He held up the candle and looked again. He could see the head quite distinctly through the semi-transparent ice, with the dim shadow of a body under it. It was no vision. It must be, he slowly realized, the body of some unfortunate Indian, who had perished on the glacier long ago, and became sealed into the ice.
Delicately with his hatchet he chipped a little at the ice about the head. A long flake split away. The shoulder came in sight, covered with a skin garment. The shaggy hairs clung in the frozen material. And then he thought he saw the dim loom of another form, beyond the first.
It was some irresistible fascination of horror that led him to excavate around these grim remains. He chipped away the ice from around the first body, intensely careful not to wound the flesh, and saw that there was indeed a second corpse. They were sitting, huddled close together, and a little more chopping brought to light a foot wrapped in untanned moccasins that did not belong to either of these two.
There was a whole party, and it was not hard to reconstruct the story of the tragedy. The Indians had tried to cross the glacier, probably in a winter storm. Morrison had said there was a pass at the top of the glacier. They had been caught in a blizzard, lost, snowed under, and frozen as they huddled together. The glacier had engulfed their bodies, and, in its infinitely slow progression, had brought them at last down to sea level, uncorrupted as when they had perished—how many centuries ago?
It came upon him that he might well sit down with this prehistoric company and join its sleep. It would come to that in the end, and he would be melted out of the glacier along with them. The candle flickered down. It was burned out, in spite of all his efforts to economize it. As if it had been an omen, he hurriedly lighted another, and looked again at the motionless, huddled figures in the cavern he had hollowed out.
He was not sure how many were in the party; there might be four, or perhaps more than that. Except the one which lay prostrate, they were in sitting postures, leaning together. The faces were somewhat shrunken, the eyes closed, the heads slightly bowed, the coarse black hair protruded from the fur hoods.
They looked as if they had died yesterday. Lang thought of Morrison’s archaeological enthusiasm, and imagined his excitement if he could have witnessed this find. The nearest Indian had a rude copper knife, green with incrustation, in his belt, with something like a bundle of arrows, and Lang tried gingerly to pull away the frozen furs to see these weapons.
The stiff hide would not give. He hacked it a little with the hatchet edge, cut a long gash, and pulled the frozen edges apart. He must have cut into some sack. Out of the rent came a stream of pebbles and bits of rock, that glittered with green and yellow and diamond points in the candlelight.
He picked one of them out of the litter of ice chips, curiously, not realizing what it might be. It was a rough bit of greenish crystal, six-sided, the size of a beechnut, half embedded in a brownish bit of rock. It was mostly dull surfaced, but as he turned it over a brilliant green sparkle shot out, and it was only then that he realized what he had found.
He had forgotten all about the emeralds in these last terrible hours. The memory came back to him with a shock. He gasped with confusion and amazement. He had come to the end of his quest. He had broken the glacier gate. He had found the green stones.