We followed the line of his skis to this outcrop. The snow was badly trampled around a jagged point of rock that barely showed above the mantle of snow. 'My God! Look at that!' Joe's voice was awed.
He was pointing on along the ski tracks.
I looked up and followed the twin lines, up and up the slope beyond, to a tumbled mass of heaped-up snow.
The slope reared up a thousand feet or more to the Crepedel of Faloria, a narrow ridge which is marked as dangerous on the maps. The slope seemed nearly sheer at the end. And out of the sheer part of the slope, a mighty avalanche of snow had tumbled. It lay, spilled and disordered, across half the mountainside. And out of the lowest reaches of it, two faint lines ran parallel and close together, as though drawn with a ruler in the snow, straight to the rock outcrop by which we were standing.
Joe had his camera working again. When he had taken the picture, he said, 'He must have been a marvellous skier, Neil. He did the impossible. He rode that avalanche on skis and came out of it alive. And then he had to hit these rocks. See — he fell before he reached the worst of the outcrop. But he didn't see that little chap half-hidden in the snow. That's what did the damage.'
I nodded. I was past speaking. It seemed such irony for him to escape that avalanche, only to injure himself fatally on this outcrop.
I was gazing up at the slope, fascinated, when my own eyes suddenly picked out a dark object lying on the snow just below the final spill of the avalanche. It was well to the left of Engles' ski tracks, towards the gap, and it looked like the body of a man.
I pointed it out to Joe. 'Is it the body of a man, or am I seeing things?' I asked him.
He squinted up the slope. 'My God — yes,' he said. Then he looked at me. 'Keramikos?' he asked.
'Must be,' I replied.