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Even at this hour when the basin of the valley was filled with sunshine that one corner at the head of the Glacier d'Argentière was still dead white, dead black. She shivered once more as she looked at it so grim and so menacing the rock-wall seemed, so hard and steep the riband of ice. Then Chayne joined her on the ridge.
Here the palm is left between times, and here two persons generally work together, each braiding at a hat, while a little cross, cut in the rock-wall, looks down upon the work, for good luck. These caves have a narrow opening upward and are scarcely large enough to admit the two persons who sit at their work.
"The people up there call it a 'God-given rock-wall, and of course there is no force to speak of just near it. But a tribe of devils incarnate, who call themselves the Bada-Mawidi, live on its skirts, and there must be a road through it. It isn't the caravan route, which goes much farther east and is plain enough.
We found four principal columns of ice, three of which, in the loftiest part of the cave, are represented in the accompanying engraving: I call them three, and not two, because the two which unite in a common base proceeded from different fissures. The line of light at the foot of the rock-wall is the only entrance to the glacière.
Thus then they entered into the narrow pass aforesaid, which was the ingate to the Vale from the Waste, and little by little its dimness swallowed up their long line. As they went by the place where the lowering of the rock-wall gave a glimpse of the valley, they looked down into it as Face-of-god had done, but much change was there in little time.
As for the captive, for some days he was possessed by a morose anticipation of being brained at any moment an anticipation, however, which did not seem to interfere with his appetite. He would clutch eagerly all the food offered him, and crouch, huddled over it, with his face to the rock-wall, while he devoured it with frantic haste and bestial noises.
So saying, he led hastily up a kind of stair in the rock-wall, until they reached a cranny, whence through a hole in the cliff, they could see all over the haven. Black was her sail, and the image of the Sea-eagle enwrought thereon spread wide over it; and the banner of the Flaming Sword streamed out from the stern.
The upper end of the valley, where it first began to open out from the pass, was rugged and broken by rocks and ridges of water-borne stones, but presently it smoothed itself into mere grassy swellings and knolls, and at last into a fair and fertile plain swelling up into a green wave, as it were, against the rock-wall which encompassed it on all sides save where the river came gushing out of the strait pass at the east end, and where at the west end it poured itself out of the Dale toward the lowlands and the plain of the great river.
Away, scudding along the foot of the rock-wall struck the familiar track leading to the Scoop, and up it, bleating pitifully, nigh spent, the Killer hard on her now. "He'll doon her in the Scoop!" cried the Master hoarsely, following with fascinated eyes. "Owd Un! Owd Un! wheer iver are yo' gotten to?" he called in agony; but no Owd Un made reply.
"How narrow this place is!" Bertie exclaimed. "It is not much more than half the width of the room above." "Of course it is not; the two rooms above occupied the whole width of the house, these only occupy the width between the passage and the rock-wall on each side.
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