He had no longer any doubt.

His friend and his friend's guide were not lying upon any ledge of the rocks of the Aiguille de Blaitiere; they were not waiting for any succor.
On the glacier, a broad track, littered with blocks of ice, stretched upward in a straight line from the upper lip of the crevasse to the great ice-fall on the sky-line where the huge slabs and pinnacles of ice, twisted into monstrous shapes, like a sea suddenly frozen when a tempest was at its height, stood marshaled in serried rows.

They stood waiting upon the sun.

One of them, melted at the base, had crashed down the slope, bursting into huge fragments as it fell, and cleaving a groove even in that hard glacier.
Chayne went forward and stopped at the guide's side on the lower edge of the crevasse.

Beyond the chasm the ice rose in a blue straight wall for some three feet, and the upper edge was all crushed and battered; and then the track of the falling serac ended.