A few minutes sufficed for saddling up the mule with his load, and then they started once more farther into the wilds, in all the glorious beauty of the early summer morning, Melchior leading them in and out through such a labyrinth of cracks and rifts that after some hours’ walking, Saxe glanced at his leader.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering how we could find our way back.”
Melchior laughed.
“Oh, easily enough, herr.”
“But I couldn’t,” cried Saxe.
“No, herr. That shows the use of a guide. But I could have come an easier way, only I am taking a short cut. We are a thousand feet higher than when we started. Look, herr: go on by that shelf of rock: it is perfectly safe. Then come back and tell me what you see.”
Saxe started forward, from the ragged slope they were ascending; and a minute or two after passing quite a mossy niche, which ran some forty or fifty yards right into the mountain, to where a silvery-veil-like cascade fell, he stopped short, threw up his hands, and then turned and signalled to Dale.
“What is it?” cried the latter, as he hurried to the boy’s side. “Hah!”
He wanted no explanation, for they were standing at the edge of a precipice, gazing down at another huge glacier, which glittered in the rays of the morning sun—a vast chaos of ice whose cracks and shadows were of a vivid blue; and as they gazed up towards the point where it suddenly curved round an immense buttress, there beyond, peak after peak, as far as eye could reach, stood out in the clear air, and all seeming to rise out of the fields and beds of snow which clung around them and filled every ravine and chasm running up from their feet.