He lay down once more in the snow, shrinkingly, for in spite of his efforts, the thought would come, “Suppose a great piece of the side should give way beneath me, and carry me down to a similar fate to Melchior’s.” These fancies made him move carefully in his efforts to peer down farther than before, so as to force his eyes to pierce the gloom and make out where Melchior lay.
But it was all in vain. He could see a long way, and sometimes it almost seemed as if he saw farther than at others; but lower down there was always that purply transparent blackness into which his eyesight plunged, but could not quite plumb.
“I wonder how deep it is?” said Saxe aloud, after shouting till he grew hoarse, and speaking out now for the sake of hearing a voice in that awful silence. “I wonder how deep it is?” he said again, feeling startled at the peculiar whisper which had followed his words. “It must go right down to the rocks which form the bottom of the valley, and of course this ice fills it up. It may be fifty, a hundred, or five hundred feet. Who can say?”
The thought was very terrible as he gazed down there, and once more imagination was busy, and he mentally saw poor Melchior falling with lightning speed down, down through that purply-blackness, to lie at last at a tremendous depth, jammed in a cleft where the crevasse grew narrower, ending wedge-shape in a mere crack.
He rose from the snow, beginning to feel chilled now; and he shook off the glittering crystals and tramped heavily up and down in the warm sunshine, glad of the reflection from the white surface as well, though it was painful to his eyes.
But after forming a narrow beat a short distance away from the crevasse, he ceased as suddenly as he had begun, feeling that he might even there be doing something which would cause the ice to crack; and he had hardly come to the conclusion that he would go gently in future, when a peculiar rending, splitting sound fell upon his ears, and he knew that it was the ice giving way and beginning to form a new crevasse.
For the first few moments he fancied that it was beneath his feet; but, as it grew louder and developed into a heavy sudden report, he knew that it must be some distance away.
He crept back to the crevasse, and listened and shouted again, to begin wondering once more how deep the chasm would be; and at last, with the horror of being alone there in that awful solitude creeping over him, he felt that he must do something, and, catching up his ice-axe from where it lay, he tramped away fifty yards to where a cluster of ragged pinnacles of ice hung together, and with a few blows from the pick-end of the axe he broke off a couple of fragments as big as his head, and then bounded back.
None too soon, for the towering piece which he had hacked at suddenly turned over towards him, and fell forward with a crash that raised the echoes around, as it broke up into fragments of worn and honeycombed ice.
As soon as he had satisfied himself that no other crag would fall, he stepped back, and, as he picked up two more pieces about the same size as he had selected before, he saw why the serac had fallen.