He stooped and picked up the letter--picked it up and read it hurriedly; and then he, too, let it fall again and leaned back against the seat. "Philip Smerdon my brother's murderer!" he exclaimed. "Philip Smerdon, my friend, an assassin! The self-accused, the self-avowed murderer of Walter Cundall! Ida," he said, turning to her, "is _his_ the figure in your dream?" "Yes," she wailed. "Yes! I recognise it now." CHAPTER XX. The Schwarzweiss Pass, leading from the south-east of Switzerland to Italy, is one well known to mountaineers, because of the rapid manner in which they can cross from one country to another, and also because of the magnificent views that it presents to the traveller. Moreover, it offers to them a choice either of making a passage over the snow-clad mountains that rise above it, and across the great Schwarzweiss glacier, or of keeping to the path that, while rising to the height at some places of 10,000 feet, is, except at the summit, perfectly passable in good weather. It is true that he who, even while on the path, should turn giddy, or walk carelessly, would risk his life, for though above him only are the vast white "horns" and "Piz," below him there are still the ravines through which run the boiling torrents known respectively as the "Schwarz" and the "Weiss" rivers--rivers that carry with them huge boulder stones and pine-trees wrenched from their roots; dry slopes that fall hundreds of feet down into the valley below; and also the Klein (or little) Schwarzweiss glacier, a name so given it, not because of its smallness--for it is two miles long, and in one place, half-a-mile across--but to distinguish it from the Gross-Schwarzweiss glacier that hangs above on the other side of the pass. It is a lonely and grim road, a road in which no bird is heard or seen from the time that the village of St. Christoph is left behind on the Swiss side until the village of Santa Madre is reached on the Italian side; a road that winds at first, and at last, through fir-woods and pine-trees, but that in the middle is nothing but a path, cut in some parts and blasted in others, along the granite sides of the rocks, and hanging in many places above the valley far below. Patches of snow and pieces of rock that have fallen from above, alone relieve the view on the side of the path; on the opposite side of the ravine is nothing but a huge wall of granite that holds no snow, so slippery is it; but above which hangs, white and gray, like the face of a corpse, the glacier from which the pass derives its name.