The staff captain’s lips formed the words, "Awfully sorry! Good luck!" but his articulation was indistinct, and he went off hurriedly, still murmuring. Carfax stood in the snow, watching him clamber down among the rocks, where an alpinist orderly joined them. Gary presently appeared at the door of the observation station. "Has he gone?" he inquired, without interest. "Yes," said Carfax. "Is he going to do anything for us?" "I don’t know.... _No!_" Gary lingered, kicked at a salamander, then turned and went indoors. Carfax sat down on a rock and sucked at his empty pipe. Later the three officers in the observation station came out to the door again and looked at him, but turned back into the doorway without saying anything. And after a while Carfax, feeling slightly feverish, went indoors, too. In the square, whitewashed room Gray and Flint were playing cut-throat poker; Gary was at the telephone, but the messages received or transmitted appeared to be of no importance. There had never been any message of importance from the Falcon Peak or to it. There was likely to be none. Ennui, inertia, dry rot--and four men, sometimes silently, sometimes violently cursing their isolation, but always cursing it--afraid in their souls lest they fall to cursing one another aloud as they had begun to curse in their hearts. Months ago rain had fallen; now snow fell, and vast winds roared around them from the Alps. But nothing else ever came to the Falcon Peak, except a fierce, red-eyed _Lämmergeyer_ sheering above the peak on enormous pinions, or a few little migrating birds fluttering down, half frozen, from the high air lanes. Now and then, also, came to them a staff officer from below, British sometimes, sometimes French, who lingered no longer than necessary and then went back again, down into friendly deeps where were trees and fields and familiar things and human companionship, leaving them to their hell of silence, of solitude, and of each other. The tide of war had never washed the base of their granite cliffs; the highest battle wave had thundered against the Vosges beyond earshot; not even a deadened echo of war penetrated those silent heights; not a Taube floated in the zenith. In the squatty, whitewashed ruin which once had been the eyrie of some petty predatory despot, and which now served as an observatory for two idle divisions below in the valley, stood three telescopes. Otherwise the furniture consisted of valises, trunks, a table and chairs, a few books, several newspapers, and some tennis balls lying on the floor. Carfax seated himself at one of the telescopes, not looking through it, his heavy eyes partly closed, his burnt-out pipe between his teeth. Gary rose from the telephone and joined the card players. They shuffled and dealt listlessly, seldom speaking save in monosyllables. After a while Carfax went over to the card table and the young lieutenant cashed in and took his place at the telescope.