“Come as often as you please!” consequently said Garratt Skinner from his hammock.  “And now let us talk of something else.”

He talked of nothing for a while.  But it was plain that he had a subject in his thoughts.  For twice he turned to Chayne and was on the point of speaking; but each time he thought silence the better part and lay back again.  Chayne waited and at last the subject was broached, but in a queer, hesitating, diffident way, as though Garratt Skinner spoke rather under a compulsion of which he disapproved.

“Tell me!” he said.  “I am rather interested.  A craze, an infatuation which so masters people must be interesting even to the stay-at-homes like myself.  But I am wrong to call it a craze.  From merely reading books I think it a passion which is easily intelligible.  You are wondering what I am talking about.  My daughter tells me that you are a famous climber.  The Aiguille d’Argentiere, I suppose, up which you were kind enough to accompany her, is not a very difficult mountain.”

“It depends upon the day,” said Chayne, “and the state of the snow.”

“Yes, that is what I have gathered from the books.  Every mountain may become dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“Each mountain,” said Garratt Skinner, thoughtfully, “may reward its conquerors with death”; and for a little while he lay looking up to the green branches interlaced above his head.  “Thus each mountain on the brightest day holds in its recesses mystery, and also death.”

There had come a change already in the manner of the two men.  They found themselves upon neutral ground.  Their faces relaxed from wariness; they were no longer upon their guard.  It seemed that an actual comradeship had sprung up between them.

“There is a mountain called the Grepon,” said Skinner.  “I have seen pictures of it—­a strange and rather attractive pinnacle, with its knife-like slabs of rock, set on end one above the other—­black rock splashed with red—­and the overhanging boulder on the top.  Have you climbed it?”

“Yes.”

“There is a crack, I believe—­a good place to get you into training.”

Chayne laughed with the enjoyment of a man who recollects a stiff difficulty overcome.

“Yes, to the right of the Col between the Grepon and the Charmoz.  There is a step half way up—­otherwise there is very little hold and the crack is very steep.”

They talked of other peaks, such as the Charmoz, where the first lines of ascent had given place to others more recently discovered, of new variations, new ascents and pinnacles still unclimbed; and then Garratt Skinner said: 

“I saw that a man actually crossed the Col des Nantillons early this summer.  It used to be called the Col de Blaitiere.  He was killed with his guide, but after the real dangers were passed.  That seems to happen at times.”

Chayne looked at Garratt Skinner in surprise.