“What! you really believed me?.. Why, that was a _galéjade_ a fib... Among us Taras-conese you ought surely to know what talking means...” “Then,” asked Tartarin, with much emotion, “the Jungfrau was not_ prepared?_” “Of course not.” “And if the rope had broken?..” “Ah! my poor friend...” The hero closed his eyes, pale with retrospective terror, and for one moment he hesitated... This landscape of polar cataclysm, cold, gloomy, yawning with gulfs... those laments of the old hut-man still weeping in his ears... _Outre!_ what will they make me do?.. Then, suddenly, he thought of the _folk_ at Tarascon, of the banner to be unfurled “up there,” and he said to himself that with good guides and a trusty companion like Bompard... He had done the Jungfrau... why should n’t he do Mont Blanc? Laying his large hand on the shoulder of his friend, he began in a virile voice:-- “Listen to me, Gonzague...” XIII. The catastrophe. On a dark, dark night, moonless, starless, skyless, on the trembling whiteness of a vast ledge of snow, slowly a long rope unrolled itself, to which were attached in file certain timorous and very small shades, preceded, at the distance of a hundred feet, by a lantern casting a red light along the way. Blows of an ice-axe ringing on the hard snow, the roll of the ice blocks thus detached, alone broke the silence of the _névé_ on which the steps of the caravan made no sound. From minute to minute, a cry, a smothered groan, the fall of a body on the ice, and then immediately a strong voice sounding from the end of the rope: “Go gently, Gonzague, and don’t fall.” For poor Bompard had made up his mind to follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in the morning--it was now four by the president’s repeater--the hapless courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed, vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might send down its masses of snow and ice. To suffer in silence! what torture to a native of Tarascon! But the caravan halted. Tartarin asked why. A discussion in low voice was heard; animated whisperings: “It is your companion who won’t come on,” said the Swedish student. The order of march was broken; the human chaplet returned upon itself, and they found themselves all at the edge of a vast crevasse, called by the mountaineers a _roture_. Preceding ones they had crossed by means of a ladder, over which they crawled on their hands and knees; here the crevasse was much wider and the ice-cliff rose on the other side to a height of eighty or a hundred feet. It was necessary to descend to the bottom of the gully, which grew smaller as it went down, by means of steps cut in the ice, and to reascend in the same way on the other side. But Bompard obstinately refused to do so.