But the suggestion had been made by Garratt Skinner.

And Garratt Skinner was Gabriel Strood, who knew--none better--the folly of such light traveling.
The rope was put on; Pierre Delouvain led the way, Walter Hine as the weakest of the party was placed in the middle, Garratt Skinner came last; the three men mounted by a snow-slope and a gully to the top of the rocks which supported the upper Brenva glacier.
"That's our road, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner.

He pointed to a great buttress of rock overlain here and there with fields of snow, which jutted out from the ice-wall of the mountain, descended steeply, bent to the west in a curve, and then pushed far out into the glacier as some great promontory pushes out into the sea.

"Do you see a hump above the buttress, on the crest of the ridge and a little to the right?
And to the right of the hump, a depression in the ridge?
That's what they call the Corridor.

Once we are there our troubles are over." But between the party and the buttress stretched the great ice-fall of the upper Brenva glacier.