A few minutes later he was lying full-length in a narrow low-sided cage, suspended from a pulley on a thick wire-rope, and being hauled up, with much creaking and strident protest of the pulley-wheel and vicious jerking of the loose rope, to the summit of the cliff.
There he was again in a scene of activity. Broad-shouldered porters in frayed and much-worn Territorial uniforms were bearing away the ammunition boxes that had arrived at the summit, carrying them towards the next station of the Teleferica. The captain followed in their track.
The wire-rope railway ran in short sections from station to station. The gaps between the sections—stretches of comparatively level ground—were filled by the sturdy Alpine porters or, in the case of longer distances, by pack-mules. It was the line of communications to the sector of the front immediately ahead—a front that for the most part of 450 miles is thrust out amid the eternal snows of lofty mountains, along the edges of deep chasms, upon the knife-ridges of arêtes, across the Arctic desolation of glacier and neve. Over it was transported food and ammunition, light guns, clothing, equipment, all the necessaries for an army in action. By it descended the wounded and the sick, the unwanted stores.
Over section after section the staff-captain passed, ascending higher and ever higher towards his goal. About him rose the great peaks, their robes of snow dazzling white under the sun, splendidly superior to the ragged army of stunted pines that sought to climb them, last lost sentinels straggling half submerged in the snow. Up sheer rock-faces whence birds of prey darted frightened from their nests, over deep chasms where he looked down to a dark profundity of pines and rushing streams, over great empty fields of snow far away beneath him on which zigzagged long lines of tiny black figures insignificant in the immensity, bearing burdens, upward and ever upward to the regions where snow and ice reign in eternal winter, the Teleferica bore him. And ever between the stations there were throngs of busy men, more and more thickly clad at each successive height, who marched under heavy loads.
Always there was a thunder rolling among the mountains. From apparently inaccessible crags dark against the blue, from bare snow ridges, from bleak white wastes where there seemed nothing to detain the eye, spurted little darts of flame, drifted faint smoke. Detonations came in sharp direct cracks, fantastically re-echoed; in a long rumbling angry mutter from the more distant guns. From steep mountain-sides, avalanches, loosened by the concussions, rushed downwards in a white smoke of flying snow, their thunders rivalling the persistent artillery.
The staff-captain dallied not. The bombardment which was to prepare the way for the attack had already commenced. He hurried over the intervening spaces between the wire-rope stations, ascended higher and ever higher in the little dangling cages.
It was afternoon when he reached the limit of the Teleferica—a little snow-covered hut on a desolate ledge. Here, sheeted down from the weather, stacks of supplies awaited further transportation. It was the depot of the quartermaster of the battalion holding the sector. An Alpino soldier, thickly clad, was in waiting to act as guide.
The staff-captain borrowed an alpenstock from the quartermaster and set out. In front of him stretched a great smooth slope of snow that ascended until, high above him, it cut—in sharp contrast—across the blue of the sky. Its whiteness was blinding—the captain fitted on a pair of darkened spectacles. Far across it, dark dots strung like beads on an invisible thread, a company of soldiers was marching in a long single file zigzagged over the snow, climbing to the crest. Nearer at hand to the right, vivid spurts of yellow flame shot out from mounds of snow aligned at a little distance from each other. The detonations of the battery came crisply to the ear, predominant over the rumble and roll and confused echoes of the general bombardment.
As the captain followed his guide up the vast empty slope he heard a long plaintive whining in the air, descending a scale of tones. It had not ceased when over to his right a great fountain of snow leaped skywards from the field—subsided leaving a smother of dirty smoke. The whine finished in an ugly rush, a muffled detonation. Another and another followed, in each case the visible effects of the shell's explosion preceding the noise of its arrival. The Austrian batteries were replying.