He thumped at their low, foul doors with a kind of nervous, savage anger; he challenged the stupid silence to tell him something about his friend.

Some of these places had evidently not been open in months.

The silence everywhere was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious symbol of calamity.

In the midst of it, at the door of one of the chalets, quite alone, sat a hideous cretin, who grinned at Rowland over his goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he questioned him.

The creature's family was scattered on the mountain-sides; he could give Rowland no help to find them.