rrible picture of the thousand deaths that
awaited him; crevasses, avalanches, hurricanes, whirlwinds...

Tartarin interrupted him:--

"Ah! _vai_, you rogue; and the Company? Isn't Mont Blanc managed like
the rest?"

"Managed?. the Company?.." said Bompard, bewildered, remembering nothing
whatever of his tarasconade, which Tartarin now repeated to him word for
word--Switzerland a vast Association, lease of the mountains, machinery
of the crevasses; on which the former courier burst out laughing.

"What! you really believed me?.. Why, that was a _galejade_ a fib...
Among us Taras-conese you ought surely to know what talking means..."

"Then," asked Tartarin, with much emotion, "the Jungfrau was not_
prepared?_"

"Of course not."

"And if the rope had broken?.."

"Ah! my poor friend..."

The hero closed his eyes, pale with retrospective terror, and for one
moment he hesitated... This landscape of polar cataclysm, cold, gloomy,
yawning with gulfs... those laments of the old hut-man still weeping
in his ears... _Outre!_ what will they make me do?.. Then, suddenly,
he thought of the _folk_ at Tarascon, of the banner to be unfurled
"up there," and he said to himself that with good guides and a trusty
companion like Bompard... He had done the Jungfrau... why should n't he
do Mont Blanc?

Laying his large hand on the shoulder of his friend, he began in a
virile voice:--

"Listen to me, Gonzague..."

XIII.

The catastrophe.

On a dark, dark night, moonless, starless, skyless, on the trembling
whiteness of a vast ledge of snow, slowly a long rope unrolled itself,
to which were attached in file certain timorous and very small shades,
preceded, at the distance of a hundred feet, by a lantern casting a red
light along the way. Blows of an ice-axe ringing on the hard snow, the
roll of the ice blocks thus detached, alone broke the silence of the
_neve_ on which the steps of the caravan made no sound. From minute to
minute, a cry, a smothered groan, the fall of a body on the ice, and
then immediately a strong voice sounding from the end of the rope: "Go
gently, Gonzague, and don't fall." For poor Bompard had made up his mind
to follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in
the morning--it was now four by the president's repeater--the hapless
courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed,
vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations
ext