The next night the boys found shelter in the mountain village of Bezheeta, which perched at an elevation of about nine thousand feet. The warmth of the rude stone house in which they slept was very pleasant after the exposure of the previous nights. Bezheeta is at the foot of the ultimate great ridge which forms the backbone of the Caucasus Range. The snowy summits towered some three thousand feet above the village, and appeared to the weary boys an almost insurmountable barrier. There was no dance that night as there had been at the other village where they stopped. The night air was too frosty for such an outdoor function. Consequently the boys were allowed to get to sleep early, and were up correspondingly early in the morning. That enabled them to start out on their last climb long before the sun appeared over the mountain crests. The trail went up the steep ascent by a switchback which crossed, back and forth, the bed of a foaming stream that came down from a glacier above. At first the walking was good, over hard rock, but presently they reached snow, and tramped for a time through half-frozen slush. That greatly increased the effort necessary to climb the steep trail. The boys slipped and slid, and it sometimes seemed to them that they hardly advanced at all. Their feet became soaked and cold, and altogether they felt very miserable and discouraged. Then gradually the slush underfoot became firmer and changed to old snow that was packed and frozen hard. Finally the noise of the torrent ceased; that, too, was frozen. Still, up, up, the boys toiled, their packs growing heavier and their breath shorter. As the day advanced, clouds gathered about the summits, and from these masses snow-squalls swept down across the ravines and ridges. Several of these surging gusts enveloped the boys. At first the flurries of snow were light and rather fun than otherwise, but as the boys gained in altitude the storms increased in density and in severity. Finally, when one came they did not try to breast it, but stopped, in the shelter of some rock if possible, till it passed. Occasionally there was a heavy noise like rolling thunder that echoed from cliff to cliff. The boys thought it very strange that there should be thunder with what was, in effect, a midwinter storm. Also there was no lightning, only the reverberating noise, but they could think of no other cause, and accepted the thunder theory as the only one. Then the perplexing question was solved in a startling manner. The boys were toiling up the steep side of a ravine, with the slopes above them more nearly perpendicular than where they were. A storm, which appeared to be heavier than any previous one, passed along the mountain, extending beyond the boys, and nearly smothering them in swirling snow.