Now it was a perilous strip of ice between unfathomable blue depths along which they must pass, as bridge-builders along their girders, yet without the bridge-builders’ knowledge that at the end of the passage there was a further way.  Now it was some crevasse into which they must descend, cutting their steps down a steep rib of ice; now it was a wall up which the leader must be hoisted on the shoulders of his companions, and even so as likely as not, his fingers could not reach the top, but hand holds and foot holds must be hewn with the ax till a ladder was formed.  Now it was some crevasse gaping across their path; they must search this way and that for a firm snow-bridge by which to overpass it.  It was difficult, as Pierre Delouvain discovered, to find a path through that tangled labyrinth without some knowledge of the glacier.  For, only at rare times, when he stood high on a serac, could he see his way for more than a few yards ahead.  Pierre aimed straight for the foot of the buttress, working thus due north.  And he was wrong.  Garratt Skinner knew it, but said not a word.  He stood upon insecure ledges and supported Delouvain upon his shoulders, and pushed him up with his ice-ax into positions which only involved the party in further difficulties.  He took his life in his hands and risked it, knowing the better way.  Yet all the while the light broadened, the great violet shadows crept down the slopes and huddled at the bases of the peaks.  Then the peaks took fire, and suddenly along the dull white slopes of ice in front of them the fingers of the morning flashed in gold.  Over the eastern rocks the sun had leaped into the sky.  For a little while longer they advanced deeper into the entanglement, and when they were about half way across they came to a stop.  They were on a tongue of ice which narrowed to a point; the point abutted against a perpendicular ice-wall thirty feet high.  Nowhere was there any break in that wall, and at each side of the tongue the ice gaped in chasms.

“We must go back,” said Pierre.  “I have forgotten the way.”

He had never known it.  Seduced by a treble fee, he had assumed an experience which he did not possess.  Garratt Skinner looked at his watch, and turning about led the party back for a little while.  Then he turned to his right and said: 

“I think it might go in this direction,” and lo! making steadily across some difficult ground, no longer in a straight line northward to Mont Blanc, but westward toward the cliffs of the Peuteret ridge under Garratt Skinner’s lead, they saw a broad causeway of ice open before them.  The causeway led them to steep slopes of snow, up which it was just possible to kick steps, and then working back again to the east they reached the foot of the great buttress on its western side just where it forms a right angle with the face of the mountain.  Garratt Skinner once more looked at his watch.  It had been half-past two when they had put on the rope, it was now close upon half-past six.  They had taken four hours to traverse the ice-fall, and they should have taken only two and a half.  Garratt Skinner, however, expressed no anxiety.  On the contrary, one might have thought that he wished to lose time.