"Isn't there a refuge hut on the Bosses?"
"Yes."
"Can we reach it?"
Couttet did not immediately reply, but looked up and about, as if trying to pierce the driving snow with his gaze. "If I could catch sight of the rocks," at length he said.
Suddenly the gale seemed to split the clouds, and for an instant a vision opened of blue sky over our heads, and endless slopes of snow, falling one below another, under our feet. I saw that we were standing on the rounded back of a snowy ridge. Just in front the white surface dipped and disappeared in a vast gulf of air, where flying clouds were torn against the black jagged points of lower mountains. Above our level, to the left, rocks appeared projecting through the covering of snow. I knew that these must belong to the Bosses du Dromadaire, and that the hut we sought was perched on one of them.
All this the eye caught in a twinkling, for the storm curtain was lifted only to be as quickly dropped again, shutting out both the upper and the lower world, and leaving us isolated on the slippery roof ridge of Europe. At the same time the wind increased its violence, and the cold became more penetrating. I pulled my fingers out of the digits of my woollen gloves, and gripped my iron-shod baton between thumb and knuckles. We now had our bearings, thanks to the momentary glance, and it behooved us not to lose them, for the storm was every instant growing worse. At times it was not the simplest thing in the world to keep one's feet in the face of the blasts. I was too fresh from reading the history of Mont Blanc not to remember that a few years ago Count Villanova and two guides were blown from another nearby ridge into the very abyss whose jaws had just opened before us, where their bodies lie undiscovered to this day.
Moving cautiously, we began to descend, in order to cross the neck which stretches between the Dome du Gouter and the Bosses. When we wandered a little to the right the surface commenced to pitch off, and we knew what that meant—beware! Once when we had veered too far to the left, staggering down hill under the blows of the storm, and able to see but a few feet away, we stopped as if a shot had arrested us. Another step or two would have carried us over a precipice of ice, whose blue wall fell perpendicularly from the brittle edge at our feet into cloud-choked depths. We had gone down our roof to the eaves. Not a word was spoken, but with instant unanimity we turned and scrambled up again, Couttet in the lead, and the porter breathing hard at my heels. Such a scene in the fraction of a second is photographed on the memory for a lifetime.
In a little while we began to ascend another slope, to which we had felt our way, and this was surely the swelling hump of the first of the Bosses, and the rocks must be near at hand. Another opportune gap in the clouds, which left us for an instant surrounded with retreating walls of vapor, confirmed that opinion, and vindicated the mountaineering skill of Couttet, who had found the way though way there was none. A quick, breathless scramble up a confused heap of ice and slippery points of rock brought us at last to the refuge.
