Happily we had an easy course down a snow gradient, which we glissaded in very unorthodox style. The swift motion freshened him up a little, and he was able to put on the brake with his axe to prevent us cascading into the bergschrund. We crossed it by a snow bridge, and started out on the seracs of the Schwarzstein glacier.
I am no mountaineer - not of the snow and ice kind, anyway -but I have a big share of physical strength and I wanted it all now.
For those seracs were an invention of the devil. To traverse that labyrinth in a blinding snowstorm, with a fainting companion who was too weak to jump the narrowest crevasse, and who hung on the rope like lead when there was occasion to use it, was more than I could manage. Besides, every step that brought us nearer to the valley now increased my eagerness to hurry, and wandering in that maze of clotted ice was like the nightmare when you stand on the rails with the express coming and are too weak to climb on the platform. As soon as possible I left the glacier for the hillside, and though that was laborious enough in all conscience, yet it enabled me to steer a straight course. Wake never spoke a word. When Ilooked at him his face was ashen under a gale which should have made his cheeks glow, and he kept his eyes half closed. He was staggering on at the very limits of his endurance ...
By and by we were on the moraine, and after splashing through a dozen little glacier streams came on a track which led up the hillside. Wake nodded feebly when I asked if this was right. Then to my joy I saw a gnarled pine.
I untied the rope and Wake dropped like a log on the ground.
'Leave me,' he groaned. 'I'm fairly done. I'll come on later.'
And he shut his eyes.
My watch told me that it was after five o'clock.
'Get on my back,' I said. 'I won't part from you till I've found a cottage. You're a hero. You've brought me over those damned mountains in a blizzard, and that's what no other man in England would have done. Get up.'
He obeyed, for he was too far gone to argue. I tied his wrists together with a handkerchief below my chin, for I wanted my arms to hold up his legs. The rope and axes I left in a cache beneath the pine-tree.
Then I started trotting down the track for the nearest dwelling.
My strength felt inexhaustible and the quicksilver in my bones drove me forward. The snow was still falling, but the wind was dying down, and after the inferno of the pass it was like summer.
The road wound over the shale of the hillside and then into what in spring must have been upland meadows. Then it ran among trees, and far below me on the right I could hear the glacier river churning in its gorge' Soon little empty huts appeared, and rough enclosed paddocks, and presently I came out on a shelf above the stream and smelt the wood-smoke of a human habitation.
I found a middle-aged peasant in the cottage, a guide by profession in summer and a woodcutter in winter.
'I have brought my Herr from Santa Chiara,' I said, 'over the Schwarzsteinthor. He is very weary and must sleep.'
I decanted Wake into a chair, and his head nodded on his chest.
But his colour was better.
'You and your Herr are fools,' said the man gruffly, but not unkindly. 'He must sleep or he will have a fever. The Schwarzsteinthor in this devil's weather! Is he English?'
'Yes,' I said, 'like all madmen. But he's a good Herr, and a brave mountaineer.'
We stripped Wake of his Red Cross uniform, now a collection of sopping rags, and got him between blankets with a huge earthenware bottle of hot water at his feet. The woodcutter's wife boiled milk, and this, with a little brandy added, we made him drink. Iwas quite easy in my mind about him, for I had seen this condition before. In the morning he would be as stiff as a poker, but recovered.
'Now I'm off for St Anton,' I said. 'I must get there tonight.'
