hat I had at first taken for the rush of my own arteries,
had an origin apart from us. It was like the wash and thunder of waters
in a deep sewer.

"'Fidele!' I said again.

"'I am listening.'

"'Hear, then! Canst thou free my right arm, that I may feel for the
lucifers in my pocket?'

"She moved at once, never raising her face from my breast. I groped for
the box, found it; and manipulating with one hand, succeeded in striking
a match. It flamed up--a long wax vesta.

"A glory of sleek fires sprang on the instant into life. We lay
imprisoned in a house of glass at the foot of a smooth incline rising
behind us to unknown heights. A wall of porous and opaque ice-rubbish,
into which our feet had plunged deep, had stayed our progress.

"I placed the box by my side ready for use. Our last moments should be
lavish of splendour. Stooping for another match, to kindle from the flame
of the near-expired one, a thought struck me. Why had we not been at once
frozen to death? Yet we lay where we had brought up, as snug and glowing
as if we were wrapped in bedclothes.

"The answer came to me in a flash. We had fallen sheer to the glacier
bed, which, warmed by subterraneous heat, was ever in process of melting.
Possibly, but a comparatively thin curtain of perforated ice separated us
from the under torrent.

"The enforced conclusion was astounding; but as yet it inspired no hope.
We were none the less doomed and buried.

"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 ot