Concern showed in the Seneca's face.
"Tawannears is selfish," he said quickly. "He thinks only of himself. There is no need for Otetiani and Peter to go with me. Let them wait here whilst I go up and make prayer to Tamanoas."
I laughed, and Corlaer's flat visage creased in a ridiculous simper, which was the Dutchman's idea of derisive mirth.
"These many thousand leagues we have traveled," I answered, "without one venturing alone. Shall we begin now? I say no."
"Ja," said Corlaer. "But we go in der morning, eh? Tonight we eat."
In the morning we cached our muskets and spare equipment in a hollow tree, and started up, with no more encumbrances than our food-pouches, tomahawks, some fifty feet of resilient hide-rope and the staves we had whittled from cedar saplings. Our path was obvious enough. We crossed the zone of the wild-flowers, skirted the glacier which terminated in their midst in a spouting, ice-cold stream of brown water, and found firm footing for half a mile upon a tongue of rock. Beyond this was a snow-field, solid and frozen almost to the consistency of ice, in which we were obliged to cut our steps foot by foot. The glare was dazzling as the bright sunlight was reflected from the smooth, sloping surface, but we won to our objective, another rock-mass, only to discover it too precipitous for climbing, and were forced to entrust ourselves to the glacier, which encircled it.
Here was work to try our souls. The dull, dirt-hued ice-river was riven by cracks and crevices, some a few inches wide, others impassable, from whose dark-green depths came faint tinklings, and blasts of that utter cold that numbs life instantly. But it was not cold on the glacier's top. The warm sun made us sweat as we toiled upward, testing the ice in front of us with our sticks at every step, studying ways to evade the widest crevices, aiding each other to leap those where there was substantial footing on either side.
But the hour came when a great, spreading crack that struck diagonally across it compelled us to abandon the glacier as a highway. We clambered laboriously over the side walls of bowlders it had built in the ages of its descent, and assailed another snow-field, aiming for a series of rock-ledges which lifted, one above the other, toward the summit. The air was like wine, heady, yet strangely thin, and we began to pant out of all proportion to our efforts. Tawannears and Peter, both of them stronger than I, seemed to feel it more; and I was startled to see the big Dutchman sink to his knees.
"I bleed," he gasped. "Who strikes us, eh!"
Tawannears, too, dashed a flux of blood from his nose and collapsed on the snow.