“‘Fidele!’ I said again.

“‘I am listening.’

“’Hear, then!  Canst thou free my right arm, that I may feel for the lucifers in my pocket?’

“She moved at once, never raising her face from my breast.  I groped for the box, found it; and manipulating with one hand, succeeded in striking a match.  It flamed up—­a long wax vesta.

“A glory of sleek fires sprang on the instant into life.  We lay imprisoned in a house of glass at the foot of a smooth incline rising behind us to unknown heights.  A wall of porous and opaque ice-rubbish, into which our feet had plunged deep, had stayed our progress.

“I placed the box by my side ready for use.  Our last moments should be lavish of splendour.  Stooping for another match, to kindle from the flame of the near-expired one, a thought struck me.  Why had we not been at once frozen to death?  Yet we lay where we had brought up, as snug and glowing as if we were wrapped in bedclothes.

“The answer came to me in a flash.  We had fallen sheer to the glacier bed, which, warmed by subterraneous heat, was ever in process of melting.  Possibly, but a comparatively thin curtain of perforated ice separated us from the under torrent.

“The enforced conclusion was astounding; but as yet it inspired no hope.  We were none the less doomed and buried.

“I lit a second match, turned about, and gave a start of terror.  There, imbedded in the transparent wall at my very shoulder, was something—­the body of a man.

“A horrible sight—­a horrible, horrible sight—­crushed, flattened—­a caricature; the very gouts of blood that had burst from him held poised in the massed congelations of water.

“For how long ages had he been travelling to the valley, and from what heights?  He was of a bygone generation, by his huge coat cuffs, his metal buttons, by his shoe buckles and the white stockings on his legs, which were pressed thin and sharp, as if cut out of paper.  Had he been a climber, an explorer—­a contemporary, perhaps, of Saussure and a rival?  And what had been his unrecorded fate?  To slip into a crevasse, and so for the parted ice to snap upon him again, like a hideous jaw?  Its work done, it might at least have opened and dropped him through—­not held him intact to jog us, out of all that world of despair, with his battered elbow!

“Perhaps to witness in others the fate he had himself suffered!

“I dropped the match I was holding.  I tightened my clasp convulsively about Fidele.  Thank God she, at any rate, was blind to this horror within a horror!

“All at once—­was it the start I had given, or the natural process of dissolution beneath our feet?—­we were moving again.  Swift—­swifter!  Fidele uttered a little moaning cry.  The rubbish of ice crashed below us, and we sank through.

“I knew nothing, then, but that we were in water—­that we had fallen from a little height, and were being hurried along.  The torrent, now deep, now so shallow that my feet scraped its bed, gushed in my ears and blinded my eyes.