on 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
buttress 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
buttress, 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 buttress stretched the great ice-fall of
the upper Brenva glacier. Crevassed, 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.

"Come," said Pierre.

"Keep the rope stretched tight, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner; and they
descended into the furrows of that wild and frozen sea. The day's work
had begun in earnest; and almost at once they began to lose time.

Now it was a perilous strip of ice between unfathomable blue depths along
which they must pass, as bridge-builders along their girders, yet without
the bridge-builders' knowledge that at the end of the passage there was a
further way. Now it was some crevasse into which they must descend,
cutting their steps down a steep rib of ice; now it was a wall up which
the leader must be hoisted on the shoulders of his companions, and even
so as likely as not, his fingers could not reach the top, but hand holds
and foot holds must be hewn with the ax till a ladder was formed. Now it
was some crevasse gaping across their path; they must search this way and
that for a firm snow-bridge by which to overpass it. It was difficult, as
Pierre Delouvain discovered, to find a path through that tangled
labyrinth without some knowledge of the glacier. For, only at rare times,
when he stood high on a serac, could he see his way for more than a few
yards ahead. Pierre aimed straight for the foot of the buttress, working
thus due north