cheeks glow, and he kept his eyes half closed. He was staggering on
at the very limits of his endurance ...

By and by we were on the moraine, and after splashing through a dozen
little glacier streams came on a track which led up the hillside. Wake
nodded feebly when I asked if this was right. Then to my joy I saw a
gnarled pine.

I untied the rope and Wake dropped like a log on the ground. 'Leave
me,' he groaned. 'I'm fairly done. I'll come on later.' And he shut his
eyes.

My watch told me that it was after five o'clock.

'Get on my back,' I said. 'I won't part from you till I've found a
cottage. You're a hero. You've brought me over those damned mountains
in a blizzard, and that's what no other man in England would have done.
Get up.'

He obeyed, for he was too far gone to argue. I tied his wrists together
with a handkerchief below my chin, for I wanted my arms to hold up his
legs. The rope and axes I left in a cache beneath the pine-tree. Then I
started trotting down the track for the nearest dwelling.

My strength felt inexhaustible and the quicksilver in my bones drove me
forward. The snow was still falling, but the wind was dying down, and
after the inferno of the pass it was like summer. The road wound over
the shale of the hillside and then into what in spring must have been
upland meadows. Then it ran among trees, and far below me on the right
I could hear the glacier river churning in its gorge' Soon little empty
huts appeared, and rough enclosed paddocks, and presently I came out on
a shelf above the stream and smelt the wood-smoke of a human habitation.

I found a middle-aged peasant in the cottage, a guide by profession in
summer and a woodcutter in winter.

'I have brought my Herr from Santa Chiara,' I said, 'over the
Schwarzsteinthor. He is very weary and must sleep.'

I decanted Wake into a chair, and his head nodded on his chest. But his
colour was better.

'You and your Herr are fools,' said the man gruffly, but not unkindly.
'He must sleep or he will have a fever. The Schwarzsteinthor in this
devil's weather! Is he English?'

'Yes,' I said, 'like all madmen. But he's a good Herr, and a brave
mountaineer.'

We stripped Wake of his Red Cross uniform, now a collection of sopping
rags, and got him between blankets with a huge earthenware bottle of
hot water at his feet. The woodcutter's wife boiled milk, and this,
with a little brandy added, we made him drink. I was quite easy in my
mind