Well, there was poetry enough in that, but you were soon awakened from your contemplation by some unexpected explosion which made you think the whole landscape before you must have been blown up. But no, there were no visible signs of commotion around. It was merely a new crevasse, some hundreds of feet deep, splitting, for some reason, climatic or other, in the ice. Constant rumblings you heard, near and distant; and you only had to close your eyes and you could imagine yourself in a forest with the wind rustling among the trees, or the pleasant sound of a waterfall close [[67]]by, or an æolian harp being played by a divine hand.
Echoes, of course, there are by the dozen on mountains, and each sound is repeated over and over again till it fades away. An occasional boulder gets loose from the rotted rock up on the mountain side, and is precipitated with bounding leaps on to the ice of the glacier; a huge one weighing some tons came down that night and missed our tent by not very many yards. My men said the spirits of the mountains were doing all this for our special benefit, to see whether we were brave or not! The big boulder they had flung at and purposely missed us to show us their powers, but not to hurt us. This was a good sign. “The gods are with us,” they stated; but internally I heartily prayed that we might have no more “good signs” of that nature.
While I was trying to make some hot chocolate with a small spirit-stove, my men were busy packing up, they bearing the discomfort with some considerable pluck. We had not been able to make a fire, and we had not the prospect of seeing many for some weeks to come. I always found chocolate the most useful and sustaining food for mountaineering purposes, and I carried any number [[68]]of tablets in my pockets. On the march I constantly ate it; food, I found, keeping one’s strength up and being more easily digested under those circumstances, if spread in small quantities over the entire day, than if eaten in large quantities twice or three times a day at given hours. I had my chocolate specially prepared with a percentage of meat and fat, which gave it additional nourishment. For days and days at a time I lived on chocolate only, it being impossible to cook food, and deeming it rather dangerous to eat tinned meats cold.
Funnels in the Moraine Ice
I was able to overcome the caste scruples of my men, and they, too, partook freely of my chocolate, although I never let them know that it contained beef. Had they known this, most of them would have lost their caste. They ate it because they believed it entirely prepared by machinery and not touched by unclean hands!
I was sorry when we struck camp and left behind the beautiful glacier and Api Mt., 19,919 feet. We soon rose over a pass (13,050 feet) where we obtained a view of a second glacier, almost as fine as the first, in precipitous terraces, and with a gigantic terminal moraine, covered in great part by débris and rotten rock, fallen from [[69]]the mountain at the side. This I called the Armida Glacier. It spread in a direction from N.E. to S.W. To the west of the glacier on the mountain side there was hardly any snow up to 16,000 feet, but to the east, as one looked towards it, there were huge masses.
The entire valley of the Lumpa river along which we were travelling made part of a gigantic glacier, with side glaciers such as those we have seen. In the lower portion of the valley the ice was covered with débris.
At the foot of the Armida Glacier were some immense parallel crevasses in the ice. The upper portion of these was a mixture of dark grey mud and rock embedded in the ice, showing vertical streaks and corrugations. Then there were some curious pits in the moraine, such as the one shown in the illustration, funnel-shaped and of great depth, some 60 feet deep and more, and about 100 feet in diameter. These funnels, cone-shaped, had a great fascination—quite an irresistible attraction—when one looked into them. The ice, of a beautiful light green colour, was corrugated into grooves converging towards the centre at the bottom, where a deep hole was generally to be found. The ridges of the myriads of grooves [[70]]reflected in a line of silver the rays of the sun, and these many dazzling luminous streaks all converging towards one point had quite an hypnotic effect on some of my more highly strung men. One man became quite giddy in looking down, and very nearly went over, and several other men experienced a strong desire to precipitate themselves into these pits.
