“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Beastly hot.”
Thus characteristically did these two Britons greet each other, meeting unexpectedly on the steps of one of the hotels at Zermatt. The bell was ringing for table d’hôte luncheon, and the sojourners in that extensive caravanserai were dropping in by twos and threes; ladies—ruddy of countenance, the result of sunburn—sketch-book and alpenstock in hand; spectacled Teutons in long black coats with the inevitable opera-glass slung around them; English youths armed with butterfly net or tennis racket, and a sprinkling of the ubiquitous Anglican parson whose nondescript holiday attire, which its wearer flattered himself savoured of the real mountaineer while not entirely disguising his “cloth,” imparted to him very much the aspect of a raffish undertaker in attenuated circumstances. The usual line of guides, taciturn and melancholy, roosted upon the low wall just outside the hotel, or stood in a knot in front of the wood-carving shop opposite, their normal stolidity just awakened into a gleam of speculative interest by the appearance of a string of vehicles heaving in sight amid a cloud of dust, upon the road which leads up from St. Nicolas. For this was before the days of the railway, and Zermatt, still uncockneyfied, retained most of its pristine picturesqueness in spite of the monster hotels dominating its quaint brown chalets. And then the majestic cone of the Matterhorn, towering up from its plinth of rock and glacier.
“Are you staying in this house, Wentworth?” pursued Fordham. “I thought the ‘Monte Rosa’ was the hotel patronised by all you regular climbing fellows.”
“It is, as a rule. But I thought I’d come here for a change. Besides, when I’m not climbing I like to be among ordinary people. One gets a little sick of hearing nothing but guide-and-rope ‘shop’ talked. Where have you turned up from now?”
“Zinal. Came viâ the top of the Rothhorn. Orlebar got rather a nasty whack from a falling stone. He’ll have to lie by for a day or two.”
“Did he? By Jove! Now you mention it, I heard there had been a one-horse kind of accident yesterday. I think they said it was on the Trift-joch. But I didn’t believe it, and then, you see, I started early this morning to walk up to the Stockje hut and am only just back. Poor chap! I say, though, is he badly hit?”
“Between you and me and yonder mule, he is rather. Badly enough to knock him out of any more climbing this season. He’ll have to get all the brag he can out of the Rothhorn alone until next year, at any rate. It’s rough on him, too, as he was keen on doing a few of the bigger things.”
“Rough it is. Poor chap! I must go upstairs and see him after tiffin. But, come along, Fordham, we had better go in. You can sit by me; there are a lot of empty places around my end of the room.”
From their place at table—a remote corner—they could watch the room filling. The bulk of the people were of the order already referred to, but there were some new arrivals, mostly uninteresting—a parson or two; a thick-set Scotchman with a blowsy wife and a whole tribe of wooden-faced, flaxen-haired children; a couple of undergraduates in neckties of vivid hue, presumably their college colours; item, a pair of grim spinsters of uncertain age and tract-disseminating principles; in short, the average ruck of our fellow-countrymen abroad.