snow was assuming a rosy tint, and a dry, frozen wind blew in rough
gusts over its crystal surface. Ulrich uttered a long, shrill, vibrating
call. His voice sped through the deathlike silence in which the
mountains were sleeping; it reached the distance, across profound and
motionless waves of glacial foam, like the cry of a bird across the
waves of the sea. Then it died away and nothing answered him.

He began to walk again. The sun had sunk yonder behind the mountain
tops, which were still purple with the reflection from the sky, but the
depths of the valley were becoming gray, and suddenly the young man felt
frightened. It seemed to him as if the silence, the cold, the solitude,
the winter death of these mountains were taking possession of him, were
going to stop and to freeze his blood, to make his limbs grow stiff and
to turn him into a motionless and frozen object, and he set off running,
fleeing toward his dwelling. The old man, he thought, would have
returned during his absence. He had taken another road; he would, no
doubt, be sitting before the fire, with a dead chamois at his feet. He
soon came in sight of the inn, but no smoke rose from it. Ulrich walked
faster and opened the door. Sam ran up to him to greet him, but Gaspard
Hari had not returned. Kunsi, in his alarm, turned round suddenly, as
if he had expected to find his comrade hidden in a corner. Then he
relighted the fire and made the soup, hoping every moment to see the old
man come in. From time to time he went out to see if he were not coming.
It was quite night now, that wan, livid night of the mountains, lighted
by a thin, yellow crescent moon, just disappearing behind the mountain
tops.

Then the young man went in and sat down to warm his hands and feet,
while he pictured to himself every possible accident. Gaspard might
have broken a leg, have fallen into a crevasse, taken a false step and
dislocated his ankle. And, perhaps, he was lying on the snow, overcome
and stiff with the cold, in agony of mind, lost and, perhaps, shouting
for help, calling with all his might in the silence of the night.. But
where? The mountain was so vast, so rugged, so dangerous in places,
especially at that time of the year, that it would have required ten or
twenty guides to walk for a week in all directions to find a man in that
immense space. Ulrich Kunsi, however, made up his mind to set out with
Sam if Gaspard did not return by one in the morning, and he made his