“At this stage of the game,” said Colonel Garibaldi, who is fluent in American idiom as a consequence of his many revolutionary campaigns in both North and South America, “they were not grooving the wheels of the _teleferica_ basket deeply enough, with the result that they were occasionally blown off the cables by strong winds. So far as we could, the carrying of passengers was suspended during blizzards, but of course every now and then an occasion would arise when the chance had to be taken. That was how it happened that a staff officer from the Comando Supremo, who had never been on a _teleferica_ before, was in a basket which was blown from the cable of the first Marmolada span at the height of a heavy storm last March. The basket was within a couple of hundred metres of the end of its journey when the derailment of its two forward wheels occurred--in fact, it was a good deal nearer ‘land’ in that direction than downwards, where there was a clear drop of three or four hundred metres on to frozen snow. “If the air is quiet, a basket (going up, of course; the ‘down’ one runs by gravity) with only one pair of wheels off can usually be ‘nursed’ along the cable by gentle tugs from the engine, and that was what the engineers tried to do in this instance. The side pressure of the wind was too strong, however, and within a metre or two the cable wedged in beside the wheels and jammed hard. If there had not been a man in the basket, they would simply have sped up the engine and gone on pulling until either the basket came up or something broke. If the former, all was well; if the latter, they picked up the pieces as soon as the weather permitted, rushed their repairs, and started up again. With a passenger--and especially a staff officer--to reckon with, it was a different proposition. “Luckily the chap kept his nerve, and between snow flurries they could see him working hard trying to get the wheels on again. An expert _teleferica_ lineman can, with luck, occasionally put a pair of wheels back on the track alone; but unless one understands exactly how to take his weight off the basket by hanging over the cable the job is as hopeless as trying to lift yourself by your boot-straps. This chap was anything but an expert, and, after fumbling with numbing fingers for ten or fifteen minutes, he waved his hand with a gesture of despair and sank back into the bottom of the heeled-over basket.