The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

She turned after that and herself sent the belated response to Banks. But though she repeated the call twice, making a trumpet of her hands and with all the power of her voice, his hail did not reach them again. She started swiftly down. It was beginning to snow.

Frederic had nothing more to say. He moved on with her. It was as though each tried to out-travel the other, still they could not make up that delay. The snow fell in big, soft flakes that blurred the tracks they followed; soon they were completely blotted out, and though he strained his eyes continually, watching for the cleaver of rock they had climbed that morning, the landmark never appeared. Finally, at the same instant, they both stopped, listening. On the silence broke innumerable small sounds like many little hurrying feet. The mountain trembled slightly. "God Almighty!" he cried thickly. Then came the closer rush of a considerable body, not unlike sheep passing in a fog, and panic seized him. "We've got to keep on top," he shouted and, grasping her arm, he swung her around and began to run back up the slope.

In the face of this common peril, personality called a truce, and she pushed on with him blindly, leaving it to him to choose the way and set the pace. But their own tracks down the incline had filled with incredible swiftness; soon they were completely effaced. And, when the noise subsided, he stopped and looked about him, bewildered. He saw nothing but a breadth of sharply dipping slope, white, smooth as an unwritten scroll, over which hung the swaying, voluminous veil of the falling snow. He put his hands to his mouth then, and lifted his voice in a great hail. It brought no reply, but in the moment he waited, somewhere far below in those obscured depths, a great tree, splitting under tremendous pressure, crashed down, then quickly the terrific sweep and roar of a second mightier avalanche filled the hidden gorge.

Morganstein caught her arm once more. "We must get back to that shoulder where it's safe," he shouted. "Banks will come to look us up." After that, as they struggled on up the slope, he fell to saying over and over, as long as the reverberations lasted: "Almighty God!"

As they ascended, the snow fell less heavily and finally ceased. It became firm underfoot, and a cross wind, starting in puffs, struck their faces sharply with a promise of frost. Then strange hummocks began to rise. They were upheavals of ice, shrouded in snow. Sometimes a higher one presented a sheer front shading to bluish-green. They had not passed this point with Banks, but Morganstein shaped a course to a black pinnacle, lifting through the mist beyond, that he believed was the crag at the shoulder. She stumbled repeatedly on the rough surface. Her labored breathing in the great stillness, like the beat of a pendulum in an empty house, tried his strained nerves. He upbraided her for leaving her alpenstock down the slope. But she paid no attention. She looked back constantly; she was like a woman being led away from a locked door, moving reluctantly, listening against hope for a word or sign. So, at last, they came to the rock. It was not the crag, but a hanging promontory, where the mountain broke in a three-sided precipice. The cloud surged around it like an unplumbed sea.

They crept back, and Morganstein tried again to determine their position. They were too high, he concluded; they must work down a little to round the cliffs, so they took a course diagonally into the smother. Then he, too, began to lose alertness; he walked mechanically, taking the line of least resistance; his head sagged forward; he saw nothing but the hummocks before him. These grew larger; they changed to narrow ridges with fissures between. After a while, one of these breaks roused him. It was exceedingly deep; he could not see either end of it. The only way was to leap, and he did it clumsily. Then, with his alpenstock fixed, and his spiked heels set in the crust, he reached a hand to her. She was barely able to spring to the lower side, but it did not terrify her. One fear only possessed her. Her glance, seeking, returned to the hidden canyon. But soon they were confronted by a wider and still deeper chasm. It was impossible to cross it, though it seemed to narrow upwards in the direction of the summit. He took her arm and began to ascend, looking for a way over. The pitch grew steadily sharper. They entered the thinning edge of the cloud, and it became transparent like tissue of gold. Suddenly it parted, and Frederic stopped, blinded by the blaze of a red sunset on snow. He closed his eyes an instant, while, to avoid the glare, he turned his face. His first glance shocked him into a sense of great peril. The two fissures ran parallel, and they were ascending a tongue of ice between. Not far below, it narrowed to a point where the two crevasses, uniting, yawned in one. His knees weakened, but he managed to swing himself cautiously around. The causeway seemed to rock under his weight; then, shading his sight with his hand, he saw they were almost beneath the shoulder he had tried to reach. They had climbed too high, as he had believed, but also they had descended too far. And they had come directly down the glacier, to cross the upper end of which Banks had found it necessary to use a lifeline. "Be careful!" he whispered thickly, and laid his hand on her shoulder, impelling her on. "Be careful, but, for God's sake, hurry!"

He crowded her faster and faster up the incline; he dared not move abreast, it was so narrow. Sometimes he lifted her bodily, for with every step his panic grew. Beads of moisture gathered on his face, though the wind stiffened and sharpened; his own breath out-labored hers, and he cried again over and over: "God Almighty!" and "Almighty God!" Sometimes his tone was blasphemy and sometimes prayer.

But the moment came when she could not be farther pressed. Her shoulder trembled under his hold, her limbs gave, and she sank down, to her knees at first, then to her elbow. Even then she moved her head enough to look backward over the abyss. "The train," she whispered and, shuddering, dropped her face on her relaxed arm.

Morganstein ventured to glance back. Ragged fragments torn from the cloud below rose swirling across the opposite mountain top, and between their edges, like a picture in a frame, appeared briefly the roofs of the little station. But where the Oriental Limited had stood, the avalanche had passed. "God Almighty!" he repeated impotently, then immediately the sense of this appalling catastrophe whet the edge of his personal terror. "Come!" he cried; "come, you can't stop here. It's dangerous. Come, you'll freeze—or worse."

She was silent. She made no effort to rise or indeed to move. He began to press by her and on in the direction of that safe spur. But presently another dread assailed him; the dread of the city-bred man—accustomed to human intercourse, the swing of business, the stir of social life, to face great solitudes alone. This cross-fear became so strong it turned him back in a second panic. Then floundering to keep his equilibrium after an incautious step, he sat down heavily and found himself skidding towards the larger crevasse. He lifted his alpenstock and in a frenzy thrust it into the ice between his knees. It caught fast just short of the brink and held him astride, with heels dangling over the abyss. He worked away cautiously, laboriously, shaking in all his big, soft bulk; and would have given up further attempt to rescue Beatriz Weatherbee had he not at this moment discovered himself at her side.