“It will snow, I think.”

They made some tea, mixed it with wine and gave it first of all to Walter Hine.  Then they all breakfasted, and set off on their homeward journey, letting Hine down with the rope from step to step.

Gradually Hine regained a little strength.  His numbed limbs began to come painfully to life.  He began to move slowly of his own accord, supported by his rescuers.  They reached the ice-ridge.  It had no terrors now for Walter Hine.

“He had better be tied close between Pierre and myself,” said Garratt Skinner.  “We came up that way.”

“Between Simond and Droz,” said Chayne, quietly.

“As you will,” said Garratt Skinner with a shrug of the shoulders.

Along the ice-ridge the party moved slowly and safely, carrying Hine between them.  As they passed behind the great rock tower at the lower end, the threatened snow began to fall in light flakes.

“Quickly,” said Chayne.  “We must reach the chalets to-night.”

They raced along the snow-slopes on the crest of the buttress and turned to the right down the gullies and the ledges on the face of the rock.  In desperate haste they descended lowering Walter Hine from man to man, they crawled down the slabs, dropped from shelf to shelf, wound themselves down the gullies of ice.  Somehow without injury the snow-slopes at the foot of the rocks were reached.  The snow still held off; only now and then a few flakes fell.  But over the mountain the wind was rising, it swept down in fierce swift eddies, and drew back with a roar like the sea upon shingle.

“We must get off the glacier before night comes,” cried Chayne, and led by Simond the rescue party went down into the ice-fall.  They stopped at the first glacier pool and made Hine wash his hands and feet in the water, to save himself from frost-bite; and thereafter for a little time they rested.  They went on again, but they were tired men, and before the rocks were reached upon which two nights before Garratt Skinner had bivouacked, darkness had come.  Then Simond justified the praise of Michel Revailloud.  With the help of a folding lantern which Chayne had carried in his pocket, he led the way through that bewildering labyrinth with unerring judgment.  Great seracs loomed up through the darkness, magnified in size and distorted in shape.  Simond went over and round them and under them, steadily, and the rescue party followed.  Now he disappeared over the edge of a cliff into space, and in a few seconds his voice rang upward cheerily.

“Follow!  It is safe.”

And his ice-ax rang with no less cheeriness.  He led them boldly to the brink of abysses which were merely channels in the ice, and amid towering pinnacles which seen, close at hand, were mere blocks shoulder high.  And at last the guide at the tail of the rope heard from far away ahead Simond’s voice raised in a triumphant shout.

“The rocks!  The rocks!”