My feet were held this time, as in a vise.

I kept myself upright and waited.

Fortunately, the jumble of loose stone slowed and stopped, enabling me to crawl over to one side where there was comparatively good footing.

Below us, for fifty yards was a sheet of rough stone, as bare as washed granite well could be.

We slid down this in regular schoolboy fashion, and had reached another restricted neck in the fissure, when a sliding crash above warned us that the avalanches had decided to move of their own free will.