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 others the fate he had himself suffered!

"I dropped the match I was holding. I tightened my clasp convulsively
about Fidèle. Thank God she, at any rate, was blind to this horror within