Part 38 (1/2)

THE BRENVA RIDGE

The peasant was right. He _had_ seen a man waving a signal of distress on the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great b.u.t.tress. And this is how the signal came to be waved.

An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col du Geant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier. The spark was a fire lit by Pierre Delouvain. For Garratt Skinner's party had camped upon those rocks. The morning was cold, and one by one the porters, Garratt Skinner, and Walter Hine, gathered about the blaze.

Overhead the stars glittered in a clear, dark sky. It was very still; no sound was heard at all but the movement in the camp; even on the glacier a thousand feet below, where all night long the avalanches had thundered, in the frost of the early morning there was silence.

Garratt Skinner looked upward.

”We shall have a good day,” he said; and then he looked quickly toward Walter Hine. ”How did you sleep, Wallie?”

”Very little. The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a hundred times at the corner of the path,” he said, with a s.h.i.+ver. ”A hundred times I felt emptiness beneath my feet.”

He referred to a mishap of the day before. On the way to the gite after the chalets and the wood are left behind, a little path leads along the rocks of the Mont de la Brenva high above the glacier. There are one or two awkward corners to pa.s.s where rough footsteps have been hewn in the rock. At one of these corners Walter Hine had slipped. His side struck the step; he would have dropped to the glacier, but Garratt Skinner had suddenly reached out a hand and saved him.

Garratt Skinner's face changed.

”You are not afraid,” he said.

”You think we can do it?” asked Hine, nervously, and Garratt Skinner laughed.

”Ask Pierre Delouvain!” he said, and himself put the question. Pierre laughed in his turn.

”Bah! I snap my fingers at the Brenva climb,” said he. ”We shall be in Chamonix to-night”; and Garratt Skinner translated the words to Walter Hine.

Breakfast was prepared and eaten. Walter Hine was silent through the meal. He had not the courage to say that he was afraid; and Garratt Skinner played upon his vanity.

”We shall be in Chamonix to-night. It will be a fine feather in your cap, Wallie. One of the historic climbs!”

Walter Hine drew a deep breath. If only the day were over, and the party safe on the rough path through the woods on the other side of the mountain! But he held his tongue. Moreover, he had great faith in his idol and master, Garratt Skinner.

”You saved my life yesterday,” he said; and upon Garratt Skinner's face there came a curious smile. He looked steadily into the blaze of the fire and spoke almost as though he made an apology to himself.

”I saw a man falling. I saw that I could save him. I did not think. My hand had already caught him.”

He looked up with a start. In the east the day was breaking, pale and desolate; the lower glacier glimmered into view beneath them; the gigantic amphitheater of hills which girt them in on three sides loomed out of the mists from aerial heights and took solidity and shape, westward the black and rugged Peuteret ridge, eastward the cliffs of Mont Maudit, and northward sweeping around the head of the glacier, the great ice-wall of Mont Blanc with its ruined terraces and inaccessible cliffs.

”Time, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner, and he rose to his feet and called to Pierre Delouvain. ”There are only three of us. We shall have to go quickly. We do not want to carry more food than we shall need. The rest we can send back with our blankets by the porters.”

Pierre Delouvain justified at once the ill words which had been spoken of him by Michel Revailloud. He thought only of the burden which through this long day he would have to carry on his back.

”Yes, that is right,” he said. ”We will take what we need for the day.

To-night we shall be in Chamonix.”

And thus the party set off with no provision against that most probable of all mishaps--the chance that sunset might find them still upon the mountain side. Pierre Delouvain, being lazy and a worthless fellow, as Revailloud had said, agreed. But the suggestion had been made by Garratt Skinner. And Garratt Skinner was Gabriel Strood, who knew--none better--the folly of such light traveling.

The rope was put on; Pierre Delouvain led the way, Walter Hine as the weakest of the party was placed in the middle, Garratt Skinner came last; the three men mounted by a snow-slope and a gully to the top of the rocks which supported the upper Brenva glacier.

”That's our road, Wallie,” said Garratt Skinner. He pointed to a great b.u.t.tress of rock overlain here and there with fields of snow, which jutted out from the ice-wall of the mountain, descended steeply, bent to the west in a curve, and then pushed far out into the glacier as some great promontory pushes out into the sea. ”Do you see a hump above the b.u.t.tress, on the crest of the ridge and a little to the right? And to the right of the hump, a depression in the ridge? That's what they call the Corridor. Once we are there our troubles are over.”

But between the party and the b.u.t.tress stretched the great ice-fall of the upper Brenva glacier. Creva.s.sed, broken, a wilderness of towering seracs, it had the look of a sea in a gale whose breakers had been frozen in the very act of over toppling.