The ordinary motion of a _teleferica_ is not unlike that of an aeroplane--though it is not quite so smooth and vastly slower. On this occasion, however, the swaying of the cable furnished a new sensation which, while mildly suggestive of the sideslip of an aeroplane on a steep “bank,” was rather more like the “yawing” of a “sausage” observation balloon in a heavy wind. The swinging of the basket itself was also a good deal more violent than I had ever experienced before, though at no time great enough to make it difficult to keep one’s place. Both motions were, of course, at their worst out toward the middle of the span, so that one had an opportunity to get used to them gradually in the quarter of an hour which elapsed before that point was reached. I took the occasion to ask Antonio a question I had been making a point of putting to every _teleferica_ man I had a chance to talk with. “Is it really true,” I said, “that no one has been killed since the war began while riding in a _teleferica_?” “A large number of men have been injured,” he replied; “but no one has been killed outright,” and he went on to tell of a friend of his who had coasted down a thousand feet because the pulling-cable jerked loose from the place where it was attached to the basket when the latter had fouled a “down” basket in passing. He was badly injured from the jolt he received when the basket brought up short at the bottom, and it had taken three months in the hospital to put him right again. He would never walk again without a stick, but he was so far from being killed that he was the engineer of the very _teleferica_ on which we were riding. He was a very careful man, said Antonio, for he fully understood the consequences of letting two loaded baskets bump in mid-air. A chill current of spray began to enfold us at this juncture, and Antonio was just in the midst of an explanation of how it was carried by the wind from a thousand-foot-high quarter-mile-distant waterfall coming down behind the curtain of the lowering clouds, when I suddenly saw him bring the point of his alpenstock over the edge of the basket and, with his eyes fixed intently ahead, hold himself poised in an attitude of tense readiness. Just above our heads the descending basket was swaying to and fro in the strong wind. A collision seemed imminent when, with a quick lunge of his alpenstock, Antonio turned it aside, and in that fraction of a second we passed it unharmed. It had been easy this time, explained Antonio, because the engineer at the top had slowed down the baskets to under half-speed at the moment of their passing.