He led the way to a little wooden shack close under the lee of the precipice. Within, the walls were decorated with a number of scathingly satirical drawings of the _Tedeschi_; some extremely clever studies of the mountains in their different aspects of light--sunset and dawn, moonlight. The host, perceiving the captain's glance, made a deprecatory gesture. "What I am reduced to, _signor capitano_! And I might be blowing the Austrians out of their eyries!" He was typical of that new Italy which, while it cannot cease to be artistic, holds all of small account that is not war against the Austrian. He filled the glasses, raised his own, half turned to a portrait of Gabriele d'Annunzio that shared with the King the honours of the wall. "_Per la più grande Italia!_" "_Per la più grande Italia!_" Both officers drank the toast. "To-morrow morning she will be a little greater if the fates are kind," added the captain. A few minutes later he was lying full-length in a narrow low-sided cage, suspended from a pulley on a thick wire-rope, and being hauled up, with much creaking and strident protest of the pulley-wheel and vicious jerking of the loose rope, to the summit of the cliff. There he was again in a scene of activity. Broad-shouldered porters in frayed and much-worn Territorial uniforms were bearing away the ammunition boxes that had arrived at the summit, carrying them towards the next station of the _Teleferica_. The captain followed in their track. The wire-rope railway ran in short sections from station to station. The gaps between the sections--stretches of comparatively level ground--were filled by the sturdy Alpine porters or, in the case of longer distances, by pack-mules. It was the line of communications to the sector of the front immediately ahead--a front that for the most part of 450 miles is thrust out amid the eternal snows of lofty mountains, along the edges of deep chasms, upon the knife-ridges of _arêtes_, across the Arctic desolation of glacier and _neve_. Over it was transported food and ammunition, light guns, clothing, equipment, all the necessaries for an army in action. By it descended the wounded and the sick, the unwanted stores.