But the snow behind pressed on and buried Mr. Gossett. So intense was the pressure that he could not move, and he began to fear that it would be impossible to extricate himself. Then, while trying vainly to move his arms, he suddenly became aware that his hands, as far as the wrist, had the faculty of motion. The cheering conclusion was that they must be above the snow. So Mr. Gossett struggled on. At last he saw a faint glimmer of light. The crust above his head was getting thinner, and let a little air pass; but he could no longer reach it with his hands. The idea struck him that he might pierce it with his breath. He tried, and after several efforts he succeeded. Then he shouted for help, and one of his guides, who had escaped uninjured, came and extricated him. The snow had to be cut with the axe down to his feet before he could be pulled out. Then he found that his travelling companion, M. Boissonnet, was dead, and that no trace of Bennen could be seen. His body, however, was afterwards recovered. The story is told in a letter from Mr. Gossett to Professor Tyndall. "Bennen's body," he writes, "was found with great difficulty the day after Boissonnet was found. The cord end had been covered up with snow. The Cure d'Ardon informed me that poor Bennen was found eight feet under the snow, in a horizontal position, the head facing the valley of the Luzerne. His watch had been wrenched from the chain, probably when the cord broke; the chain, however, remained attached to his waist-coat. This reminds me of your fall on the Morteratsch glacier." It may be said that the principal danger of climbing rock-mountains is the danger of falling off them. For the art consists largely in traversing the faces of precipices by means of narrow and imperfect ledges, which afford more facilities for falling off than will readily be believed by any one who has not tried to stand on them. The climbers, of course, are always securely roped together in such places, and the theory is that two of them shall always be so firmly anchored that they can instantly check any slip that the third may make. But that is not always feasible. It is not feasible, for instance, at the difficult corner on the Dent Blanche, where Mr. Gabbett and the two Lochmatters came to grief. As all three climbers were killed on that occasion, no details of the accident are known. But the elder Lochmatter was known to be an exceptionally heavy man, and the presumption is that it was he who fell, and dragged the rest of the party after him. How he came to fall may be understood from the following description of the "Mauvais Pas," given by a traveller who traversed it a little afterwards: