"Ja," mumbled the Dutchman. "Andt now we go down, eh? It is not goodt here. I hafe shifers in my back."
We brushed the moisture from our eyelashes and started forth anew with redoubled caution. The mist was not so thick, but the wind-currents were brisker, and the clouds eddied in a way that was most perplexing. We succeeded in getting off the glacier onto a rock-edge, and this fetched us to a snow-field, so steep that we must resort again to our hatchets to cut steps for our descent—and here, I think, the blinding mist was an advantage, for it prevented us from being confused by the giddy depths below.
I had just taken the lead from Tawannears to rest him from the taxing labor of chopping out the foot-holds, when the whole surface of the field commenced to slip. Corlaer lost his footing first, and was flung head over heels across the snow, dragging Tawannears and me after him. The mass of snow gathered headway as it sped on, but a short distance below the starting-point it was arrested by a terrace in the mountain-side, and only a miniature torrent of ice-chunks attended us on our continued descent. For we, probably because of our individual weight, were bounced off the terrace, and rolled down a farther slope, sometimes flung into each other's arms, occasionally separated by the length of our connecting lines, anon ramming one another in head or stomach.
How far we slid I cannot say, but it must have been several thousand feet. Of a sudden, the clouds around us seemed to thin away, and we rolled out of darkness into the comparative brilliance of an overcast day. I had a fleeting perception of the lowering wrack overhead, glanced down as I turned an involuntary somersault and perceived the wild-flower zone almost at hand, and the next moment we were cascaded over a bluff and dropped into a snow-drift within a quarter mile of the glade from which we had started the ascent.
Bruised and sore, our clothing slashed to ribbons, we were yet sound in limb, and we picked ourselves up from the snow with feeble grins of amusement at the figures of dilapidation we presented. Then, limping through the flowers to our hut, we made a fire, broiled a haunch of green venison and crawled into a bed of sweet-smelling cedar boughs for a sleep that lasted until after sun-up the next morning.
CHAPTER XIII
WE TURN BACK
The sun was burning away the fog that had overlain the country since we left the base of the Ice Mountain, and the West breeze carried to our ears the odd muffled booming noise that we had heard once before that day. As the fog lifted, the noise increased. It was like the pounding of great waters over a cataract, but there was no brume in the air such as marked that of Jagara, and we were wholly at a loss until at sunset we fought our way through the briary walls of the forest upon the surface of an open bluff.
The booming noise was the beating of surf upon a rocky shore. Westward and north and south the waters rolled, blue-green off-shore, inland a smother of foam. The combers came lunging in, one after the other, in an endless succession of charges, smashing themselves into fine spray and spume against the cliffs. The bluff on which we stood was spattered by them; the breeze carried a fine mist to drench the near-by forest foliage.
"Here is a sea as vast as the Cadaraqui Lake, brothers," commented Tawannears, as our eyes drank in the picture.