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Clambering up over backs and up sledge I used an ice-axe to cut steps over the cornice and thus managed to get on top, then cut steps and surmounted the edge of the cornice. Helped Bowers up with the rope; others followed then the gear was hauled up piecemeal. For Crean, the last man up, we lowered the sledge over the cornice and used a bowline in the other end of the rope on top of it.
"What a mixture of terror and beauty these monstrous glaciers are," said Julian; "crawling down the valleys, and shearing away the solid rocks before them like gigantic ploughshares." "Yes," said Eva. "When you look up at the tumbled pinnacles of those seracs, does it not seem as if Summer had rent in anger with some great ice-axe the huge enemy whom she could not quite destroy?"
The ice-axe will not serve one cannot reach far enough forward with it for safety, and the incessant stooping is an unnecessary added fatigue. For the transportation of our wood and supplies beyond the first glacier camp, the team of six dogs was cut into two teams of three, each drawing a little Yukon sled procured in the Kantishna, the large basket sled having been abandoned.
Some day perhaps Teneriffe will wake again, either in earthquakes or lava-flow, and cause a Casamicciola or a Catania. The cones over against Garachico seemed much alive to me, and had I not warmed frozen hands at the very earth fires themselves? I broke out hot sulphur with the pick of my ice-axe.
He started on his third visit to Switzerland early in July: in the second week in August Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank were to join him at Chamounix, and thence the three would make a tour together. He started in the highest spirits, and halted at the gate to wave his ice-axe defiantly. . . .
The ice-axe had hugely amused the Cossacks all through. Climbing the ridge to the left, and keeping along its top for a little way, I then struck across the semi-circular head of a wide glen, in the middle of which, a little lower, lay a snow-bed over a long steep slope of loose broken stones and sand.
The trail may be narrow at times, with nothing between it and a gulf, and it may be pitched at an angle that compels the use of "all-fours;" but with patience and discretion the ultimate peak is conquered without rope-ladder or ice-axe, and the vastness of the world below, gray and cold at some hours, and at others lighted with a splendor which words cannot transcribe, is revealed to the adventurer as satisfaction for his toil.
"We civilised men go back to the stark Mother that so many of us would have forgotten were it not for this Rule. And one thinks.... Only two weeks ago I did my journey for the year. I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, and then inland to a starting-place, and took my ice-axe and rucksack, and said good-bye to the world.
And so, brethren, it is far too hard a task to tread the road of duty which our consciences command us, unless we are drawn by Him Who is before us there on the road, and see the shining of His garments as He sets His face forward, and draws us after Him. It is easy to climb a glacier when the guide has cut with his ice-axe the steps in which he sets his feet, and we may set ours.
He had nothing with him but a knapsack, a coil of rope, and a weather-beaten ice-axe, besides one small book, which he read whenever he read at all. He spoke German fluently, but said he was an American. Thereupon the landlady, who had a cousin who had a nephew who had gone to Brazil, asked the tourist if he did not know August Bürgin, and was very much disappointed to find that he did not.
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