seemed to shrivel the skin from our faces--the flesh from our bones. We
staggered backwards.

"'_Mon ami! mon ami_!' cried Fidèle, 'my heart is a stone; my eyes are
two blisters of water!'

"We danced as the blood returned unwilling to our veins. It was minutes
before we could proceed.

"Afterwards I learned that these hellish eruptions of air betoken a
change of temperature. It was coming then shortly in a dense rainfall.

"When we were recovered, we sought about for a way to circumambulate the
crevasse. Then we remarked that up a huge boulder of ice that had
seemed to block our path recent steps, or toe-holes, had been cut. In a
twinkling we were over. Fidèle--no, a woman never falls.

"'For all this,' she says, shaking her head, 'I maintain that a guide
here is a sinecurist.'

"Well, we made the passage safely, and toiled up the steep, loose moraine
beyond--to find the track over which was harder than crossing the
glacier. But we did it, and struck the path along the hillside, which
leads by the _Mauvais Pas_ (the _mauvais quart d'heure_) to the little
cabaret called the _Chapeau_. This tavern, too, was shut and dismal.
It did not matter. We sat like sparrows on a railing, and munched our
egg-sandwiches and drank our wine in a sort of glorious stupefaction. For
right opposite us was the vast glacier-fall, whose crashing foam was
towers and parapets of ice, that went over and rolled into the valley
below, a ruin of thunder.