Let us always after this combat their immensity and their will, and
always hate the inhuman guards that hold the gates of Italy, and the
powers that lie in wait for men on those high places.
But now I know
that Italy will always stand apart. She is cut off by no ordinary
wall, and Death has all his army on her frontiers.
Well, we returned. Twice the guide rubbed my hands with brandy, and
once I had to halt and recover for a moment, failing and losing my
hold. Believe it or not, the deep footsteps of our ascent were already
quite lost and covered by the new snow since our halt, and even had
they been visible, the guide would not have retraced them. He did what
I did not at first understand, but what I soon saw to be wise. He took
a steep slant downward over the face of the snow-slope, and though
such a pitch of descent a little unnerved me, it was well in the end.
For when we had gone down perhaps 900 feet, or a thousand, in
perpendicular distance, even I, half numb and fainting, could feel
that the storm was less violent. Another two hundred, and the flakes
could be seen not driving in flashes past, but separately falling.
Then in some few minutes we could see the slope for a very long way
downwards quite clearly; then, soon after, we saw far below us the
place where the mountain-side merged easily into the plain of that cup
or basin whence we had started.
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