Benny knew nothing of the pass, but insensibly the wonders of it grew upon him as the day dawned and the fertile valleys of Italy began to give place to the grandeur and desolation of the heights. What mind had conceived these things—what hand had planned them? An engineer by every instinct of his being, he tried to understand the spirit in which this great work was conceived and the labour which had accomplished it. And from that he passed to the sheer fascination of it all; of these frail bridges spanning the very jaws of hell; of the galleries wrought in the face of the iron rock; of the vast aqueducts bringing black torrents, and the mighty roofs which defied the thundering avalanche. By one man’s genius this had come to be; the gates had been opened, the goal attained. And with that man he crossed the pass in spirit, and lifted his eyes to the stars, and dwelt in the infinite. Upward and still upward—to what end, to what humour of destiny? Must all this grandeur of the road melt ultimately to a vulgar truth of life; must it give place to a man’s shame and a woman’s tears? He tried to think that it could not be, and yet the inevitableness of it all seemed written upon every rock which towered above him. He believed no longer that Philip Gaillarde had gone down into Italy. The lad, he thought, would be advised by others, and all that had been done at the villa would be well known to the authorities. Possibly, and this was to be reckoned with, Philip had himself gone up to the Hospice and would there meet the baronet face to face. And if he did so it might well be that a new page in this sordid tragedy would be written that very day. Benny would not dwell upon this, but he encouraged Bajazet with new promises, while that good fellow urged on his horses with wild cries and a great cracking of his whip, which echoed in the hills like a pistol shot. They were at the Gallery of Gondo by this time, and its black mouth shaped bell-like at the break of day. The open valley here closed in until it became but a tremendous cañon; the towering heights were uplifted as the spires of a Gargantuan cathedral; the road itself seemed to disappear into the very bowels of the rock. Upon the right hand, what would have been a roaring torrent in the spring was but a runnel cut in the cliff’s face; upon their left hand was the abyss whose black depths no eye could fathom. Here no living thing stirred—there was no sound but that of the water dripping; the very bridge should have been built for fabled demons of the Simplon and not for human travellers.