Lewis craned his neck over the cliff, and saw the chamois grazing quietly on a small patch of green that lay among brown rocks below.
“What’s to be done?” he asked anxiously. “Couldn’t we try a long shot?”
“Useless. Your eyes are inexperienced. The distance is greater than you think.”
“What, then, shall we do?”
Le Croix did not answer. He appeared to be revolving some plan in his mind. Turning at last to his companion, he said—
“I counsel that you remain here. It is a place near to which they must pass if driven by some one from below. I will descend.”
“But how descend?” asked Lewis. “I see no path by which even a goat could get down.”
“Leave that to me,” replied the hunter. “Keep perfectly still till you see them within range. Have your rifle ready; do not fire in haste; there will be time for a slow and sure aim. Most bad hunters owe their ill-luck to haste.”
With this advice Le Croix crept quietly round a projecting rock, and, dropping apparently over the precipice, disappeared.
Solitude is suggestive. As long as his companion was with him, Lewis felt careless and easy in mind, but now that he was left alone in one of the wildest and grandest scenes he had yet beheld, he became solemnised, and could not help feeling, that without his guide he would be very helpless in such a place. Being alone in the mountains was not indeed new to him. As we have already said, he had acquired the character of being much too reckless in wandering about by himself; but there was a vast difference between going alone over ground which he had traversed several times with guides in the immediate neighbourhood of Chamouni, and being left in a region to which he had been conducted by paths so intricate, tortuous, and difficult, that the mere effort to trace back in memory even the last few miles of the route confused him.