Those bulges are a most treacherous invention of the snow-fiend. They are best likened to an egg-shell full of sand, with some compressed air imprisoned between the shell and the sand. Break the crust, the air runs out with a puffing sound, and the snow, freed from pressure, begins to trickle through the hole, enlarging it. Then the whole mass, blowing itself out and thrown out of balance, comes down.
The study of the map would have shown to the victims of this phenomenon of nature that however much the corkscrew might be the right way up or down for loaded men and cows (the pack and the cow between them determine the lie of every mountain path), such a path was not for men mounted on skiffs that could choose their course upon the country-side with the same liberty of choice as a ship steering upon the open sea.
This brings back to my mind a regulation supposed to have been issued by a certain War Office on the Continent. Some zealous officers had been coaching their men in the use of ski upon open fields, and some trifling injuries had been entered by the army medico in his report sheet.
Next autumn a circular was received in every army corps recommending officers to teach ski-ing on roads only!
Last winter I was trotted up a steepish and narrow winding path by some well-meaning friends who had acquired their ski-ing from a “big” man. Some patches of the road under wood were sunk in deep snow; others, in the open, were ice; others bare earth and stones, and the whole was so well banked in that side-stepping was impossible.
When I mildly remonstrated—after, not before, discipline would forbid—I was politely told that so-and-so always took his parties up that way. No doubt, and quite heroic of him, mais ce n’est pas le ski.
In the evening of this day, which I reckon as the fifth, a conveyance carried the three runners, in whom the readers of this chapter may by now have become interested, to Châble, in the Val de Bagnes, and then to Lourtier, a convenient starting-point for an attempt upon the Combin region.
