From where we lay hid behind our rock to Airolo was only some thirty-two miles, and the car ate up distance with so voracious an appetite, that it was clear we should arrive in the little Italian town in the dead waste and middle of the night.  To travel a forbidden road on an automobile, and then to knock up a snoring innkeeper at one in the morning, to ask him where we could find a donkey, seemed to be straining unduly the sense of humour; so after consultation we decided that we should leave Airolo to its slumbers and speed down the Pass into Italy until we ran to earth the object of our quest.

[Illustration:  “THE BLUE FLAME OF THE CHAFING-DISH".]

Molly had produced excellent coffee; the smoke of our cigarettes mingled its perfume with the night air.  Our position had in it something unique, for while we were “in the heart of one of nature’s most savage retreats” (as said a guide-book of my boyhood), we were at the same time enjoying the refinements of civilisation, and I suggested to Winston that our bivouac would form a fit subject for a picture labelled, in the manner of some Dutch masters, “Automobilists Reposing.”

By the time Gotteland had packed up everything, and we were seated once more in the car, it was nearly eleven o’clock at night.  Coming out from the shelter of our rock, so fierce a blast of wind smote us that Molly would, I think, have been carried off her feet had I not given her a steadying arm.  We had to cram our caps on our heads, or the wind would have torn them from us, and the voice of the motor was swallowed up in the shrieking of the tempest.  Molly was evidently destined to have her wish.

The car ran swiftly up the road to Wasen, and some twinkling lights and a huge crimson eye at the entrance to the great tunnel told us that we had done the ten miles to Goeschenen.  No one stirred in the streets of the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St. Gothard Road.  The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm.  There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind along the stark and broken faces of the precipice:  it was like the rattle of thunder.  In the sombre defile of the Schoellenen the air rushed as through a funnel.  We could see nothing save the thread-like road illuminated by our steadfast lanterns—­the sole beacon of safety in this welter.  We had a ghostly impression of winding through a narrow gorge, the river roaring in its depths; then, dashing through an avalanche gallery (where the lights played strange tricks with the vaulted roof), we came out upon the Devil’s Bridge.  The spray from the Reuss, which here drops a full hundred feet into the abyss, lashed our faces as with whips; the storm leaped at us out of the blackness like a wolf; the car quivered, and for an instant it seemed that we should be hurled against the parapet of the bridge.  But we passed unharmed, and a quarter of a mile further on Winston stopped in the welcome shelter of the Urner Loch, a tunnelled passage in the rock.