“What is it?” I ask Gondocori, for I cannot see past him.

“The guide is gone.  The madrina slipped, and both have rolled down the precipice.”

“Shall we get off and walk?”

“If you like.  You will not be any safer, though you may feel so.  The mules are surer footed than we are, and they have four legs to our two.  I shall keep where I am.”

Not caring to show myself less courageous than the cacique, I also keep where I am.  We get down the ridge somehow without further mishaps, and after a while find ourselves in a funnel-shaped gully the passage of which, in ordinary circumstances, would probably present no difficulty.  But just now it is a veritable battle-field of the winds, which seem to blow from every point of the compass at once.  The snow dashes against our faces like spray from the ocean, and whirls round us in blasts so fierce that, at times, we can neither see nor hear.  The mules, terrified and exhausted, put down their heads and stand stock-still.  We dismount and try to drag them after us, but even then they refuse to move.

“If they won’t come they must die; and unless we hurry on we shall die, too.  Forward!” cried Gondocori, himself setting the example.

Never did I battle so hard for very life as in that gully.  The snow nearly blinded me, the wind took my breath away, forced me backward, and beat me to the earth again and again.  More than once it seemed as if we should have to succumb, and then there would come a momentary lull and we would make another rush and gain a little more ground.

Amid all the hurly-burly, though I cannot think consecutively (all the strength of my body and every faculty of my mind being absorbed in the struggle), I have one fixed idea—­not to lose sight of Gondocori, and, except once or twice for a few seconds, I never did.  Where he goes I go, and when, after an unusually severe buffeting, he plunges into a snow-drift at the end of the ravine, I follow him without hesitation.

Side by side we fought our way through, dashing the snow aside with our hands, pushing against it with our shoulders, beating it down with our feet, and after a desperate struggle, which though it appeared endless could have lasted only a few minutes, the victory was ours; we were free.

I can hardly believe my eyes.  The sun is visible, the sky clear and blue, and below us stretches a grassy slope like a Swiss “alp.”  Save for the turmoil of wind behind us and our dripping garments I could believe that I had just wakened from a bad dream, so startling is the change.  The explanation is, however, sufficiently simple:  the area of the tourmente is circumscribed and we have got out of it, the gully merely a passage between the two mighty ramparts of rock which mark the limits of the tempest and now protect us from its fury.

“But where are the others?”

Up to that moment I had not given them a thought.  While the struggle lasted thinking had not been possible.  After we abandoned the mules I had eyes only for Gondocori, and never once looked behind me.