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Taking the axe and bearing the most of his weight on the cord, Regnar crossed the bending surface and shifting fragments, and finding a precarious footing on the berg, wound the rope around his left arm, and with the right cut steps into the brittle ice-wall. In a few moments he ascended the cliff, and the others, leaving their guns behind them, found little difficulty in following him.
'And throng to her, sigh to her, you that can breach The ice-wall that guards her securely; You have not such bliss, though she smile on you each, As the heart that can image her purely. "Wasn't Sandoe once a friend of my father's? I suppose they quarrelled. He understands the heart. What does he make his 'Humble Lover' say?
From the example of Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would otherwise have "died and given no sign," has taken courage, and spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, by act as well as song, that "a man's a man for a' that."
"Pretty solid bit of imagination, that ice-wall yonder," laughed Captain Hazzard. "How are we ever going to get on the top of it?" asked Billy. "We must steam along to the westward till we find a spot where it shelves," was the reply. "Then it is not as high as this all the way round the polar regions?" "No, in places it shelves down till to make a landing in boats is simple.
Ice gives no such entrance to the point of the axe as hard snow does, yet the only aid in steadying the climber, and in somewhat relieving his weight on the loose snow, was afforded by such purchase upon the ice-wall, shoulder high, as that point could effect.
He looked up with a start. In the east the day was breaking, pale and desolate; the lower glacier glimmered into view beneath them; the gigantic amphitheater of hills which girt them in on three sides loomed out of the mists from aerial heights and took solidity and shape, westward the black and rugged Peuteret ridge, eastward the cliffs of Mont Maudit, and northward sweeping around the head of the glacier, the great ice-wall of Mont Blanc with its ruined terraces and inaccessible cliffs.
A few centuries ago it must have been the grandest feature of this part of the coast, and, so well preserved are the monuments of its greatness, the noble old ice-river may be seen again in imagination about as vividly as if present in the flesh, with snow-clouds crawling about its fountains, sunshine sparkling on its broad flood, and its ten-mile ice-wall planted in the deep waters of the channel and sending off its bergs with loud resounding thunder.
The appearance of the rocks, too, in the lower cave, and the surface of the ice-wall there, gave no indications of the action of water; and there was no trace of ice among the stones, as there certainly would have been if water had filled the cave, and gradually retired before the attacks of frost, or in consequence of the opening up of drainage.
He pointed to a great buttress of rock overlain here and there with fields of snow, which jutted out from the ice-wall of the mountain, descended steeply, bent to the west in a curve, and then pushed far out into the glacier as some great promontory pushes out into the sea. "Do you see a hump above the buttress, on the crest of the ridge and a little to the right?
She stood on the peaks above me; her figure presented in strong relief against the dead, neutral tint of the ice-wall behind her. I could see her face plainly the look of entreaty in her eyes and the beckoning motion of her hands. She was calling to me, and urging me to join her; and I could not! A wide crevasse yawned before me, preventing any forward movement.
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