“Will it go?” asked Garratt Skinner.

“It must,” said Delouvain.  “For we can never go back”; and suddenly alarmed lest the way should be barred in front as well as behind, Walter Hine turned and looked above him.  His nerves were already shaken; at the sight of what lay ahead of him, he uttered a cry of despair.

“It’s no use,” he cried.  “We can never get up,” and he flung himself upon the snow and buried his face in his arms.  Garratt Skinner stood over him.

“We must,” he said.  “Come!  Look!”

Walter Hine looked up and saw his companion dangling the face of his watch before his eyes.

“We are late.  It is now twelve o’clock.  We should have left this spot two hours ago and more,” he said, very gravely; and Pierre Delouvain exclaimed excitedly: 

“Certainly, monsieur, we must go on.  It will not do to loiter now,” and stooping down, he dragged rather than helped Walter Hine to his feet.  The quiet gravity of Garratt Skinner and the excitement of Delouvain frightened Walter Hine equally.  Some sense of his own insufficiency broke in at last upon him.  His vanity peeled off from him, just at the moment when it would most have been of use.  He had a glimpse of what he was—­a poor, weak, inefficient thing.

Above them the slopes stretched upward to a great line of towering ice-cliffs.  Through and up those ice-cliffs a way had to be found.  And at any moment, loosened by the sun, huge blocks and pinnacles might break from them and come thundering down.  As it was, upon their right hand where the snow-fields fell steeply in a huge ice gully, between a line of rocks and the cliffs of Mont Maudit, the avalanches plunged and reverberated down to the Brenva glacier.  Pierre Delouvain took the lead again, and keeping by the line of rocks the party ascended the steep snow-slopes straight toward the wall of cliffs.  But in a while the snow thinned, and the ax was brought into play again.  Through the thin crust of snow, steps had to be cut into the ice beneath, and since there were still many hundreds of feet to be ascended, the steps were cut wide apart.  With the sun burning upon his face, and his feet freezing in the ice-steps, Walter Hine stood and moved, and stood again all through that afternoon.  Fatigue gained upon him, and fear did not let him go.  “If only I get off this mountain,” he said to himself with heartfelt longing, “never again!” When near to the cliffs Pierre Delouvain stopped.  In front of him the wall was plainly inaccessible.  Far away to the left there was a depression up which possibly a way might be forced.

“I think, monsieur, that must be the way,” said Pierre.

“But you should know” said Garratt Skinner.

“It is some time since I was here.  I have forgotten;” and Pierre began to traverse the ice-slope to the left.  Garratt Skinner followed without a word.  But he knew that when he had ascended Mont Blanc by the Brenva route twenty-three years before, he had kept to the right along the rocks to a point where that ice-wall was crevassed, and through that crevasse had found his path.  They passed quickly beneath an overhanging rib of ice which jutted out from the wall, and reached the angle then formed at four o’clock in the afternoon.