Stealthily, with the utmost precautions to avoid any unnecessary sound, the company stole across the uneven, heaped and riven snow and ice of the glacier. Under that black night of stars it stretched away white to a near indistinctness. The black masses of the mountains occulting the stars near the horizon were too indefinite to indicate direction. Compass in hand, the commander counted his paces over the snow, his only means of judging distance. For greater accuracy the staff-captain counted also. They spoke not a word. From the obscurity came the whispers of the men as they preserved a rough alignment. Sliding, stumbling over the inequalities of the frozen surface, they pressed onwards. Somewhere over to their right, higher on the glacier in front of them, the other company was advancing also. There was neither sound nor sign of it. In that dim desolation the staff-captain might with difficulty see his immediate companions. The remainder of the company was swallowed up, was noiseless. It seemed that they were stumbling on alone--on and on, an interminable distance--a few lost figures struggling through an Arctic night. Suddenly from the blackness straight ahead a beam of intensely white light shot out horizontal with the ground, sweeping it. At its first birth-splutter they flung themselves upon the snow, lay motionless. The searchlight--a wall of milky radiance to one side of them, suffusing the snow with a pale reflection--then, as it shone full on them, a lane of intolerable light from a blindingly violent source, casting long pitch-black shadows from every hump and hummock of the ice--swept questingly over the glacier, rested doubtfully here and there for a moment, passed on again. The Austrians were on the alert. Cautiously, still repeating to himself the number of paces they had marched when they dropped, the staff-captain glimpsed to right and left of him, looking for the company. The nearer figures he saw, immobile, their white humped backs looking like inequalities of the snow. Those more distant were utterly indistinguishable. The searchlight ceased abruptly. The world was annihilated in a profound blackness where the stars reigned alone. The two officers rose to their feet, marched onward, resumed their count of the paces. To right and left of them rose ghostly figures, stumbling forward. On and on they went, bruising themselves on sudden obstacles in the black night, the dim uniform whiteness of the snow a bewilderment to the vision. Far away in the mountains of the Austrian position a livid flash leaped to the sky. The reverberation of a gun's discharge rolled heavily and ominously to their ears, the long hurrying whine of a shell approached them. There was an instant of suspense. Were they after all discovered? The shell passed overhead to burst far behind, inaudible. The trench in front was invisible in the darkness--not a flare, not a rifle-spurt marked its position.