"You should see--through the telescope--since you climb. It is very interesting. But you must be quick, or the clouds will close in again."
"What do you mean?" Challoner asked.
"There, on the top of the Weisshorn, I saw two men."
"Now? At six o'clock in the evening--on a day of storm?" Challoner cried. "It's impossible."
"But I have seen them, I tell you."
Challoner turned and looked down and across the valley. The great curtain of cloud hung down in front of the hills like wool. The lower slopes of dark green met it, and on them the black pines marched up into the mist. Of rock and glacier and soaring snow not an inch was visible. But the tourist clung to his story.
"It is my first visit to the mountains. I was never free before, and I must go down to-morrow morning. I thought that even now I should never see them--all the time I have been here the weather has been terrible. But at the last moment I have had the good fortune. Oh, I am very pleased."
The enthusiasm of this middle-aged German business man, an enthusiasm childlike as it was sincere, did not surprise Challoner. He looked upon that as natural. But he doubted the truth of the man's vision. He wanted so much to see what he saw.
"Tell me exactly what you saw," Challoner asked, and this was the story which the tourist told.
He was looking through the telescope when suddenly the clouds thinned, and through a film of vapour he saw, very far away and dimly, a soaring line of black like a jagged reef, and a great white slope more solid than the clouds, and holding light. He kept his eye to the lens, hoping with all his soul that the wonderful vision might be vouchsafed to him, and as he looked, the screen of vapour vanished, and he saw quite clearly the exquisite silver pyramid of the Weisshorn soaring up alone in the depths of a great cavern of grey cloud. For a little while he continued to watch, hoping for a ray of sunlight to complete a picture which he was never to forget, and then, to his amazement and delight, two men climbed suddenly into his vision on to the top of the peak. They came from the south or the south-west.