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But he knew that when he had ascended Mont Blanc by the Brenva route twenty-three years before, he had kept to the right along the rocks to a point where that ice-wall was crevassed, and through that crevasse had found his path. They passed quickly beneath an overhanging rib of ice which jutted out from the wall, and reached the angle then formed at four o'clock in the afternoon.
No four-footed animals rove over it; no human beings inhabit it. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of pack-ice, glaciers, and ice-walls jealously guard it on all sides. On one side, for a distance of five hundred miles, extends a great ice barrier whose perpendicular ice-wall is from thirty to three hundred feet in height.
The heat became torrid. The splashing of the water and thunder of huge pieces of ice falling into the crack almost deafened them. Just as the sun had crossed the narrow arc above the crevasse there came a thunderous roar. Used as they had been for some hours to explosions of sound, this one made all tremble. The ice-wall seemed to crack and stagger from base to summit.
Fortunately to most travelers the thundering ice-wall, while comfortably accessible, is also the most strikingly interesting portion of the glacier. The mountains about the great glacier were also seen from this standpoint in exceedingly grand and telling views, ranged and grouped in glorious array.
The swell was crashing on its perpendicular sides and throwing spray to a height of sixty feet. Evidently there was an ice- foot at the east end, for the swell broke before it reached the berg- face and flung its white spray on to the blue ice-wall. We might have paused to have admired the spectacle under other conditions; but night was coming on apace, and we needed a camping-place.
The point about one thousand five hundred feet above the gable, where the earthquake cleavage took place, will perhaps remain the crux of the climb. The ice-wall rises forty or fifty feet sheer, and the broken masses below it are especially difficult and precipitous, but with care and time and pains it can be surmounted even as we surmounted it.
But the interesting feature was this: One of the searchers came suddenly upon a sleeved arm projecting from a crevice in the ice-wall, with the hand outstretched as if offering greeting! "The nails of this white hand were still rosy, and the pose of the extended fingers seemed to express an eloquent welcome to the long-lost light of day." The hand and arm were alone; there was no trunk.
"Lotys!" he said; "Are you so cold, so frozen in an ice-wall of conventionality that you cannot warm to passion not even to that passion which every pulse of you is ready to return? What do you want of me? Lover's oaths? Vows of constancy? Oh, beloved woman as you are, do you not understand that you have entered into my very heart of hearts that you hold my whole life in your possession?
There was also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of the spectacle we were about to witness. Thus we pushed forward bravely toward an ice-wall that stretched across the top of the bay from one high shore to the other.
The mountains back of it and on each side of its inlet are sculptured in a singularly rich and striking style of architecture, in which subordinate peaks and gables appear in wonderful profusion, and an imposing conical mountain with a wide, smooth base stands out in the main current of the glacier, a mile or two back from the discharging ice-wall.
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