We had just come out of a narrowed section of the gorge where, to get through at all, the road had to run on a sort of trestle built above the now frozen river, and where the ice-sheathed walls above us interlocked like the jaws of a wolf-trap. Ahead of us the road was blocked by a towering barrier of crumpled snow, piled a hundred feet or more high from wall to wall. Rocks and snapped-off and up-ended pine trees peppered through the amorphous mass furnished unmistakable evidence that the avalanche which formed it had come down out of a “track.” “We couldn’t go over it, and we couldn’t have shovelled it away in ten years,” said my companion; “so we simply had to follow the only alternative left and go through it. Here we go into the tunnel now. My great worry is as to whether the new slide that the next day or two--or the next hour or two, for that matter--may bring down upon this will crush in my little tunnel or only pile up harmlessly above. Hard-packed as it is, the snow” (I felt him lurch away from me in the darkness, and heard the soft swish of something brushing against the side of the tunnel) “is slushy even in under here. I’m rather afraid that it won’t stand much more weight, even if it doesn’t fall in of its own. But--ah” (we were out of the tunnel now, and a fluted yellow cliff of staggering sheerness loomed through the notch ahead), “there’s the Marmolada! Doesn’t look like an easy place to dislodge the enemy from, does it? Well, my men--my brother, Major Ricciotti Garibaldi, leading them--took the most of the 13,000-foot _massif_ from the Austrians with the loss of so few men that I am still being accused of having thrown my dead in the _crevasses_ of the glacier and filling their places with smuggled recruits!” An Alpino passed singing, and the Colonel took up the air as he returned the salute. “O Marmolada, tu es bella, tu es grana ina in peo e forta in guerra.” “It’s a song the men have made,” he said. “The Marmolada was famous even in peace time, but up to a year or two before the war it had never been climbed from this side. The Captain of Alpini in the post at that pass on the left was the first Italian to make the ascent. It took him two days, and cost him several hundred _lira_ for guides. Well, it was from this very side that we took it (I can’t tell you exactly how, as we want to use the same method again), and now we are sending fuel and food and munitions up there every day. To-morrow, if the _telefericas_ are still running, you will go up there to that snow-cap on the top in less than an hour.”