"And how will I manage to tow along this lump of a Pinocchio who is half dead with mountain-sickness?"
"Pinocchio?"
"Where is he?"
"Pull the rope and take him off my back; he has tired me out."
Pinocchio, who was in a state of great weakness and curiously sleepy, felt himself lifted up and whirled around to the outburst of loud laughter. It seemed to him that something slipped down his throat which burned and made him cough and sneeze ... then he thought he was stretched out on a bed that was rather hard, but covered with warm and heavy coverings; then ... he experienced a strange feeling of comfort disturbed only by a long, monotonous, persistent humming.
If he had been able to notice what was happening to him he would either have died of fright or he would have believed himself in the very hands of God. Fastened to the gun-carriage of a six-inch cannon, suspended in the car of a filovia, he was traveling over the abyss which separates two of our giant Alps. Below him was a sea of clouds, above the beautiful blue sky, all about him the gleam of white snow, and on the snow here and there a group of little gray points, like grains of sand lost in all this immensity. Those were our Alpine troops, the dear big boys who were laughing at the joke played on Pinocchio, and defying serenely all the obstacles that nature opposed to their victorious advance on Italian soil which Austria's power had for so many years disputed with us.
When Pinocchio regained his senses he found himself lying on the ground wrapped up in coverlets and warm as a bun just out of the oven. Above his head dangled horizontally the huge basket from which he had been flung by the shock of its sudden halt, and which swung on the steel cables of the filovia as if it were weary of being up there and eager to set about its job. All about was the gleam of the snow, even though the light was growing paler every moment. I bet you a soldo against a lira what hour it was. But Pinocchio guessed it from the odor of cooking which sweetened the air all about, an odor which would have brought a dead dyspeptic to life. He sniffed the air like a bloodhound, rolled his eyes in every direction, in all corners, to discover the spot whence came the delicious fragrance, but couldn't see anything but snow, nothing, not even a curl of distant smoke. He was so hungry that he thought he would faint.
"I am dreaming with eyes open. How is it possible that there should be in this desert pastry covered with caramel sauce? Because I know I am not mistaken ... the odor I smell is just that. If I had only a piece of bread, by means of my nose and by means of my mouth I could fool myself into believing that I was dining magnificently, but ..."
But the odor affected him so strongly that he had to get up to limber up his muscles. He had scarcely got to his feet when a strange thing happened—from the very spot where he had been lying a puff of smoke rose gently upward, and this smoke had precisely the odor of pastry covered with caramel sauce.
