The wire-rope railway ran in short sections from station to station. The gaps between the sections--stretches of comparatively level ground--were filled by the sturdy Alpine porters or, in the case of longer distances, by pack-mules. It was the line of communications to the sector of the front immediately ahead--a front that for the most part of 450 miles is thrust out amid the eternal snows of lofty mountains, along the edges of deep chasms, upon the knife-ridges of _arêtes_, across the Arctic desolation of glacier and _neve_. Over it was transported food and ammunition, light guns, clothing, equipment, all the necessaries for an army in action. By it descended the wounded and the sick, the unwanted stores.
Over section after section the staff-captain passed, ascending higher and ever higher towards his goal. About him rose the great peaks, their robes of snow dazzling white under the sun, splendidly superior to the ragged army of stunted pines that sought to climb them, last lost sentinels straggling half submerged in the snow. Up sheer rock-faces whence birds of prey darted frightened from their nests, over deep chasms where he looked down to a dark profundity of pines and rushing streams, over great empty fields of snow far away beneath him on which zigzagged long lines of tiny black figures insignificant in the immensity, bearing burdens, upward and ever upward to the regions where snow and ice reign in eternal winter, the _Teleferica_ bore him. And ever between the stations there were throngs of busy men, more and more thickly clad at each successive height, who marched under heavy loads.
Always there was a thunder rolling among the mountains. From apparently inaccessible crags dark against the blue, from bare snow ridges, from bleak white wastes where there seemed nothing to detain the eye, spurted little darts of flame, drifted faint smoke. Detonations came in sharp direct cracks, fantastically re-echoed; in a long rumbling angry mutter from the more distant guns. From steep mountain-sides, avalanches, loosened by the concussions, rushed downwards in a white smoke of flying snow, their thunders rivalling the persistent artillery.
The staff-captain dallied not. The bombardment which was to prepare the way for the attack had already commenced. He hurried over the intervening spaces between the wire-rope stations, ascended higher and ever higher in the little dangling cages.