For any such edifying notions as that the average man feels subdued and reverential in the presence of impending danger may safely be relegated to the Sunday school. In nine cases out of ten he relieves his feelings pretty much as these Alpine guides did theirs—or feels inclined to—presumably as the outcome of an unwonted excitement not unmixed perhaps with a sort of irritation against the powers that be, which have, in a manner of speaking, “cornered” him.
“We must get on so quick as we can. De shtones are going to fall to-day like a devil,” remarked Peter. This comparison as it stood was a correct one and graphic withal. But in point of fact no thought of the fall of Lucifer entered the honest guide’s head. He was merely reproducing a time-honoured and highly colloquial simile, the unconscious variation of which made Philip laugh.
For a quarter of an hour all went well. Suddenly that ominous rattle was heard again—right overhead. The three foremost were on a small but steep slope of hard ice, nor could they move out of the steps which had been cut by the foremost guide’s axe. It follows, therefore, that the attitudes struck by them were grotesque in the extreme as they stood glaring wildly upward at a rumbling shower of stones coming down straight at them, as though the power of the human eye might at a pinch avail to deflect the dreaded volley. On it came, whizzing and ricochetting by—the three men staring at it in the most ludicrous state of helplessness, Fordham ducking violently as a small chip rebounding from the ice grazed his ear like a slug. It was but a shower of small stones—none larger than a cricket ball. But a bullet is as potent for evil as a cannon shot, as Philip was destined to learn. He was seen to pick up his right leg with a howl of pain, and then to go rather white in the face.
“Are you hurt?” said the head guide, somewhat anxiously.
“Oh, not much, I suppose,” was the rather doleful reply. “I believe my ankle’s broken, that’s all.”
Peter, without a word, turned back to help him, but he declined any aid.
“The sooner we are out of this the better,” he said. “I can hop along somehow. Hand us your flask, Fordham. That’s better!”
And he was as good as his word. Though his foot was frightfully painful he found that he could still use it, and at length they left the rock-face of the mountain and gained the high ice arête which forms one of the spurs of the latter.
It was an awkward place wherein to be incapacitated. The way lay right along the very edge of the arête, where there was not room for two to walk abreast. But Phil was very game. The pain of his bruised ankle increased with every step, but he was not going to hamper his companions by collapsing. He took another liberal pull at Fordham’s flask, and started again manfully, trying to persuade himself that he was in reality more frightened than hurt.
But apart from this casualty the view as seen from the apex of the dizzy arête was a thing to make the very pulses bound with delight in the sheer exhilaration of living. Behind rose the stupendous cliffs of the eastern face of the Rothhorn, soaring up to its twin-peaked summit against the deep and cloudless blue. Immediately beneath, webbed and criss-crossed by innumerable cracks, lay an amphitheatre of vast glaciers flowing down from a crescent of grim and frowning cliffs culminating in the Ober-Gabelhorn, a tower of precipitous rock. Right opposite, the huge Matterhorn, a dark monolith, frowning, defiant—then a white sublimity of dazzling snow mountains, the broad hump of the Breithorn, and the two smaller ones known as Castor and Pollux—the perilous Lyskamm and the sheeny mass of the beautiful Monte Rosa. Glaciers, innumerable and vast, mighty rivers of rolling white waves, whatever way the eye should turn.