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Gabriel Strood had then climbed Mont Blanc from the Italian side up from the glacier to the top of the great rock-buttress, then along the world-famous ice-arête, thin as a knife edge, and to right and left precipitous as a wall, and on the far side above the ice-ridge up the hanging glaciers and the ice-cliffs to the summit of the Corridor. From the Italian side of the range of Mont Blanc!
But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and Mew took his place. Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. The sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would crash perilously against an ice-ridge and they were our one hope of reaching land.
To-morrow he would ascend the buttress, traverse the ice-ridge with Walter Hine perhaps yes, only perhaps and at that thought Chayne's heart stood still. And even if he did, there were the hanging ice-cliffs above, and yet another day would pass before any alarm at his absence would be felt. Surely, it would be the Brenva route!
Gradually Hine regained a little strength. His numbed limbs began to come painfully to life. He began to move slowly of his own accord, supported by his rescuers. They reached the ice-ridge. It had no terrors now for Walter Hine. "He had better be tied close between Pierre and myself," said Garratt Skinner. "We came up that way." "Between Simond and Droz," said Chayne, quietly.
She knew that Murray was apt to lose himself in his dreams; perhaps some visionary mood had blinded him to the menace of that mounting ice-ridge it front of the glacier, or had he madly chosen to stand or fall with this structure that meant so much to him? She would make him yield to her own terror, drag him ashore, if necessary, with her own hands.
After a glance over the top I turned to the anxious faces of the two men behind me and said, "Come on, boys." Within a minute they stood beside me on the ice-ridge. The surface fell away at a sharp incline in front of us, but it merged into a snow- slope.
With brutish stolidness I plodded ever on, almost like a walking machine, sometimes nodding in sleep while I helped the dogs, or manouvred the sledge over an ice-ridge, pushing or pulling.
And then in front of him he saw Garratt Skinner sit down and bestride the wall. Over Garratt Skinner's head, he now saw the path by which he needs must go. He was on the famous ice-ridge; and nothing so formidable, so terrifying, had even entered into his dreams during his sleep upon the rocks where he had bivouacked.
As Lewis remarked, they seemed to have been suddenly transported to within the Arctic circle, and got lost among the ice-mountains of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla. "It is magnificent!" exclaimed Nita Horetzki with enthusiasm, as she paused on the summit of an ice-ridge, up the slippery sides of which she had been assisted by Antoine Grennon, who still held her little hand in his.
"As you will," said Garratt Skinner with a shrug of the shoulders. Along the ice-ridge the party moved slowly and safely, carrying Hine between them. As they passed behind the great rock tower at the lower end, the threatened snow began to fall in light flakes. "Quickly," said Chayne. "We must reach the chalets to-night."
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