Lang prepared his usual supper, longing for the fog to clear. There was an orange glow through the smother as the sun went down, promising clearing weather; but as it grew dark and the moon shone the air was like cotton wool. The fire burned red, eating into the coal seam, exploding startlingly as lumps of stone burst, and Lang wondered in vain if this coal meant proximity to the glacier gate. Morrison had, he thought, made many camps all along the shore, and this might be miles from the final one.
He lay awake for a long time, but finally slept lightly and uneasily. He dreamed of the Chita, which might be lying offshore within a mile of him even now.
He awoke suddenly with light shining in his face. It was brilliant moonlight. He sat up. The sky was all clear, but for a faint film of fairy haze.
He was on a long rocky hillside, sprinkled with dumps of small evergreens, sloping to the sea, and rising the other way to the black density of forests. All that held his eye was a river of white, a vast, dear sheet of radiance that split the forested mountainside.
He jumped up, dazzled, and ran toward its nearest point. He came to the edge of the ravine. There was a valley below him, a gravelly beach, the wash of the sea, a sound of running streams. A few hundred yards shoreward the valley was cut sharp across by what seemed a snowy wall. It was a glittering gate, going back and rising—rising perpetually toward the sky, luminous and white against the low moon, as if a flood of light itself had been poured out from the heavens and frozen into solidity.
CHAPTER XVI
IMPRISONED IN SNOW
It was the place—he could not possibly doubt it. Was he the first to reach it? Struck with anxiety, he hurried down to the sea, where the land fell off sharply in a steep bluff. No craft lay in the great bay that was the extension of the valley. Out in the wide channel he could see nothing on the water, neither boat nor light, nor camp fire on the shore.
He had won the race, after all; and now he could hardly be taken unawares, for he could surely hear the Chita’s engines for a long way. He returned to his camp, however, and cleaned and dried his firearms, taking out and wiping the cartridges, trying the action, finally putting the pistol in his pocket and laying the rifle away under sheets of dry bark.
To save time he ate his breakfast, knowing that it must be near dawn by the moon. While he ate he gazed at the magnificent spectacle of the glacier, which, as he finished began to grow dim at its upper edge, and presently to redden faintly.
Too impatient to wait for full daylight, he hastened to the edge of the valley, and scrambled down the twenty-foot precipitous sides. The ravine was nearly half a mile wide, a dismal gulch of wet gravel, all of it probably drift from the glacier, and it was several hundred yards farther up to where the ice wall blocked the valley from side to side, and even slightly bulged over the edges.