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“We looked over fearfully. Here, in truth, was real ice at last–green as bottle-glass at the edges, and melting into unfathomable deeps of glowing blue.

“In a moment, with a shriek like that of escaping steam, a windy demon leapt at us from the underneath. It was all of winter in a breath. It seemed to shrivel the skin from our faces–the flesh from our bones. We staggered backwards.

“‘ Mon ami! mon ami !’ cried Fidele, ‘my heart is a stone; my eyes are two blisters of water!’

“We danced as the blood returned unwilling to our veins. It was minutes before we could proceed.

“Afterwards I learned that these hellish eruptions of air betoken a change of temperature. It was coming then shortly in a dense rainfall.

“When we were recovered, we sought about for a way to circumambulate the crevasse. Then we remarked that up a huge boulder of ice that had seemed to block our path recent steps, or toe-holes, had been cut. In a twinkling we were over. Fidele–no, a woman never falls.

“‘For all this,’ she says, shaking her head, ‘I maintain that a guide here is a sinecurist.’

“Well, we made the passage safely, and toiled up the steep, loose moraine beyond–to find the track over which was harder than crossing the glacier. But we did it, and struck the path along the hillside, which leads by the Mauvais Pas (the mauvais quart d’heure ) to the little cabaret called the Chapeau. This tavern, too, was shut and dismal. It did not matter. We sat like sparrows on a railing, and munched our egg-sandwiches and drank our wine in a sort of glorious stupefaction. For right opposite us was the vast glacier-fall, whose crashing foam was towers and parapets of ice, that went over and rolled into the valley below, a ruin of thunder.

“Far beyond, where the mouth of the gorge spread out littered with monstrous destruction, we saw the hundred threads of the glacier streams collect into a single rope of silver, that went drawn between the hills, a highway of water. It was all a majestic panorama of grey and pearly white–the sky, the torrents, the mountains; but the blue and rusty green of the stone pines, flung abroad in hanging woods and coppices, broke up and distributed the infinite serenity of the snow fields.

“Presently, having drunk deep of rich content, we rose to retrace our steps. For, spurred by vanity, we must be returning the way we had come, to show our confident experience of glaciers.

“All went well. Actually we had passed over near two-thirds of the ice-bed, when a touch on my arm stayed me, and ma mie looked into my eyes, very comical and insolent.

“‘Little cabbage,’ she said; ‘will you not put your new knowledge to account?’

“‘But how, my soul?’

“She laughed and pressed my arm to her side. Her heart fluttered like a nestling after its first flight.

“‘To rest on the little prowess of a small adventure! No, no! Shall he who has learnt to swim be always content to bathe in shallow water?’

“I was speechless as I gazed on her.

“‘Behold, then!’ she cried. ‘We have opposed ourselves to this problem of the ice, and we have mastered it. See how it rears itself to the inaccessible peaks, the which to reach the poor innocents expend themselves over rocks and drifts. But why should one not climb the mountain by way of the glacier?’

“‘Fidele!’ I gasped.

“‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, nodding her head; ‘but poor men! They are mules. They spill their blood on the scaling ladders when the town gate is open.’

“Again I cried ‘Fidele!’

“‘But, yes,’ she said, ‘it needs a woman to see. It is but two o’clock. Let us ascend the glacier, like a staircase; and presently we shall stand upon the summit of the mountain. Those last little peaks above the ice can be of no importance.’