I did not think.

My hand had already caught him." He looked up with a start.

In the east the day was breaking, pale and desolate; the lower glacier glimmered into view beneath them; the gigantic amphitheater of hills which girt them in on three sides loomed out of the mists from aerial heights and took solidity and shape, westward the black and rugged Peuteret ridge, eastward the cliffs of Mont Maudit, and northward sweeping around the head of the glacier, the great ice-wall of Mont Blanc with its ruined terraces and inaccessible cliffs.
"Time, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner, and he rose to his feet and called to Pierre Delouvain.

"There are only three of us.

We shall have to go quickly.