There remains confusion in A Tramp Abroad as to exactly where Mark Twain and Harris (Joe Twichell) were, Leukerbad or Leuk. It's my opinion that they were in Leukerbad if only because he makes the statement on leaving the town that "Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took the train for Visp". If Leuk, they would not have needed to drive the Rhone Valley.
August 26 Monday – Sam and Joe took a train to Locchi-Suste (Visp). They met John Dawson and wife, an English family going their way. From Visp the two hiked “6 hours through mud & rain” the ten miles to St. Nicklaus, Switzerland [MTNJ 2: 148]. Rodney: “Ensconsed in a new hotel, they changed into dry clothes and revived with a good dinner” [107].
Sam wrote from St. Nicklaus to Livy. He included a line drawing of “the great mountain profile,” and mentioned they’d made “some nice English friends, [unnamed, but may have been the Rev. Robert Eden (1804-1886) mentioned in the inscription dated Sept. 1–4; or the John Dawson family] and shall see them at Zermat tomorrow.”
“Livy darling, we came through a-whooping, to-day, 6 hours tramp up steep hills & down steep hills, in mud & water shoe-deep, & in a steady pouring rain which never moderated a moment. I was as chipper & fresh as a lark all the way & arrived without the slightest sense of fatigue” [MTLE 3: 82].
Sam did not dump his dismal opinions about the area on Livy, but fully noted the “alleys run liquid dung,” the villages, “the shackliest & vilest we have seen anywhere,” and the roads and bridges that “must have made themselves” [MTNJ 2: 148-9].
Mark Twain tells of this journey in A Tramp Abroad, Chapter 35
Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took the train for Visp. There we shouldered our knapsacks and things, and set out on foot, in a tremendous rain, up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt. Hour after hour we slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble Lesser Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green all the way up and had little atomy Swiss homes perched upon grassy benches along their mist-dimmed heights.
The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we continued to enjoy both. At the one spot where this torrent tossed its white mane highest, and thundered loudest, and lashed the big boulders fiercest, the canton had done itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden bridge that exists in the world. While we were walking over it, along with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even the larger raindrops made it shake. I called Harris’s attention to it, and he noticed it, too. It seemed to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake, and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice before I would ride him over that bridge.
We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half past four in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through the fertilizer-juice, and stopped at a new and nice hotel close by the little church. We stripped and went to bed, and sent our clothes down to be baked. And the horde of soaked tourists did the same. That chaos of clothing got mixed in the kitchen, and there were consequences.
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