Over section after section the staff-captain passed, ascending higher and ever higher towards his goal. About him rose the great peaks, their robes of snow dazzling white under the sun, splendidly superior to the ragged army of stunted pines that sought to climb them, last lost sentinels straggling half submerged in the snow. Up sheer rock-faces whence birds of prey darted frightened from their nests, over deep chasms where he looked down to a dark profundity of pines and rushing streams, over great empty fields of snow far away beneath him on which zigzagged long lines of tiny black figures insignificant in the immensity, bearing burdens, upward and ever upward to the regions where snow and ice reign in eternal winter, the _Teleferica_ bore him. And ever between the stations there were throngs of busy men, more and more thickly clad at each successive height, who marched under heavy loads. Always there was a thunder rolling among the mountains. From apparently inaccessible crags dark against the blue, from bare snow ridges, from bleak white wastes where there seemed nothing to detain the eye, spurted little darts of flame, drifted faint smoke. Detonations came in sharp direct cracks, fantastically re-echoed; in a long rumbling angry mutter from the more distant guns. From steep mountain-sides, avalanches, loosened by the concussions, rushed downwards in a white smoke of flying snow, their thunders rivalling the persistent artillery. The staff-captain dallied not. The bombardment which was to prepare the way for the attack had already commenced. He hurried over the intervening spaces between the wire-rope stations, ascended higher and ever higher in the little dangling cages. It was afternoon when he reached the limit of the _Teleferica_--a little snow-covered hut on a desolate ledge. Here, sheeted down from the weather, stacks of supplies awaited further transportation. It was the depot of the quartermaster of the battalion holding the sector. An Alpino soldier, thickly clad, was in waiting to act as guide. The staff-captain borrowed an alpenstock from the quartermaster and set out. In front of him stretched a great smooth slope of snow that ascended until, high above him, it cut--in sharp contrast--across the blue of the sky. Its whiteness was blinding--the captain fitted on a pair of darkened spectacles. Far across it, dark dots strung like beads on an invisible thread, a company of soldiers was marching in a long single file zigzagged over the snow, climbing to the crest. Nearer at hand to the right, vivid spurts of yellow flame shot out from mounds of snow aligned at a little distance from each other. The detonations of the battery came crisply to the ear, predominant over the rumble and roll and confused echoes of the general bombardment.