They advise you to keep the windows shut, as you go cork-screwing up that infernal staircase. You might find it worse if you did not; it is bad enough when you do. Drifts of asphyxiating smoke, fitfully lambent, stream by the glass, and writh about and nozzle where they fancy they have detected an opening. It may not be large enough for them to enter by, but whiffs of their poisonous breath leak in, and give you a taste of what you might expect were they to find you napping. The train itself, in that choking atmosphere, seems to go weak at the wheels, and to drag itself wearily upward, as if every revolution must be its last, committing you in prospect to the alternatives of entombment in the heart of a mountain or a back-descent at rocket-speed into France. A throb as of thunderous subterranean waters fills your ears; the wind of your passage clacks like a monstrous tongue on the stony roof above you; it seems impossible that any work of man can withstand the hugeness of that deafening uproar and vibration. But it is all, of course, acoustically exaggerated to you in your confined pen. You are going up a spiral chimney, with a sufficient ventilation at the top. The clamour of your rising emerges there with the smoke and steam, and, like a piston rod, you expel them before you as you advance. And so, at last, when you have almost given up hope, a flash--and Elysium. I think the world can give one no first experience at once so sombre and so dazzlingly impressive as that of the passage of the Col de Fréjus, with its entry from low France and emergence into high Italy. Thirty minutes are but half-an-hour out in the daylight; in the Mont Cenis tunnel they amount to a good long spell of purgatory. There the wails of the damned go past in drifts of lurid smoke, most agitating in their bearing on the fragile pane which alone separates the eternal from the temporal classes. One finds oneself hoping that the ministers of justice have fully understood their instructions about one, and that one will be permitted to reach redemption without the window being broken. Curiously, too, the system of bought indulgence strikes one for the first time as having something in it. The cost would be very small to shorten this tunnel by a spiritual mile or two. And yet, when it is ended, one would not have had it shorter by a metre, because every foot taken from it would mean just so much ecstasy filched from one’s awakening from a nightmare. For, behold! from travelling in a steaming suffocating drain pipe, one is spat out suddenly into Paradise in winter.