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The crust, brittle, held for a pace or two, then let one down with a bump some 8 or 10 inches. Now and again one's leg went down a crack in the hard ice underneath. We drew up a slope on this surface and discovered a long icefall extending right across our track, I presume the same pressure which caused Shackleton to turn towards the Cloudmaker.
Although the surrounding peaks were as yet invisible through the haze of sleet and vapor, objects near at hand were revealed with uncanny distinctness. Each frozen wave on the surface of the ice was etched in sharp lines. A cluster of séracs on a neighboring icefall showed all their mad chaos.
The sky had clouded over, and ugly streamers floated on the high slopes. We tied on the rope at the foot of the bergschrund, which was easy to pass because of the winter's snow. Wake led, of course, and presently we came on to the icefall. In my time I had done a lot of scrambling on rocks and used to promise myself a season in the Alps to test myself on the big peaks.
The wall seemed to thin out and become much lower toward our left, and we moved cautiously toward its lowest point. The edge upon which we walked was itself very narrow, and ran down at a steep angle to the top of a lower icefall which repeated the form of the upper. It almost thinned out at the point where the upper wall was lowest.
CREVASSES. Slight changes of slope in the glacier bed, and the different rates of motion in different parts, produce tensions under which the ice cracks and opens in great fissures called crevasses. At an abrupt descent in the bed the ice is shattered into great fragments, which unite again below the icefall. Crevasses are opened on lines at right angles to the direction of the tension.
There are vast amphitheatres of pure snow, of which the glacier known to tourists is merely the insignificant drainage, but whose very existence they do not generally suspect. They are utterly ignorant that from the top of the icefall which they visit you may walk for hours on the eternal ice.
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