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The guides declared the first route impracticable, on account of the recent crevasses which entirely obstructed it; the choice between the two others remained. I thought the second, by the "Camel's Hump," the best; but it was regarded as too dangerous, and it was decided that we should attack the ice-wall conducting to the summit of the Corridor.
Considering the inclination of the upper ice-floor, and the sharpness of the angle between the wall of ice and the line of our descent to this lowest point, I believe that 50 feet will fairly represent the height of the ice-wall from this point to the foot of the slope from the upper wall; so that 72 feet will be the whole depth of ice, from the top of the third ladder to the point where our further progress downwards was arrested.
"Sanna, we cannot make our way here," said the boy. "No," answered his sister. "Then we will turn back and try to get down somewhere else." "Yes, Conrad." The children now tried to climb down from the ice-wall where they had clambered up, but they did not succeed. There was ice all about them, as if they had mistaken the direction from which they had come.
Ten minutes later they climbed the ice-wall, and on and up the bank, which was partly a hillside, to where the signal of distress still fluttered. Beneath it, on the ground, lay stretched the man. He lay very quietly, and the fear that they were too late was upon them, when he moved his head slightly and moaned.
Some of them had futilely been used; the snow and ice on the ground above our recent fighting was melted in patches pools of boiling water lay on the naked rock; and the water, flowing down the depression, had reached the ice-wall a tiny stream of it, eating into the wall, slowly, surely.... With my men I flew up the slope.
'As soon as I could pull myself together I looked round, and now to my astonishment I saw that we were well on towards the entrance of our own glacier; ahead and on either side of us appeared well-remembered landmarks, whilst behind, in the rough broken ice-wall over which we had fallen, I now recognized at once the most elevated ice cascade of our valley....
Over the icy levels and over the woods, on the mountains, over the jagged rocks and spires and chasms of the glacier it boomed and moaned and roared, filling the fiord in even, gray, structureless gloom, inspiring and awful. I first struggled up in the face of the blast to the east end of the ice-wall, where a patch of forest had been carried away by the glacier when it was advancing.
The effect of this was, that we could walk between the ice-wall and the icicles as in a cloister, with solid ice on the one hand and Gothic arcades of ice on the other, the floor being likewise of ice, and the roof formed by the junction of the wall with the top of the icicle-arcade.
You must pursue for three hours a giddy path, and scale a height of moving ice, called the "Camel's Hump." The third route consists in ascending directly to the summit of the Corridor, crossing an ice-wall seven hundred and fifty feet high, which extends along the first escarpment of the Rouges rocks.
Most of these crumbling discharges are from the excessively shattered central part of the ice-wall; the solid deep-blue masses from the ends of the wall forming the large bergs rise from the bottom of the glacier. Many lesser reports are heard at a distance of a mile or more from the fall of pinnacles into crevasses or from the opening of new crevasses.
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