“Everything is different here from anywhere else,” Harry went on. “Just look at the names of the streets! First we came up the Cannebiere, then up Rue Paradis. Then we turned up the Cours Pierre Puget into Rue Breteuil, and now we are going up the Rue Dragon. What would they think of such names in Huntington, Kit? But the ascenseurs! That’s what takes me. What are they, Kit? some kind of animals?”
“Why, the word is almost English,” Kit laughed. “We call them elevators, in London they call them lifts, and in France they are called ascenseurs. They are elevators, that’s all, to take us up the hill.”
“Say, old man, I don’t see where you learn so many things!” Harry exclaimed. “We only got here yesterday, and you travel about this town like a native.”
“What do you think my eyes are for?” Kit asked. “But here we are. This seems to be the end of navigation.”
The omnibus had run through a big gateway into a small garden, and could go no further because at the end of the garden an immense hill of rock rose almost straight into the air. As they stepped out, an old man held a tin box in front of them, with a hole in the top to drop coins through.
“No, thank you,” said Harry, “I don’t care for any to-day. They have a good stock of beggars in this town,” he added to Kit, “but that’s the first one I ever saw in uniform.”
“He begs for the sailors’ hospital, so the guidebook says,” Kit answered, as he dropped a ten-centime piece into the box. “There, what do you think of going up the hill in that thing?”
He pointed, as he spoke, to a great pile of masonry that rose almost straight up the side of the hill, with two tracks, one on each side, and near the top a series of dark and forbidding arches. The whole thing had an uncanny look; and they heard the rapid flow of a stream of water, but could not see it.
“Phew!” Harry exclaimed. “I don’t like the looks of it very much. I’ve never made a practice of going to church in an elevator, you know. But I suppose it must be safe enough, as other people use it.”
At the foot of the masonry was a small open pavilion where a man sold tickets for the elevators; and after paying their fares, eighty centimes, or sixteen cents, each, which entitled them to go up and come down, they passed through a turnstile and stepped into a car nearly as large as a small room, with a seat across the back, large windows in the front, and before the windows a narrow platform, on which stood the brakeman.