Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
There was to be a sequel, perhaps some hazardous ascent, some expedition at all events which Garratt Skinner had not thought fit to name. "They took guides, I suppose," he said. "One guide, monsieur, and a porter. Monsieur need not fear. For Monsieur Skinner is of an excellence prodigious." "My father!" exclaimed Sylvia, in surprise. "I never knew." "What guide?" asked Chayne.
"Time, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner, and he rose to his feet and called to Pierre Delouvain. "There are only three of us. We shall have to go quickly. We do not want to carry more food than we shall need. The rest we can send back with our blankets by the porters." Pierre Delouvain justified at once the ill words which had been spoken of him by Michel Revailloud.
Inconsolable, and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought "Da"; but suddenly aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his father, and had run into the arms of his mother. "Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!" His mother's clasp, and her: "Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing.
Pierre Delouvain, however, followed a practice not unknown amongst Chamonix guides. "Absinthe is good on the mountains," said he. When they rose, the order of going was changed. Pierre Delouvain, who had led all the morning, now went last, and Garratt Skinner led.
It was wrong, monsieur, to try the Brenva ridge. Yes, we shall die here"; and he fell to blubbering like a child. "Could you go down alone?" Garratt Skinner asked. "There is the glacier to cross, monsieur." "I know. That is the risk. But it is cold and there is no sun. The snow-bridges may hold." Pierre Delouvain hesitated. Here it seemed to him was certain death.
Garratt Skinner had started two days before from Chamonix, was already, now, at this moment, asleep, with his unconscious victim at his side, high up on the rocks of the upper Brenva glacier. There was no way to hinder him no way unless God helped. He asked abruptly of Michel: "Have you climbed this season, Michel?" Michel laughed grimly. "Indeed, yes, to the Montanvert, monsieur.
Sylvia saw the truth too clearly. "Walter Hine is getting well," he said. "Your father is still at another hotel in Courmayeur. There's the future to be considered." "Yes," she said, and she waited. "I have asked your father to come over to-night after dinner," said Chayne. And into their private sitting-room Garratt Skinner entered at eight o'clock that evening.
But nothing could have been more easy or natural than his comment on her words. "Yet you look like a good sleeper. A strange house, I suppose, Sylvia." "Voices in the strange house," she answered. "Voices?" Garratt Skinner's face darkened. "Did those fellows stay so late?" he asked with annoyance. "What time was it when they woke you up, Sylvia?" "A little before five."
"That's famous," cried Garratt Skinner, looking once more at his watch. He did not say that they had lost yet another hour upon the face of the buttress. It was now half past nine in the morning. "We are twelve thousand feet up, Wallie," and he swung to his left, and led the party up the ridge of the buttress. As they went along this ridge, Wallie Hine's courage rose.
Walter Hine began to take heart; and as the flames blazed up, the six men gathered about it, crouching, kneeling, sitting, and the rocks resounded with their laughter. "Only a little further, Wallie!" said Garratt Skinner, still true to his part. They descended from the rocks, crossed a level field of ice and struck the rock path along the slope of the Mont de la Brenva.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking