The donkey, they told me in the engine-house at the top, had colic from eating fresh snow on top of the contents of a box of dried figs he had broached, and they had tied his legs and sent him down on his way to the “Blue Cross” hospital to be put right. He was a plains donkey, and didn’t have good “Alpine sense,” else they would have driven him down by the path on his own legs. If they had known that a guest was coming up, however, they said, they wouldn’t have sent down an ass in the _teleferica_. It wasn’t quite safe for either passenger on account of the way the animal sprawled. The last donkey they had sent down got his hind legs tangled in a load of firewood that was coming up, and they had lost a good deal of the precious fuel at a time when they were at the bottom of their pile, with a storm coming on. The “up” car always got the worst of a collision, but if they were only warned that anyone of importance was coming, they took great care that there shouldn’t be any collision. No one ever got much hurt on a _teleferica_, anyhow. It seems to be a plain fact that no man has yet lost his life on the Italian front as a consequence of riding in a _teleferica_. Many have been killed in constructing them, and even more in patrolling the lines and keeping them in repair. Men have fallen or have jumped out of the baskets, often from considerable heights, and men have been brought in stiff with cold after two or three hours of exposure to a blizzard in a stalled car. Stations and engines have been carried away and buried, with all serving them, a hundred feet beneath an avalanche; but in these, as well as in all other mishaps connected with _telefericas_, inquiries which I pursued during the whole time I spent on the Italian front failed to reveal a single instance in which an actual passenger had lost his life. Hairbreadth escapes and rescues I heard of by the score. The story of one of the most remarkable of the latter was related by no less a personage than the brave and distinguished Colonel--now General--“Peppino” Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator, and hero of the famous capture of the peak of the Coli di Lano. While I was staying with Colonel Garibaldi in the Dolomites last winter the station of a _teleferica_ which I had been expecting to use on the morrow in going up to the lines on the glacier of the Marmolada was carried away by an avalanche, which also killed one of the engineers. It was the receipt of the news of this disaster which led my host to remark that one of the most spectacularly brave feats he had ever heard of had been performed by an Alpino the previous winter in connection with putting right a stalled car on this very span of cableway which had just been destroyed.