Looking up again, with an exclamation of pleasure, he was aware of a little weak finger of light pointing into the gloom. Day had broken. He got to his cramped feet, jubilant in a moment, and, feeling for the door above, essayed to open it. Something resisted. He put all his nerve into a mighty push, felt the hinges yield—then the obstruction; and in an instant a great buttress of snow fell away from the outside and light leaped into the pit.
Light gorgeous and bountiful. The snow had ceased; a hard wintry sun revealed a little surrounding world of heaped and drifted desolation, wherein the very trees seemed but accidents of the storm, or frost-flowers enamelled upon the wide windows of the mist.
The noise of his onset and the gush of radiant air awakened two other of the sleepers.
“Out!” he cried softly, for fear of disturbing Dennis—“up and out and reconnoitre!”
He scrambled, himself, to the open, and was joined by his companions.
“Where in the name of mystery are we?” he murmured.
In the heart of a little wood, apparently—in a clearing ringed about with trees, and so choked, in the course of those fifteen or so pregnant hours, with the white fall, as to seem to offer an insurmountable barrier to their escape. Towards the middle of the circle the snow lay shallowest; but all around against the tree-trunks it sloped upwards to a considerable height, suggesting a bowl of whipped cream that had stiffened to the shape of the vessel it lay in.
“Gentlemen,” said Tuke, “it behoves us to make the struggle. The sky is resolute steel; to remain here is to perish. What do you say?”
Blythewood gave out a rather tortured little laugh. He, as they all did, wore an unshorn and haggard look; but his lips were set grimly.
“I’m with the fox that bit off his foot rather than remain in the trap,” he said.