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“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.

“Still I hugged Fidele, and I could feel by her returning grasp that she lived. The water was not unbearably cold as yet. The air that came through cracks and crevasses had not force to overcome the under warmth.

“I felt something slide against me–clutched and held on. It was a brave pine log. Could I recover it at this date I would convert it into a flagstaff for the tricolour. It was our raft, our refuge; and it carried us to safety.

“I cannot give the extravagant processes of that long journey. It was all a rushing, swirling dream–a mad race of mystery and sublimity, to which the only conscious periods were wild, flitting glimpses of wonderful ice arabesques, caught momentarily as we passed under fissures that let the light of day through dimly.

“Gradually a ghostly radiance grew to encompass us; and by a like gradation the water waxed intensely cold. Hope then was blazing in our hearts; but this new deathliness went nigh to quench it altogether. Yet, had we guessed the reason, we could have foregone the despair. For, in truth, we were approaching that shallower terrace of the glacier beyond the fall, through which the light could force some weak passage, and the air make itself felt, blowing upon the beds of ice.

“Well, we survived; and still we survive. My faith, what a couple! Sublimity would have none of us. The glacier rejected souls so commonplace as not to be properly impressed by its inexorability.

“This, then, was the end. We swept into a huge cavern of ice–through it–beyond it, into the green valley and the world that we love. And there, where the torrent splits up into a score of insignificant streams, we grounded and crawled to dry land and sat down and laughed.

“Yes, we could do it–we could laugh. Is that not bathos? But Fidele and I have a theory that laughter is the chief earnest of immortality.

“To dry land I have said. Mon Dieu! the torrent was no wetter. It rains in the Chamounix valley. We looked to see whence we had fallen, and not even the
Chapeau was visible through the mist.