Here was a man, at last!..
Tartarin ran to him waving his arms: “Ah! Monsieur le baron, what a disaster!.. Do you know about it?.. Where is it?.. How did it take?..”
“Who? What?” stuttered the terrified baron, not understanding.
“Why, the fire...”
“What fire?..”
The poor man’s countenance was so inexpressibly vacant and stupid that Tartarin abandoned him and rushed away abruptly to “organize help...”
“Help!” repeated the baron, and after him four or five waiters, sound asleep on their feet in the antechamber, looked at one another completely bewildered and echoed, “Help!..”
At the first step that Tartarin made out-of-doors he saw his error. Not the slightest conflagration! Only savage cold, and pitchy darkness, scarcely lighted by the resinous torches that were being carried hither and thither, casting on the snow long, blood-coloured traces.
On the steps of the portico, a performer on the Alpine horn was bellowing his modulated moan, that monotonous rànz des vaches on three notes, with which the Rigi-Kulm is wont to waken the worshippers of the sun and announce to them the rising of their star.
It is said that it shows itself, sometimes, on rising, at the extreme top of the mountain behind the hotel. To get his bearings, Tartarin had only to follow the long peal of the misses’ laughter which now went past him. But he walked more slowly, still full of sleep and his legs heavy with his six hours’ climb.