Crash!
There was another roar, followed by its echoes.
“Look! look!” cried Cyril excitedly. “There, just below that place where the sun shines on the ice.”
“Yes, I see it,” said Perry; “a waterfall.” And he shaded his eyes to gaze at the glittering appearance of a cascade pouring over a shelf of ice into the depths below.
“Waterfall!” said the colonel, smiling. “There is no water up there to fall. It is a cataract of pieces of ice and solidified snow, thousands of tons of it broken away through the weight and the mass being loosened by the heat of the sun.”
“Gone!” cried Cyril.
“To appear again, lower down,” said the colonel, and they watched the glittering curve of dazzling ice as it reappeared and made another leap, and again another and another, lower down, till it finally disappeared by falling into some chasm behind a fold of the mountain. But the roar of the ice was continued like distant thunder, telling how enormous the fall must have been, though dwarfed by the distance into a size that appeared trifling.
Then the boys sat gazing at the black gulf before them, with its huge walls, which were nearly perpendicular in places.
“I say, of course, we’re not going along that way?” said Perry nervously.
“I don’t know,” replied Cyril; “the tracks generally do go along the worst-looking places.”