his apex —­around this circled vast wreaths of white cloud which strung slowly out and streamed away slantwise toward the sun, a twenty-mile stretch of rolling and tumbling vapor, and looking just as if it were pouring out of a crater.  Later again, one of the mountain’s sides was clean and clear, and another side densely clothed from base to summit in thick smokelike cloud which feathered off and flew around the shaft’s sharp edge like the smoke around the corners of a burning building.  The Matterhorn is always experimenting, and always gets up fine effects, too.  In the sunset, when all the lower world is palled in gloom, it points toward heaven out of the pervading blackness like a finger of fire.  In the sunrise—­well, they say it is very fine in the sunrise.

2.  Note.—­I had the very unusual luck to catch one little
    momentary glimpse of the Matterhorn wholly unencumbered
    by clouds.  I leveled my photographic apparatus at it
    without the loss of an instant, and should have got
    an elegant picture if my donkey had not interfered. 
    It was my purpose to draw this photograph all by myself
    for my book, but was obliged to put the mountain part
    of it into the hands of the professional artist because
    I found I could not do landscape well.

Authorities agree that there is no such tremendous “layout” of snowy Alpine magnitude, grandeur, and sublimity to be seen from any other accessible point as the tourist may see from the summit of the Riffelberg.  Therefore, let the tourist rope himself up and go there; for I have shown that with nerve, caution, and judgment, the thing can be done.