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beyond a second cry rang out. A guide was standing on the lower edge of a
great crevasse with a hand upheld above his head. The searchers converged
quickly upon him. Chayne hurried forward, plying the pick of his ax as
never in his life had he plied it. Had the guide come upon the actual
place where the accident took place, he asked himself? But before he
reached the spot, his pace slackened, and he stood still. He had no
longer any doubt. His friend and his friend's guide were not lying upon
any ledge of the rocks of the Aiguille de Blaitière; they were not
waiting for any succor.

On the glacier, a broad track, littered with blocks of ice, stretched
upward in a straight line from the upper lip of the crevasse to the great
ice-fall on the sky-line where the huge slabs and pinnacles of ice,
twisted into monstrous shapes, like a sea suddenly frozen when a tempest
was at its height, stood marshaled in serried rows. They stood waiting
upon the sun. One of them, melted at the base, had crashed down the
slope, bursting into huge fragments as it fell, and cleaving a groove
even in that hard glacier.

Chayne went forward and stopped at the guide's side on the lower edge


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