'I don't think you'll be doing much camera work for some little time,' Mayne interrupted him. 'Look at know!'
He was pointing at the window and we all turned. Outside, it had suddenly become even darker. The snow was lifting up before it reached the ground and swirling round in eddies. Then, suddenly, all those millions of little jostling snowflakes seemed to fall into order of battle and charge against the trees on the far side of the slittovia. The whole hut shook with that first gust of wind. It whined and ramped round the gables as though intent upon plucking the hut off Col da Varda and whirling it away into space. It took hold of the trees and shook them like a terrier shakes a rat. The snow fell in great slabs from their whipping branches. A wave of snow swept up from the ground and flung itself across the sleigh track. Then the wind steadied down to a hard blow, driving the snowflakes almost horizontal to the ground.
'Looks as though you'll have to spend the night up here, Carla,' Engles said.
She smiled. 'Will you be a nice man, then, and give up your room for me?'
'Do not be afraid, Mr Engles,' Valdini said with a horrid leer. 'She has so kind a nature — she will not insist that you sleep down here.'
There was an awkward silence which Carla broke with a laugh. 'Do not mind Stefan,' she said to Engles. 'He is jealous, that is all.'
'Jealous!' Valdini's eyes hardened and he looked at Mayne. 'Yes, I am jealous. Do you know what it is like to be jealous, Mr Mayne?' His voice was dangerously suave and once again I had that feeling of unpleasant emotions kept just below the surface.
The hut shook to a renewed onslaught of the wind. It thrashed through the tops of the firs, tearing from them their last remnants of snow so that they stood up, black and bare, in that grey, white-speckled world.
'Lucky we're not on that glacier now, eh, Blair?' Mayne said to me. Then to Engles: 'You know you nearly lost your script writer yesterday?'
'I heard he'd had an accident skiing,' Engles replied. 'What happened?'