'Don't forget he's a first-class skier,' I said, laughing. Engles had been in the British Olympic team at one time. 'He probably likes snow.'
'I know, I know. But that was in his early twenties, before the war. He's got soft since then. That's what the Army does for people. All he wants now is comfort — and liquor. You think he'd enjoy it up here in that hut — no women, no proper heating, nobody around to tell him how marvellous his ideas are — probably not even a bath?'
'Anyway, there's a bar,' I told him.
I I He gave a snort. 'Bar! I'm told that the man who runs that bar can trace congenital idiocy back through his family for three generations, that he specialises in grappa made from pure methylated spirits and, furthermore, that he is the dirtiest, laziest, stupidist Italian any one has ever met — and that's saying something. And here I'm supposed to drag my camera up to the top of that God-damned col and prance about in the snow taking pictures to satisfy Engles's megalomania. And I don't feel like going up a slittovia this morning. Those sort of things make me dizzy. It was constructed by the Germans and the man who owned it was arrested only a fortnight ago as a German War Criminal. The cable is probably booby-trapped.'
I must admit that when I saw the thing, I didn't like it much myself. We stood at the bottom of it and looked up to the rifugio more than a thousand feet above us. Its gabled roofs and wooden belvedere were just visible at the top of the sleigh track cut through the pinewoods. It was perched high on the shoulder of Monte Cristallo, the great bastions of the mountain towering above it. It was about as remote from civilisation as an eagle's nest.
Our chauffeur got out of the car and shouted, 'Emilio!' A little man, wearing British battle-dress and the most enormous pair of snow boots, emerged from the concrete building that housed the cable plant. The boots dated back to the German occupation when there had been a flak position in the Tre Croci pass.
The snows had only just started down in Cortina, for it was early in the season yet. But up here it was already getting thick and the previous night's fall lay like a virgin blanket over everything.
We transferred our gear to the sleigh, putting our skis in the ski rack at the back. The black case of my typewriter and Joe Wesson's camera equipment seemed out of place. We climbed in. The man with the snow boots got up behind the steering wheel. He pulled over a switch and the cable tightened in front of us so that here and there it jerked clear of the snow. A soft crunching sound and we were gliding forward along the snow track. Almost immediately we were on the slope and the sleigh tilted upwards in an alarming fashion so that I found myself lying on my back rather than sitting on the seat. It was a peculiar and rather frightening sensation. We lost sight of the rifugio. We were looking up a long white avenue between the dark pines. It rose straight into the blue sky and was steep as the side of a house.
I looked back. Already the square Tre Croci hotel was no bigger than a large black box resting on the white blanket of the pass. The road to Austria snaked through the pass like a dirty brown ribbon. The sun shone, but there was no sign of that 'sunny snow paradise' referred to in the tourist brochures. It was a lost and barren world of snow and black forest.
Ahead of us, the cable was strung taut like the string of a violin. There was no sound save the soft slither of the sleigh runners on the snow. The air was still between the dark pines, We were climbing at an angle of about sixty degrees. Joe leaned across me and spoke to the driver in English. 'Do these cables ever break on these things?' he asked.