We dropped our rucksacks at the col and climbed the last 300 feet to the Tete de Jacquette at a faster pace, creatures from sea-level panting for breath in the thin Alpine air. The detour was a short one, but the reward was magnificent: a tantalising view of Mont Viso, the 12,500ft giant of the southern Alps, its twin towers appearing and disappearing among veils of cloud.
Staring at this huge bastion of ice and rock that guards the border with Italy, it was suddenly clear what an astonishing feat it was when a Carthaginian general, intent on a showdown with Rome more than 2,000 years ago, brought an army of 26,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry and 35 elephants up and over these forbidding mountains. This, according to the latest thinking, is Hannibal country - the Queyras Alps of south-eastern France.
Through the trailing mists to the north of Mont Viso, we thought we glimpsed the 10,000ft Col de la Traversette, the narrow pass beneath a row of rock needles through which the great military column is now believed to have passed at the end of October in 218BC. They had been ambushed by the Gauls, the snow and ice was thick underfoot, and yet they crossed the gap in relays and pushed down the precipitous path into Italy. Only at the gates of Rome itself did they fail.
For centuries, the Col de la Traversette has been used by traders and smugglers, and nowadays it forms part of a strenuous high-level walking circuit, the Tour du Mont Viso. But this wasn't on our route today, and reluctantly we turned our backs on Hannibal and headed south, where the sky was clear and the sun bounced and sparkled round the glaciers and snowfields of the Pics de la Font Sancte. It wasn't the end of our contact with him, however - you can never go far in this area without bumping into the ghosts of the great general and his poor, freezing elephants.
It was later in the evening when Hannibal appeared again: it turned out that while we'd been out on the hills, the annual Festival of Mountain Books and Pictures, in the nearby town of Aiguilles, had featured a debate on the burning question: is there really enough evidence that he followed the rivers Durance and Guil to the Col de la Traversette, which we'd seen earlier next to Mont Viso? Or was his route really the one that scholars have traditionally favoured - up the Isere river and over the Col du Petit St Bernard, the Col du Clapier or the Col du Mont Cénis, some 35 miles further north?
By the time we reached Aiguilles, the Hannibal experts had departed. But, by all accounts, the debate had been brought alive by the enthusiastic, theatrical contribution of John Prevas. An American academic, he has spent each summer for the past nine years climbing every pass on the French-Italian border, trying to match its features to descriptions of the route in the two main sources on Hannibal's journey - the contemporaray Greek historian Polybius, and the Roman historian Livy who wrote a century later.
Prevas's conclusion is that only the valley of the Guil, leading in a huge semi-circle to the Col de la Traversette, fulfills all the criteria: an arrow gorge where the soldiers walked with one foot in the river and were ambushed by the Gauls, a huge rock where Hannibal mustered his army to lick its wounds, a vast meadow beneath the pass where an army could camp, a high and difficult pass with year-round snow and a breathtaking view into Italy, followed by a slippery, vertigious descent where hundreds of men and animals were lost.
Prevas said later on the phone from his summer home in Cannes: "Most historians have only looked at it over a desk; my wife and I have been to the top of each pass and compared the characteristics to the sources again and again. I concluded, like the British historian Sir Gavin de Beer in the 1950s, that it had to be the Col de la Traversette."
No doubt his arguments, detailed in a recent book, will not be the last word on the subject. For the moment, however, the Queyras seems to have wrested Hannibal away from its northern rivals, and his unseen presence gives an extra frisson to walking in and around the valley of the Guil. One day, perhaps, one of us will stumble upon a Carthaginian coin in a fresh landslip, or the tip of a tusk protruding from an ancient snowfield.
Even without Hannibal, this half-lost corner of France offers a special kind of high-level walking. It is part of the Alps, but it has one foot in Provence, and the result is a climate described locally as huit mois d'hiver, quatre mois d'enfer (eight months of winter, four months of hell.)
The snows melt fast and bring violent floods, and the summer is hot and short of water. So it's not as harsh as Corsica, say, but it's more demanding than the more northerly part of the Alps. There is a good network of marked paths, including the Grande Randonnée 5, which passes through the Queyras on the way from the Dutch border to Nice, and the GR58, Tour du Queyras, a local circular route with several variations. They permit you to be as relaxed or adventurous as you like, ranging from strolls through the Bois des Amoureux, near St Veran, to a day-long scramble with 4,400ft of ascent to reach the 11,000ft summit of the Petit Rochebrune.
O ur route took us through a landscape that revealed how the people of the region, in the 2,00 years after Hannibal, led a harsh life and were largely isolated from the outside world until the present century. The region used to have its own democratic government - the République des Escartons, meaning "dividing up" or "sharing out" - an essential activity for communities hit so often by natural disaster.
The traditional village houses have stone-built living quarters on the ground floor, which used to be shared in winter by the cows and which served as an organic central heating system. The upper floors, built in the orange-tinted larch from the local forests, were once used to dry and store the hay and grain - nowadays many have been glazed in to form rooms with a view.
One of the most remarkable sights in the villages are the sundials set on the walls of churches and houses against beautifully-painted panels depicting landscapes, birds and animals. The panels are inscribed with dour or uplifting mottos in local patois: lou tems passo, passo lou ben (time is passing, pass it well), lou sourey se levo per tutches (the sun rises for all), or - on a panel with a blue beehive - de tes rais raio lou mel (from your rays flows the honey.) Other trade marks of the Queyras are split-level fountains (one trough for drinking, the lower one for washing clothes) and huge wooden crucifixes which bear not the body of Christ but all the grim paraphenalia of cruxifixion: ladders, hammers, bags of nails, a spear, a sponge on a stick and - perched on the top - a crowing cock.
From a peak of 8,500 in 1830, the population of the Queyras fell to its lowest in 1960, after disastrous floods three years earlier. But now the area is building a new economy based less on traditional farming and more on low-impact, outdoor tourism fostered by the establishment in 1977 of the Regional Natural Park of the Queyras - walking, cross-country skiing, canoeing, hang-gliding, mountain biking and horse riding. Fewer than half a million people visit the Queyras each year, of whom fewer than 20 per cent are from outside France. The Belgians, always hungry for mountains, lead the foreigners, followed by Italians, British and Germans.
A word of warning: there's a local liqueur made from an Alpine flower called génépi, which is green and pleasant, not unlike Chartreuse. But some bright spark in the local brewery has now come up with a beer called - appropriately, you may think - Tourmente au Génépi. The director of the Tourist Promotion Office was loyally drinking it one evening, but no one else was tempted. Green beer? Non merci.
The practicals
Stephen Cook travelled to the Queyras Alps with Inntravel (01653 629 014). A seven day walk costs between £600 and £700 per person, depending on the month, including flight to Marseille with onward rail and taxi transfer and half board plus picnics. The trip costs £200 less for self-drive. For further information about the area: Office du Promotion du Tourisme en Queyras, Maison de Queyras, 05470 Aiguilles, France, tel: 00 33 492 467 618. Website: www.queyras.com. Hannibal Crosses the Alps: The Enigma Re-examined, by John Prevas, Spellmount publishers, at £19.99.
