o fierce a blast of wind smote us
that Molly would, I think, have been carried off her feet had I not
given her a steadying arm. We had to cram our caps on our heads, or
the wind would have torn them from us, and the voice of the motor was
swallowed up in the shrieking of the tempest. Molly was evidently
destined to have her wish.

The car ran swiftly up the road to Wasen, and some twinkling lights
and a huge crimson eye at the entrance to the great tunnel told us
that we had done the ten miles to Goeschenen. No one stirred in the
streets of the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack
put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St.
Gothard Road. The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm.
There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind
along the stark and broken faces of the precipice: it was like the
rattle of thunder. In the sombre defile of the Schoellenen the air
rushed as through a funnel. We could see nothing save the thread-like
road illuminated by our steadfast lanterns--the sole beacon of safety
in this welter. We had a ghostly impression of winding through a
narrow gorge, the river roaring in its depths; then, dashing through
an avalanche gallery (where the lights played strange tricks with the
vaulted roof), we came out upon the Devil's Bridge. The spray from the
Reuss, which here drops a full hundred feet into the abyss, lashed our
faces as with whips; the storm leaped at us out of the blackness like
a wolf; the car quivered, and for an instant it seemed that we should
be hurled against the parapet of the bridge. But we passed unharmed,
and a quarter of a mile further on Winston stopped in the welcome
shelter of the Urner Loch, a tunnelled passage in the rock.

We gasped out broken expressions of a fearful joy; then, seeing that
Molly was well, and that the wind-wolf's teeth had torn nothing from
the car, Jack went full speed ahead again, steering along the open
Urseren Valley, where we had fleeting glimpses of green fields instead
of granite rocks. Thus we came to Andermatt, where not the eye of a
mouse seemed open to mark our quick and stealthy passage. We were now
on that great mountain highroad that slants in a straight line across
almost all Switzerland from Coire to Martigny; but we kept on it only
for a little while, to steal through Hospenthal--as dead asleep as the
other villages (for Labour had not yet begun to waken in its hard
bed), a