The preparations that Hugh advised were soon made, and the sun had not yet showed itself above the eastern mountains when the three set out on foot. For several hundred yards they had to climb a steep slope, and then as they went on toward the precipice, they came to a level bit of land, over which were strewn immense masses of stone, huge monoliths that made Jack think of the stories that he had read about the ruins in the old places of worship of the Druids.
Beyond this level land was a talus fallen from the cliff and then a morainal trough, up which they passed to the ice above. From this point the whole basin of the great glacier was spread out before them, and Hugh began to examine it with a view to making the ascent by the easiest and safest path.
Hugh studied the situation with the field glasses for a long time and then, passing them to Jack, asked, “What do you see, son? Which road seems to be the best?”
“Well, Hugh,” answered Jack, after he had looked over the ground, “it’s a little hard for me to say, for I don’t know much about these places. The shortest way, of course, is to cross over to the right and try to climb up the rocks there, but the snowslides and rockfalls seem to be coming down all the time, and I shouldn’t suppose that would be safe. The same thing is true about going close to the mountains on the left, and, of course, we can all see that we can’t go up in the middle. It looks to me, too, as if the ice were steeper on the right hand than it is on the left, so I should say that it was better to keep to the left, just as near the middle of the glacier as we can without getting in among crevices.”
“What do you say, Joe?” asked Hugh.
“I don’t know,” said Joe. “I guess I’ll just follow where you go, but it seems to me that Jack’s talk is good.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “I think so, too, and I believe that’s the best way for us to go. I ain’t so much afraid of falling in those cracks in the ice as I am of being hit by one of those rocks that comes down a thousand feet or two. Even a little bit of a rock could crack a man’s head open, and if one of those big rocks ever hits him I believe it would go right through him.
“I think Jack is right and we’d better go where he has said. Now, before we start, we must tie ourselves together with this rope, and if we get to a place where the ice is any way cracked we’ll have to go pretty slowly, so that only one man can fall in at a time, and the other two can pull him out.”
They started without further delay; and now for two or three hours followed a slow plodding walk up the face of the ice. Sometimes they came to a long crevasse, which they had to go around, but at no time did they approach very near the edge of the snowfalls. Several times, however, they passed near great stones which had fallen from the mountain far out onto the ice.
At one point, when they had passed over three-fourths of the distance, they heard a low, rumbling sound behind them, and, turning, all three were in time to witness the fall of a great avalanche, which threw itself far out onto the ice.