“I saw a man falling.  I saw that I could save him.  I did not think.  My hand had already caught him.”

He looked up with a start.  In the east the day was breaking, pale and desolate; the lower glacier glimmered into view beneath them; the gigantic amphitheater of hills which girt them in on three sides loomed out of the mists from aerial heights and took solidity and shape, westward the black and rugged Peuteret ridge, eastward the cliffs of Mont Maudit, and northward sweeping around the head of the glacier, the great ice-wall of Mont Blanc with its ruined terraces and inaccessible cliffs.

“Time, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner, and he rose to his feet and called to Pierre Delouvain.  “There are only three of us.  We shall have to go quickly.  We do not want to carry more food than we shall need.  The rest we can send back with our blankets by the porters.”

Pierre Delouvain justified at once the ill words which had been spoken of him by Michel Revailloud.  He thought only of the burden which through this long day he would have to carry on his back.

“Yes, that is right,” he said.  “We will take what we need for the day.  To-night we shall be in Chamonix.”

And thus the party set off with no provision against that most probable of all mishaps—­the chance that sunset might find them still upon the mountain side.  Pierre Delouvain, being lazy and a worthless fellow, as Revailloud had said, agreed.  But the suggestion had been made by Garratt Skinner.  And Garratt Skinner was Gabriel Strood, who knew—­none better—­the folly of such light traveling.

The rope was put on; Pierre Delouvain led the way, Walter Hine as the weakest of the party was placed in the middle, Garratt Skinner came last; the three men mounted by a snow-slope and a gully to the top of the rocks which supported the upper Brenva glacier.

“That’s our road, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner.  He pointed to a great buttress of rock overlain here and there with fields of snow, which jutted out from the ice-wall of the mountain, descended steeply, bent to the west in a curve, and then pushed far out into the glacier as some great promontory pushes out into the sea.  “Do you see a hump above the buttress, on the crest of the ridge and a little to the right?  And to the right of the hump, a depression in the ridge?  That’s what they call the Corridor.  Once we are there our troubles are over.”

But between the party and the buttress stretched the great ice-fall of the upper Brenva glacier.  Crevassed, broken, a wilderness of towering seracs, it had the look of a sea in a gale whose breakers had been frozen in the very act of over toppling.

“Come,” said Pierre.

“Keep the rope stretched tight, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner; and they descended into the furrows of that wild and frozen sea.  The day’s work had begun in earnest; and almost at once they began to lose time.