We transferred our gear to the sleigh, putting our skis in the ski rack at the back. The black case of my typewriter and Joe Wesson’s camera equipment seemed out of place. We climbed in. The man with the snow boots got up behind the steering wheel. He pulled over a switch and the cable tightened in front of us so that here and there it jerked clear of the snow. A soft crunching sound and we were gliding forward along the snow track. Almost immediately we were on the slope and the sleigh tilted upwards in an alarming fashion so that I found myself lying on my back rather than sitting on the seat. It was a peculiar and rather frightening sensation. We lost sight of the rifugio. We were looking up a long white avenue between the dark pines. It rose straight into the blue sky and was steep as the side of a house.
I looked back. Already the square Tre Croci hotel was no bigger than a large black box resting on the white blanket of the pass. The road to Austria snaked through the pass like a dirty brown ribbon. The sun shone, but there was no sign of that ‘sunny snow paradise’ referred to in the tourist brochures. It was a lost and barren world of snow and black forest.
Ahead of us, the cable was strung taut like the string of a violin. There was no sound save the soft slither of the sleigh runners on the snow. The air was still between the dark pines, We were climbing at an angle of about sixty degrees. Joe leaned across me and spoke to the driver in English. ‘Do these cables ever break on these things?’ he asked.
The driver seemed to understand. He smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no, signore. They have not never break. But the funivia—’ that was the overhead cable-way down at Cortina, and he let go of the wheel for an instant and spread his hands in an expressive gesture. ‘Once he break. Pocol funivia. Molto pericoloso.’ And he grinned.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘The cable, he gone. But the cable which draw him hold, so they fall twenty metres and do not touch earth. The passengers, they were much frightened.’
‘Suppose this cable goes?’ I enquired.
‘It no go. It is a cable of the tedesci.’ Then he crinkled the corners of his blue eyes. ‘But if he do go — you see, signori, there is nothing that will not stop you.’ And he pointed with a grin down the frightful track behind us.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said. And I was as glad as I have ever been to get out of that perilous vehicle at the rifugio.
It was large for a rifugio. Most of them only cater for the day visitor and have no sleeping accommodation. Col da Varda, however, had been designed to cater for those who come to the Dolomites for skiing alone and who do not want to dance till the early hours.
It was timber-built of pines from the woods and had been constructed two years ago by the one-time owner of the Excelsior. It was built over and around the concrete housing of the cable machinery for the slittovia. With Teutonic thoroughness the Germans had placed the electrically operated haulage plant at the top of the sleigh track. The hut itself was a long building with great feet of pine piles driven deep into the snow. Its main feature was a large belvedere or platform, protected by glass like the bridge of a ship. It looked south and west across Tre Croci and down the pass to Cortina. The view was a magnificent study in black and white in the sunshine. And though it was still early and we were nearly 8,000 feet up, it was already warm enough to sit outside.
Back from the belvedere was a large eating room. It was lined with resined match-boarding and had big windows and long pine tables with forms on each side. In one corner was a typically Italian bar with a chromium-plated coffee geyser and, behind it, a shining array of bottles of all shapes in the midst of which swung the brass pendulum of a cuckoo clock. Between the bar and the door leading to the kitchen and the rest of the hut was a big tiled stove of Austrian pattern and there was an old upright piano in the far corner.
