THE BRENVA RIDGE The peasant was right.

He _had_ seen a man waving a signal of distress on the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great buttress.

And this is how the signal came to be waved.
An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col du Geant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier.

The spark was a fire lit by Pierre Delouvain.

For Garratt Skinner's party had camped upon those rocks.