The Alps

Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV THE WESTERN GRAIANS 1 June 14-17. It would hardly interest the reader to know how we went from Torre Pellice to Modane; there are various routes, leading through hilly though hardly mountainous country, and we took one of them, in bad weather. We had to go to Modane to send Zurbriggen home, show our passports and the Gurkhas' to the police, submit our intended route for approval, get ourselves cross-examined once for all, and thus as far as possible minimise the frontier nuisance. We found the officials most polite. They asked what treatment we had received in Italy. I described to them how the Gurkhas had been mistaken for Tunisian natives, and trusted that in France they would not be taken for Abyssinians from Massowah! My friend protested volubly against such a possibility, and in his cloud of words I went a-dreaming, merely agreeing with him from time to time. 'Alors, ' he said, 'nous sommes des dnes.' 'Quite true!' I replied vaguely! Down came FitzGerald's heel, hobnailed, on my slippered foot and I perceived that I must have blundered. The official repeated his remark severely; I replied appropriately, and the matter passed. He recommended us not to take photographs nor to mark our maps. 'If any one interferes with you, refer him to me.' 1 It would have been more consistent with the main idea of our journey to have gone by the Eastern Graians, the mountains of Cogne, but I knew that district already. In the evening we found a cafe" with good beer on draught--a heaven-sent gift. When I went to sleep, FitzGerald was sitting on his bed, pen in hand, immersed in mathematics. 'Let n be the number of glasses we drank--no! 2n, for it was an even number. Then you had In--1 glasses and I had 2w]l. Now we played 2x + 4 games of...