But always they came back to the Russians and a movement of troops in the Pamirs.

Yet unknown to both of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences were not yet to be foreseen.

A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut upon the Meije.

They went out of the hut.

The sky had cleared; and in the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to the Doight de Dieu.
There were some heavy icicles overhanging the Great Wall, and Linforth looked at them anxiously.