The car ran swiftly up the road to Wasen, and some twinkling lights and a huge crimson eye at the entrance to the great tunnel told us that we had done the ten miles to Göschenen. No one stirred in the streets of the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St. Gothard Road. The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm. There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind along the stark and broken faces of the precipice: it was like the rattle of thunder. In the sombre defile of the Schöllenen the air rushed as through a funnel. We could see nothing save the thread-like road illuminated by our steadfast lanterns--the sole beacon of safety in this welter. We had a ghostly impression of winding through a narrow gorge, the river roaring in its depths; then, dashing through an avalanche gallery (where the lights played strange tricks with the vaulted roof), we came out upon the Devil's Bridge. The spray from the Reuss, which here drops a full hundred feet into the abyss, lashed our faces as with whips; the storm leaped at us out of the blackness like a wolf; the car quivered, and for an instant it seemed that we should be hurled against the parapet of the bridge. But we passed unharmed, and a quarter of a mile further on Winston stopped in the welcome shelter of the Urner Loch, a tunnelled passage in the rock. We gasped out broken expressions of a fearful joy; then, seeing that Molly was well, and that the wind-wolf's teeth had torn nothing from the car, Jack went full speed ahead again, steering along the open Urseren Valley, where we had fleeting glimpses of green fields instead of granite rocks. Thus we came to Andermatt, where not the eye of a mouse seemed open to mark our quick and stealthy passage. We were now on that great mountain highroad that slants in a straight line across almost all Switzerland from Coire to Martigny; but we kept on it only for a little while, to steal through Hospenthal--as dead asleep as the other villages (for Labour had not yet begun to waken in its hard bed), and take the southern road that leads to Italy. Thus far, audacity had been laurelled by success. It was near one in the morning, and we were spinning fast up a valley which showed bleakly in the flying lights of our car. Soon Jack called to us that we had crossed the border line of the Canton Ticino, and presently through the blackness twinkled the little lakes which mark the summit of the Pass. We were nearly seven thousand feet above the sea, and suddenly, as we crossed the ridge and began to sail down the dismal Val Tremolo towards Airolo, the great wind that had made majestic music all day and night ceased to blow. We ran into a zone of motionless, ice-cold air, and what seemed an unnatural silence, only the hum of the motor breaking the frozen stillness of these high Alpine solitudes.