“I tell you, Hugh,” said Jack, “this is a wonderful place up here. It beats anything I ever saw. I can’t help wondering how these mountains got tipped up in this way, and what the force was that changed them from level or rolling ground to these sharp peaks and ridges.”
“Well, son,” replied Hugh, “you can’t prove it by me, but I expect that most of these valleys, if not all of them, were cut out by the ice, just as we see below us this valley here being cut out.”
“I suppose that is so,” Jack replied, “but it doesn’t seem quite possible to me.”
“Well,” answered Hugh, “you must remember that if our understanding about these glaciers is correct, they may have been working for thousands of years, and if they only ground away six inches or a foot of the rock under them in each year, a thousand years or so would make a mighty deep valley. And besides that, I reckon that in those ancient times these glaciers were a heap bigger and heavier than they are now, and maybe they moved a lot faster, and in that case they’d work a lot faster, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose they would,” agreed Jack. “But it’s mighty hard to realize such things. You see we human beings are such little bits of things, and we live so short a time, that it’s mighty difficult to comprehend the forces of nature that never stop working.”
“You bet your life it is,” said Hugh. “It’s only within a few years, since I began to talk to people who understood something about these things, that I began to look back a little. In my young days, so long as I had my blankets and a few charges of ammunition I never thought much about what was behind me or what was ahead. Of course, I always looked out for myself as well as I could, but I never thought very much about the world and the things that are going and have gone on in it. But of late years it’s different, and when a man does think about those things it kind o’ takes his breath away once in a while.”
“That’s so,” replied Jack. “People say that we can’t count the stars in the sky, and that we can’t understand how many miles away from the earth the sun or the moon is, and, of course, that’s true, but it’s just as hard for us to understand some of the things that are going on right under our noses, as it is to understand time or space.”
Up on this mountain peak the wind blew cool, and it was not long before they were ready to turn about and begin the descent.
“We’ll go back the way we came,” said Hugh, “and we want to go just as carefully over this snow as we did when we were coming up. Only one man must move at a time, and the others must fix themselves firmly, so as to hold him if he slips.”
The traverse back across the snow was made in safety, and before very long they found themselves on the low rocky ridge over which they must descend to return over the ice.