Chapter Twenty Seven.
The Black Ravine.
Perfectly simple to arrange, but very difficult to practise. For instance, they had to toil on quite a mile before the narrow crack, which formed the bed of a streamlet, offered itself as a way out of the glacier valley.
“I’m afraid this will be an awkward climb, Saxe,” said Dale. “What do you say? Will you face the hard work?”
“Oh yes!” he cried. “It’s better than going the same way back.”
“Up you go, then.”
Saxe went on, now on one side of the tiny stream, now on the other, the sides rising right and left almost perpendicularly at times. But there was plenty of good foot and hand-hold, so that Saxe made his way onward and upward at a fair rate for mountaineering, and in a very short time they had taken a last look of the glacier; the narrow rift, turned almost at right angles, growing blacker and more forbidding in aspect at every step.
“I don’t believe there is any way out here!” cried Saxe at last. “It gets deeper and darker, as if it were a cut right into the mountain.”
He had paused to rest as he spoke, and the gurgling of the little stream down a crack far below mingled with his words.
“Well, let’s go a little farther first,” said Dale. “I am beginning to think it is going to be a cul de sac.”