A lonely and grim road even in the daytime, when a few rays of sunshine manage to penetrate it at midday, when occasionally a party of tourists may be met with, and when sometimes the voice of a goatherd calling his flocks rises from the valley below; but lonelier and more grim, and more black and impenetrable at night, and rarely or ever then trod by human foot. For he who should attempt the passage of the Schwarzweiss Pass at night, unless there were a brilliant moon to light him through its most dangerous parts, would take his life in his own hands. Yet, on an August night of the year in which this tale is told, and when there was a moon that, being near its full, consequently rose late and shone till nearly daylight, a man was making his way across this pass to Italy. Midnight was close at hand as, with weary steps, he descended a rough-hewn path in the rock--a path which, for safety, had a rude handrail of iron attached to the side from which it was cut--and reached a small plateau, the size, perhaps, of an ordinary room, and from which again the path went on. From this plateau shelved down, for a hundred feet or more, an almost perpendicular moraine, or glacier bed, and at the foot of this lay the Klein-Schwarzweiss, with its crevasses glistening in the moonlight; for the moon had topped even the great mountains above by now, and lighted up the pass. It was evidently considered a dangerous part of the route, since between the edge of the plateau and the side of the moraine a wooden railing had been erected, consisting of two short upright posts and a long cross one. As the man reached this plateau, holding to the rail with one hand, while with the other he used his alpenstock as a walking-stick, he perceived a stone--it may have been placed there for the purpose--large enough for a seat; and taking off his knapsack wearily, he sat down upon it. "Time presses," he muttered to himself, "yet I must rest. Otherwise I shall not be at Santa Madre by eight o'clock to-morrow. I can go no farther without a rest." There is an indefinite feeling of awfulness in being alone at night amongst the mountains, in knowing and feeling that for miles around there is no other creature in these vast, cold solitudes but ourselves: and this man had that feeling now. "How still--how awful this pass is!" he said to himself, "with no sound but the creaking of that glacier below--with no human being here but me. Yet, I should be glad I am alone." At this moment a few stones in the moraine slipped and fell into the glacier, and the man started at the distinct sound they made in that wilderness of silence. Then, as he sat there gazing up at the moon and the snow above him, he continued his meditations.