d in.

"We looked over fearfully. Here, in truth, was real ice at last--green as
bottle-glass at the edges, and melting into unfathomable deeps of glowing
blue.

"In a moment, with a shriek like that of escaping steam, a windy demon
leapt at us from the underneath. It was all of winter in a breath. It
seemed to shrivel the skin from our faces--the flesh from our bones. We
staggered backwards.

"'_Mon ami! mon ami_!' cried Fidele, 'my heart is a stone; my eyes are
two blisters of water!'

"We danced as the blood returned unwilling to our veins. It was minutes
before we could proceed.

"Afterwards I learned that these hellish eruptions of air betoken a
change of temperature. It was coming then shortly in a dense rainfall.

"When we were recovered, we sought about for a way to circumambulate the
crevasse. Then we remarked that up a huge boulder of ice that had
seemed to block our path recent steps, or toe-holes, had been cut. In a
twinkling we were over. Fidele--no, a woman never falls.

"'For all this,' she says, shaking her head, 'I maintain that a guide
here is a sinecurist.'

"Well, we made the passage safely, and toiled up the steep, loose moraine
beyond--to find the track over which was harder than crossing the
glacier. But we did it, and struck the path along the hillside, which
leads by the _Mauvais Pas_ (the _mauvais quart d'heure_) to the little
cabaret called the _Chapeau_. This tavern, too, was shut and dismal.
It did not matter. We sat like sparrows on a railing, and munched our
egg-sandwiches and drank our wine in a sort of glorious stupefaction. For
right opposite us was the vast glacier-fall, whose crashing foam was
towers and parapets of ice, that went over and rolled into the valley
below, a ruin of thunder.

"Far beyond, where the mouth of the gorge spread out littered with
monstrous destruction, we saw the hundred threads of the glacier streams
collect into a single rope of silver, that went drawn between the hills,
a highway of water. It was all a majestic panorama of grey and pearly
white--the sky, the torrents, the mountains; but the blue and rusty green
of the stone pines, flung abroad in hanging woods and coppices, broke up
and distributed the infinite serenity of the snow fields.

"Presently, having drunk deep of rich content, we rose to retrace our
steps. For, spurred by vanity, we must be returning the way we had come,
to show our confident experience of glaciers.

"All went well.