“But we are not going away to-morrow, or the next day either,” she replied, with a sunny laugh. “We shall have many more such days as this.”
“It is perfect!” he continued, now in a low tone. “Almost too perfect to last. When shall we be ever again together like this?”
The remark was made without a shadow of arrière pensée, yet it sounded almost prophetic. Why should it, however? No cloud was in their sky any more than in the firmament of deep blue spreading overhead. No shadow was across their path any more than upon the dazzling snowfields lying aloft in pure and unbroken stretches. The morrow would be but a reproduction of to-day—a heaven of youth and its warm pulsations, of sunny freedom from care, and—of love.
And now Fordham’s voice was heard behind.
“Hallo, Phil?” it shouted, characteristically addressing the stronger and, in its owner’s opinion, more important and only responsible member of the pair in advance. “Better hold on till we come up. We are getting among the séracs.”
They were. Great masses of ice, by the side of which a five-storey house would look puny, were heaving up to the sky. The glacier here made a steep and abrupt drop, falling abroad into wide, lateral chasms—not the black and grim crevasses of bottomless depth into which an army might disappear and leave no trace, such as the smooth, treacherous surface of the upper névés are seamed with, but awkward rifts for all that, deep enough to break a limb or even a neck. A labyrinthian course along the sharp ice-ridges overhanging these became necessary, and although Philip was armed with the requisite ice-axe and by this time knew how to wield it, Fordham satirically reflected that the mind of a man in the parlous state of his friend was not hung upon a sufficiently even balance to ensure the necessary equilibrium from a material and physical point of view. So he chose to rally his party.
A little ordinary caution was necessary, that was all. A little step-cutting now and then, a helping hand for the benefit of the ladies, and they threaded their way in perfect safety among the yawning rifts, the great blue séracs towering up overhead, piled in titanic confusion—here in huge blocks, there standing apart in tall needle-like shafts. One of these suddenly collapsed close to them, falling with an appalling roar, filling the air with a shower of glittering fragments, causing the hard surface to vibrate beneath them with the grinding crash of hundreds of tons of solid ice.
“By Jove! What a magnificent sight?” cried the old General. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”
“‘He casteth forth His ice like morsels,’” quoted the parson to himself, but not in so low a tone as not to be heard by Alma, becoming aware of which he was conscious of a nervous and guilty start, as of one who had allowed himself to be found preaching out of church. But he had in her no supercilious or scoffing critic.
“I think the vastness of this ice-world is the most wonderful thing in Nature, Mr Massiter,” she said.