Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/96

90 with impenetrable mist, but the few feet we could see did not look very formidable. Burgener suggested a standing glissade, and the next minute we had quitted the sun and blue sky, and were spinning through fog, surrounded by a seething avalanche of snow. From time to time we jumped sideways out of the gathering torrent, fearing lest its growing mass might involve us in danger. Suddenly through the fog I caught sight of the Bergschrund, and with a warning shout to Burgener, who was eighty feet above me, the brakes were applied, regardless of skin and knuckles, and we pulled up on the very brink of the chasm. Traversing to the left we found a bridge, and, as it was much too rotten to crawl over, we trusted to luck and a sitting glissade. We then dodged a few crevasses and glissaded a few slopes, and, turning sharply to the right, got off the glacier. We were now almost below the clouds, and a sun-warmed rock suggested to devout worshippers of the goddess Nicotine the observance of certain solemn rites. Half an hour soon passed, and then the rope was squeezed into the knapsack and we ran, helter-skelter, down to Breuil, where we arrived in one hour and a quarter of actual going, or one hour and three-quarters including halts, from the Col.

My second guide, Venetz, had been sent across the Theodule, partly because the knapsack was