“Not a little cast down over this development, they began hauling in from the station, only to feel the more apprehension when they saw it was a limp and apparently lifeless body that was coming up to them out of the storm. A reassuring yodel rolled up from the misty depths at this juncture, however, and the sharpest-eyed of them announced that he could see his comrade ‘jack-knifed’ over the cable jerking the basket straight. Even before the body of the swooned officer, with its wind-blown arms and legs flopping like those of a scarecrow, was swung on to the landing and released from its harness, the ringing bang of a steel spanner on the cable gave the familiar signal of ‘Haul away!’ “He came up (so his captain told me later),” concluded Colonel Garibaldi, “sitting on the rim of the basket with his eagle’s feather rasping right along the sagging cable all the way, his hobnailed boots drumming a tattoo on the steel bottom, and singing the Alpini marching song in a voice that set the echoes ringing above the howling of the storm.” The expedient of shooting a _teleferica_ cable across an otherwise unbridgeable space was not tried for the first time on the occasion referred to in the opening paragraph of this chapter--when it was resorted to in running a line across a flood-swollen river. The same plan had been successfully followed a year previously in carrying succour to a band of Alpini who, through the destruction of their _teleferica_ by an avalanche, were left “marooned” on the side of a glacier with only a few days’ supply of food and munitions. The one path leading up to their eyrie had also been scoured away by the slide, so that a month or more of labour would have been required to open communications in this way. For the same reason even a longer period would have had to elapse before the _teleferica_ could be restored; that is, if the cable were to be carried up as when it was first built. The mountaineering genius of the Alpini would undoubtedly have been equal to the problem of finding their way back to safety by letting each other down by ropes, but this would have involved the abandonment of a position which it was vitally important to hold.