The Glacier Gate: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

At this positive direction and hope Lang had a shock and revolution in his soul that first dizzied him, and then changed to an almost agonizing ecstasy of joy. He had accepted death more fully than he had realized. With trembling fingers he fished up the green stones from the water, chipping them out where they were frozen into the ice bottom. He picked them out from the torn skin bag, collecting another half pint, of all sorts. He did not pick them over, but among them were two huge crystals nearly as large as small eggs, though both were rocky and flawed at the ends.

He crept back to his first position and hastily gathered up the stones he had left there. It was a problem how to carry them. He was afraid to trust his pockets; they might spill out if he tumbled. Finally he tied his trouser legs tightly around his ankles and poured the stones inside, half in each leg. They rasped and bulged uncomfortably, but he had them safe from spilling. By an afterthought he took the green-rusted copper knife, thinking of Morrison, squeezed back through the hole he had cut, and began to follow the streamlet down the ice crevice.

He was able to walk perhaps a dozen feet, and then the fissure grew too small for passage, though the rivulet slipped through uninterruptedly. Here he found another small green crystal, and now he had to hew away the ice to make way for himself.

He attacked it with energetic strength. It could not be many yards, perhaps not many feet, to the end of the glacier, he thought. At every stroke he half expected to feel the blade break through. He pushed the chips back behind him, hewing and hacking, cutting a tunnel just wide and high enough to creep through, while the little stream ran merrily between his feet.

He cut for a yard—two yards. He put out the candle lest he might have greater need later, and worked in darkness, guided by the feel of the water. The stream dropped through a fissure in the floor. Only a yard, but it terrified him lest it had gone far beyond following; and he had to hew a way down after it and pursue it again on its new level.

He sweated and panted in spite of the chill. Then his feverish energy collapsed suddenly. He got himself back out of the water and lay back, hard put to it to keep awake. Again he forced himself into the tunnel, hewed another ten feet, paused to rest, worked again and again collapsed. He half dozed into a deadly nightmare, awoke shuddering and plunged frenziedly at the work again. It seemed to him that he had driven his tunnel far enough to pierce the whole glacier.

Queer terrors beset him. He fancied that the Indians were stirring back there in the darkness—they were coming down the passageway behind him. He had to relight the candle to steady his nerves. He began to fear that he was on the wrong course after all, and the horror of this possibility almost took the heart out of him.

He stopped to rest again; again attacked the ice, and was encouraged by finding another small rivulet flowing in to increase the first. A yard farther, and his hatchet smashed through into space. He split the screen of ice apart and crawled through.

It was not the open air. It was an ice cavern; the floor was covered with chips of ice, and the farther end blocked with translucent white. For a second he thought he had come back into one of his own tunnels, but there was daylight in the place, and it was snow that blocked the opening.

He recognized it then. It was the cavern he had dug out the day before, in his attempt to follow the stream backward. He plunged at the snow. There must have been a couple of yards of it, but he wallowed through, and fell outside in a collapse of exhaustion, of nerve tension, of relief.