Night was about to overtake him. Where find a hut? or even a projecting rock to shelter him? All of a sudden, he saw before his nose on the arid, naked plain a species of wooden chalet, bearing, on a long placard in gigantic type, these letters, which he deciphered with difficulty: PHO... TO... GRA... PHIE DU RI... GI KULM. At the same instant the vast hotel with its three hundred windows loomed up before him between the great lamp-posts, the globes of which were now being lighted in the fog.
III.
An alarm on the Rigi. “Keep cool! Keep cool!” The Alpine
horn. What Tartarin saw, on awaking, in his looking-glass,
Perplexity. A guide is ordered by telephone.
“Quès aco?.. Quî vive?” cried Tartarin, ears alert and eyes straining hard into the darkness.
Feet were running through the hotel, doors were slamming, breathless voices were crying: “Make haste! make haste!..” while without was ringing what seemed to be a trumpet-call, as flashes of flame illumined both panes and curtains.
Fire!..
At a bound he was out of bed, shod, clothed, and running headlong down the staircase, where the gas still burned and a rustling swarm of misses were descending, with hair put up in haste, and they themselves swathed in shawls and red woollen jackets, or anything else that came to hand as they jumped out of bed.
Tartarin, to fortify himself and also to reassure the young ladies, cried out, as he rushed on, hustling everybody: “Keep cool! Keep cool!” in the voice of a gull, pallid, distraught, one of those voices that we hear in dreams sending chills down the back of the bravest man. Now, can you understand those young misses, who laughed as they looked at him and seemed to think it very funny? Girls have no notion of danger, at that age!..
Happily, the old diplomatist came along behind them, very cursorily clothed in a top-coat below which appeared his white drawers with trailing ends of tape-string.