tween the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong
rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted
the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches
glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand,
where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was
somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the accumulation
of winter debris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and
death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the
white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress.
But that unpleasing glimpse of disruption was quickly dispelled by the
magnificent volume and virgin purity of the glacier as a whole. Helen
tried to imagine herself two miles distant, a tiny speck on the great
floor of the pass. That was the only way to grasp its stupendous size,
though she knew that it mounted through five miles of rock strewn
ravine before it touched the precipitous saddle along which runs the
border line between Italy and Switzerland.

Karl's sigh of relief as he deposited his heavy load on a tablelike
boulder brought Helen back from the land of dreams. To this sturdy
peasant the wondrous Forno merely represented a day's hard work, at an
agreed sum of ten francs for carrying nearly half a hundredweight, and
a liberal _pour-boire_ if the voyageurs were satisfied.

Sandwiches and a glass of wine, diluted with water brought by the
guide from a neighboring rill,--glacier water being used only as a
last resource,--were delectable after a steady two hours' walk. The
early morning meal of coffee and a roll had lost some of its flavor
when consumed apparently in the middle of the night, and Helen was
ready now for her breakfast. While they were eating, Bower and Josef
Barth cast glances at some wisps of cloud drifting slowly over the
crests of the southern hills. Nothing was said. The guide read his
patron's wishes correctly. Unless some cause far more imperative than
a slight mist intervened, the day's programme must not be abandoned.
So there was no loitering. The sun was almost in the valley, and the
glacier must be crossed before the work of the night's frost was
undone.

When they stepped from the moraine on to the ice Barth led, Helen
followed, Bower came next, with Karl in the rear.

If it had not been for the crisp crunching sound of the hobnails amid
the loose fragments on the surface, an