My little wire basket swung giddily to one side as the first gust drove into it, promptly to swing back again, after the manner of a pendulum, when the air-buffer was undermined by a counter-gust and fell away; but the deeply grooved wheel was never near to jumping off the supporting cable, and the even throb of the distant engine coming down the pulling wire felt like a kindly hand-pat of reassurance. “Good old _teleferica_!” I said half aloud, raising myself on one elbow and looking over the side: “you’re as comfy and safe as a passenger lift and as thrilling as an aeroplane. But”--as the picture of a line of ant-like figures I had noted toiling up the snowy slope a few moments before flashed to my mind--“what happens to a man on his feet--a man not being yanked along out of trouble by an engine on the end of a nice strong cable--when he’s caught in a maelstrom like that? What must be happening to those poor Alpini? Whatever can they be doing?” And even before the clinging insistence of the warm breeze from the lower valley had checked the impetuosity of the invader, and diverted him, a cringing captive, to baiting avalanches with what was left of his strength, I had my answer; for it was while the ghostly draperies of the snow-charged wind-gusts still masked the icy slope below that, through one of those weird tricks of acoustics so common among high mountain peaks, the flute-like notes of a man singing in a clear tenor floated up to the ears I was just unmuffling from a furry collar:-- “Fratelli d’Itali, l’Italia, s’è desta; Dell’ elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa!” It was the “Inno di Mameli,” the Song of 1848--the Marseillaise of the Italians. I recognised it instantly, because, an hour previously my hosts at luncheon in the officers’ mess below had been playing it on the gramophone. Clear and silvery, like freshly minted coins made vocal, the stirring words winged up through the pulsing air till the “sound chute” by which they had found their way was broken up by the milling currents of the dying storm. But I knew that the Alpini were still singing,--that they had been singing all the time, indeed,--and when the last of the snow-flurries was finally lapped up by the warm wind, there they were, just as I expected to find them, pressing onwards and upwards under their burdens of soup-cans, wine-bottles, stove-wood, blankets, munitions, and the thousand and one other things that must pass up the life-line of a body of soldiers holding a mountain pass in midwinter. II