“That, mademoiselle, is the Aiguille d’Argentiere.  We cross the glacier here.”

Jean put the rope about her waist, fixing it with the fisherman’s bend, and tied one end about his own, using the overhand knot, while his brother tied on behind.  They then turned at right angles to their former march and crossed the glacier, keeping the twenty feet of rope which separated each person extended.  Once Jean looked back and uttered an exclamation of surprise.  For he saw Chayne and his guides following across the glacier behind, and Chayne’s road to the Col Dolent at the head of the glacier lay straight ahead upon their former line of advance.  However he said nothing.

They crossed the bergschrund with less difficulty than they had anticipated, and ascending a ridge of debris, by the side of the lateral glacier which descended from the cliffs of the Aiguille d’Argentiere, they advanced into the bay under the southern wall of the Aiguille du Chardonnet.  On the top of this moraine Jean halted, and the party breakfasted, and while they breakfasted Chayne told Sylvia something of that mountain’s history.  “It is not the most difficult of peaks,” said he, “but it has associations, which some of the new rock-climbs have not.  The pioneers came here.”  Right behind them there was a gap, the pass between their mountain and the Aiguille du Chardonnet.  “From that pass Moore and Whymper first tried to reach the top by following the crest of the cliffs, but they found it impracticable.  Whymper tried again, but this time up the face of the cliffs further on to the south and just to the left of the summit.  He failed, came back again and conquered.  We follow his road.”

And while they looked up the dead white of that rounded summit ridge changed to a warm rosy color and all about that basin the topmost peaks took fire.

“It is the sun,” said he.

Sylvia looked across the valley.  The great ice-triangle of the Aiguille Verte flashed and sparkled.  The slopes of the Les Droites and Mont Dolent were hung with jewels; even the black precipices of the Tour Noir grew warm and friendly.  But at the head of the glacier a sheer unbroken wall of rock swept round in the segment of a circle, and this remained still dead black and the glacier at its foot dead white.  At one point in the knife-like edge of this wall there was a depression, and from the depression a riband of ice ran, as it seemed from where they sat, perpendicularly down to the Glacier d’Argentiere.

“That is the Col Dolent,” said Chayne.  “Very little sunlight ever creeps down there.”

Sylvia shivered as she looked.  She had never seen anything so somber, so sinister, as that precipitous curtain of rock and its riband of ice.  It looked like a white band painted on a black wall.

“It looks very dangerous,” she said, slowly.

“It needs care,” said Chayne.

“Especially this year when there is so little snow,” added Sylvia.