At the sound of his own voice he stopped, startled as if some one had called to him. Was it not she who called him once again, the last time? He was going to join her painlessly. Already he was no longer conscious of his limbs. He would slip away toward her, as gently as the moon’s rays fell upon the snow. The excess of his fatigue, the cold, the rarity of the air, not less than his despair, gave him hallucinations. In this stage of exhaustion from cold one who stops is lost. He could no longer put one foot before another. He was only a broken mechanism. “Edith!” he called again. And he smiled. No suffering touched him. It was so simple to sit down and wait. In front of him, toward the right, the glaciers of Monte Leone flashed and trembled, as if some movement animated them. It seemed to him that the whole white landscape was displacing itself, moving back toward Italy. He felt a kind of exquisite beatitude in his torpor. The instinct of self-preservation, or his curious watching for the mirage, made him keep his eyes opened, though sleepiness was heavy on them; yet he had no more desire to stir. The silence of the mountain, accentuated by the snow and moonlight, filled all space, rising even to the stars. In this shifting of the landscape through which he slipped away there was an arresting moment when his satchel fell, relinquished mechanically by his hand. The movement that he made to pick it up broke the spell. He knew his danger from the difficulty he had in moving his limbs at all. “But here, I’m going to die,” he said to himself sharply. “All alone here in this waste.” To die! Edith, toward whom he had fancied he was going back, disappeared immediately from his thoughts, like a siren into the depths of the sea, and in her place appeared the country of his childhood, the hillside of La Vigie, and his family. “They are waiting for me.”