ed he must have fallen, and looked up to see,
exaggerated by the ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous
flight he had taken. For a while he lay, gazing blankly at the
vast, pale cliff towering above, rising moment by moment out of a
subsiding tide of darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held
him for a space, and then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing
laughter . . . .

After a great interval of time he became aware that he was
near the lower edge of the snow. Below, down what was now a
moon-lit and practicable slope, he saw the dark and broken
appearance of rock-strewn turf He struggled to his feet, aching in
every joint and limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow
about him, went downward until he was on the turf, and there
dropped rather than lay beside a boulder, drank deep from the flask
in his inner pocket, and instantly fell asleep . . . .

He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far
below.

He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of
a vast precipice that sloped only a little in the gully down which
he and his snow had come. Over against him another wall of rock
reared itself against the sky. The gorge between these precipices
ran east and west and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit
to the westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the
descending gorge. Below him it seemed there was a precipice
equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found a sort of
chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which a desperate man
might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last
to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no
particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He took his
bearings and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw it opened out
above upon green meadows, among which he now glimpsed quite
distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times
his progress was like clambering along the face of a wall, and
after a time the rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the
voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and
dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the
brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks
he noted--for he was an observant man--an unfamiliar fern that
seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He
picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and found it helpful.

A