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Updated: May 13, 2025
Still, for an hour nothing could be seen, until between three and four the snow gave place to a sleety rain, and the watchers saw that they were passing with frightful rapidity a line of jagged ice-cliffs, not two hundred yards away. La Salle called his companions, and they watched for nearly an hour in constant expectation of having to take to their boat.
Some sense of his own insufficiency broke in at last upon him. His vanity peeled off from him, just at the moment when it would most have been of use. He had a glimpse of what he was a poor, weak, inefficient thing. Above them the slopes stretched upward to a great line of towering ice-cliffs. Through and up those ice-cliffs a way had to be found.
This proved to be the largest of the series of narrow lakelets that lie in shallow troughs between the moraine and the glacier, a miniature Arctic Ocean, its ice-cliffs played upon by whispering, rippling waveless and its small berg floes drifting in its currents or with the wind, or stranded here and there along its rocky moraine shore.
"Are not the floes nearer? Can he not look on the great salt lake from the hummocks? The sun has been hot a long time now. The ice-cliffs are dangerous. Their edges split off every day. If my son goes often to them, he will one day come tumbling down upon the floes and be crushed flat, and men will carry him to his mother's feet like a mass of shapeless blubber."
The islands and floats on the coast, the great falls from the ice-cliffs in the port, or a heavy snow-storm attended with a sharp frost, would be equally fatal. After such an explanation as this, the reader must not expect to find me much farther to the south. It was, however, not for want of inclination, but for other reasons.
"No, I only see tall ice-cliffs on the left, and icebergs rising up here and there out of the frozen sea," he answered. Several times on hearing this Saunders declared it was useless to go on, and even Foubister once proposed building a snow-hut as well as their blindness would allow them, and then lying down within it to die.
The day was unusually warm, and the ice melted so rapidly that parts of this moraine were being sent down in frequent avalanches. The rustle of debris was almost incessant, and, ever and anon, the rustle rose into a roar as great boulders bounded over the edge, and, after dashing portions of the ice-cliffs into atoms, went smoking down into the chaos below.
Cloud-banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into view, although it really is outside our range of vision. Worst of all is the deceptive appearance of open water, caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice-cliffs below the horizon."
They had seen the signal of the handkerchief, understood and followed it, and, in a few minutes more, were under the lee of the ice-cliffs, thanking God and congratulating each other on their deliverance. A sheltered cove was soon found, far enough removed from cliffs and pinnacles to insure moderate safety.
To-morrow he would ascend the buttress, traverse the ice-ridge with Walter Hine perhaps yes, only perhaps and at that thought Chayne's heart stood still. And even if he did, there were the hanging ice-cliffs above, and yet another day would pass before any alarm at his absence would be felt. Surely, it would be the Brenva route!
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