A feeling of weary despondency came over the boy now, and he shrank away from the edge and threw himself down on the snow.
For it was hopeless, he knew. And when Mr Dale returned he should have to tell him of his terrible discovery; when he, too, would own that no human being could fall down that terrible gulf and live.
The snow was cold beneath him, and the sun poured down upon his back with blistering power, but the boy felt nothing save the despairing agony of mind; and as he lay there one desire, one wish came to his mind, and that was full of longing for forgetfulness—the power to put all this terrible trouble behind him—a miserable feeling of cowardice: in short, of desire to evade his share of the cares of life, which come to all: for he had yet to learn what is the whole duty of a man.
Chapter Twenty One.
“You think he is dead?”
Saxe never knew how long it was before he was roused from his miserable lethargic state by a faint hail, which acted upon him like magic, making him spring to his feet and answer before going back to the edge of the crevasse, and uttering a cry that was doleful in the extreme.
Then he shaded his eyes and gazed downward beneath the labyrinth of ice blocks among which the smoother ice which had formed their path wound its way; but for a long time he could see nothing of Dale, and he was beginning to ask himself whether it was fancy, when there was another hail, and soon after he caught sight of Dale’s head and shoulders as he climbed up the icy slope, and saw that the new rope was across his breast.
But this sent no thrill of joy through Saxe, for he seemed instinctively to know that it would be useless, and he shook his head.