“It was seven o’clock in the evening; we had only two-and-a-half hours of daylight left; we had to go. I took Paccard by the arm, and once more waved my hat as a last signal to our friends in the valley; and the descent began. There was no track to guide us; the wind was so cold that even the snow on the surface had not thawed; all that we could see on the ice was the little holes made by the iron points of our stick. Paccard was no better than a child, devoid of energy and will-power, whom I had to guide in the easy places and carry in the hard ones. Night was already beginning to fall when we crossed the crevasse; it finally overtook us at the foot of the Grand Plateau. At every instant, Paccard stopped, declaring that he could go no further; at every halt, I obliged him to resume his march, not by persuasion, for he understood nothing but force. At eleven, we at last escaped from the regions of ice, and set foot upon _terra firma_; the last afterglow of the sunset had disappeared an hour before. Then I allowed Paccard to stop, and prepared to wrap him up again in the blanket, when I perceived that he was making no use whatever of his hands. I drew his attention to the fact. He answered that that was likely enough, as he no longer had any sensation in them. I drew off his gloves, and found that his hands were white and, as it were, dead; for my own part, I felt a numbness in the hand on which I wore his little glove in place of my own thick one. I told him we had three frost-bitten hands between us; but he seemed not to mind in the least, and only wanted to lie down and go to sleep. As for myself, however, he told me to rub the affected part with snow, and the remedy was not far to seek. I commenced operations upon him and concluded them upon myself. Soon the blood resumed its course, and with the blood, the heat returned, but accompanied by acute pain, as though every vein were being pricked with needles. I wrapped my baby up in his blanket, and put him to bed under the shelter of a rock. We ate a little, drank a glass of something, squeezed ourselves as close to each other as we could, and went to sleep.