He had no
longer any doubt. His friend and his friend's guide were not lying upon
any ledge of the rocks of the Aiguille de Blaitiere; they were not
waiting for any succor.
On the glacier, a broad track, littered with blocks of ice, stretched
upward in a straight line from the upper lip of the crevasse to the great
ice-fall on the sky-line where the huge slabs and pinnacles of ice,
twisted into monstrous shapes, like a sea suddenly frozen when a tempest
was at its height, stood marshaled in serried rows. They stood waiting
upon the sun. One of them, melted at the base, had crashed down the
slope, bursting into huge fragments as it fell, and cleaving a groove
even in that hard glacier.
Chayne went forward and stopped at the guide's side on the lower edge
of the crevasse. Beyond the chasm the ice rose in a blue straight
wall for some three feet, and the upper edge was all crushed and
battered; and then the track of the falling serac ended. It had
poured into the crevasse.
The guide pointed to the left of the track.
"Do you see, monsieur? Those steps which come downward across the glacier
and stop exactly where the track meets them? They do not go on, on the
other side of the track, monsieur."
Chayne saw clearly enough. The two men had been descending the glacier in
the afternoon, the avalanche had fallen and swept them down.
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