The party moved forward again, watching with redoubled vigilance for some spot in the glacier, some spot above a crevasse, to which ice-steps descended and from which they did not lead down.  And three hundred yards beyond a second cry rang out.  A guide was standing on the lower edge of a great crevasse with a hand upheld above his head.  The searchers converged quickly upon him.  Chayne hurried forward, plying the pick of his ax as never in his life had he plied it.  Had the guide come upon the actual place where the accident took place, he asked himself?  But before he reached the spot, his pace slackened, and he stood still.  He had no longer any doubt.  His friend and his friend’s guide were not lying upon any ledge of the rocks of the Aiguille de Blaitiere; they were not waiting for any succor.

On the glacier, a broad track, littered with blocks of ice, stretched upward in a straight line from the upper lip of the crevasse to the great ice-fall on the sky-line where the huge slabs and pinnacles of ice, twisted into monstrous shapes, like a sea suddenly frozen when a tempest was at its height, stood marshaled in serried rows.  They stood waiting upon the sun.  One of them, melted at the base, had crashed down the slope, bursting into huge fragments as it fell, and cleaving a groove even in that hard glacier.

Chayne went forward and stopped at the guide’s side on the lower edge of the crevasse.  Beyond the chasm the ice rose in a blue straight wall for some three feet, and the upper edge was all crushed and battered; and then the track of the falling serac ended.  It had poured into the crevasse.

The guide pointed to the left of the track.

“Do you see, monsieur?  Those steps which come downward across the glacier and stop exactly where the track meets them?  They do not go on, on the other side of the track, monsieur.”

Chayne saw clearly enough.  The two men had been descending the glacier in the afternoon, the avalanche had fallen and swept them down.  He dropped upon his knees and peered into the crevasse.  The walls of the chasm descended smooth and precipitous, changing in gradual shades and color from pale transparent green to the darkest blue, until all color was lost in darkness.  He bent his head and shouted into the depths: 

“Lattery!  Lattery!”

And only his voice came back to him, cavernous and hollow.  He shouted again, and then he heard Michel Revailloud saying solemnly behind him: 

“Yes, they are here.”

Suddenly Chayne turned round, moved by a fierce throb of anger.

“It’s not true, you see,” he cried.  “He didn’t slip out of his steps and drag his guide down with him.  You were wrong, Michel.”

Michel was standing with his hat in his hand.

“Yes, monsieur, I was quite wrong,” he said, gently.  He turned to a big and strong man: 

“Francois, will you put on the rope and go down?”