his feet most
precisely in the holes which the first guide cut for them, doing all
that he saw the guide do, as tranquil as he was in the garden of the
baobab when he practised around the margin of the pond, to the terror of
the goldfish. At one place the ridge became so narrow that he was
forced to sit astride of it, and while they went slowly forward, helping
themselves with their hands, a loud detonation echoed up, on their
right, from beneath them. "Avalanche!" said Inebnit, keeping motionless
till the repercussion of the echoes, numerous, grandiose, filling the
sky, died away at last in a long roll of thunder in the far distance,
where the final detonation was lost. After which, silence once more
covered all as with a winding-sheet.

The ridge passed, they went up a _neve_ the slope of which was rather
gentle but its length interminable. They had been climbing nearly an
hour when a slender pink line began to define the summits far, far
above their heads. It was the dawn, thus announcing itself. Like a true
Southerner, enemy to shade, Tartarin trolled out his liveliest song:

Grand souleu de la Provenco
Gai compaire dou mistrau--

A violent shake of the rope from before and behind stopped him short in
the middle of his couplet. "Hush... Hush..." said Inebnit, pointing
with his ice-axe to the threatening line of gigantic _seracs_ on their
tottering foundations which the slightest jar might send thundering down
the steep. But Tartarin knew what _that_ meant; he was not the man to
ply with any such tales, and he went on singing in a resounding voice:

Tu qu 'escoules la Duranco
Commo un flot de vin de Crau.

The guides, seeing that they could not silence their crazy singer, made
a great detour to get away from the _seracs_, and presently were stopped
by an enormous crevasse, the glaucous green sides of which were lighted,
far down their depths, by the first furtive rays of the dawn. What is
called in Switzerland "a snow bridge" spanned it; but so slight was it,
so fragile, that they had scarcely advanced a step before it crumbled
away in a cloud of white dust, dragging down the leading guide and
Tartarin, hanging to the rope which Rodolphe Kaufmann, the rear guide,
was alone left to hold, clinging with all the strength of his mountain
vigour to his pick-axe, driven deeply into the ice. But although he was
able to hold the two men suspended in the gulf he had not enough force
to draw them up