“Yes, we all find that,” said Dale merrily. “Now take another look round, and see if you can see squalls.”
“Now you are laughing at me,” said Saxe resentfully. “No: I am in earnest. Take a look round, boy, and then we’ll go up the ravine and satisfy ourselves that it is all safe, and come back after a quiet investigation, so as to see whether there are other ways of fixing our rope. I should like to go up higher, too, and try whether we cannot get out on to the mountain, as I at first proposed.”
Saxe swept their surroundings as well as he could, and paused to gaze at an ice-fall on the opposite mountain, a dull, heavy peal like thunder having announced that there had been a slip.
It was very beautiful in the bright sunshine, and looked wonderfully like water as it plunged down into a dark-looking crack, which Dale declared must be a huge bergschrund, between the snow and rock.
But there was no human being in sight, as far as Saxe could see; and as soon as he had descended, they began to climb the little lateral valley as on the previous day.
Hardly, however, had they passed out of sight, before high up on the mountain slope, what at first sight seemed to be a bear came into sight, creeping cautiously in and out among the stones, till it reached one of the many ledges of a precipice, and trotted along toward the edge of the lateral valley, over which it peered cautiously, and then drew back and went higher, repeating the action several times, and in the distance looking more and more bearlike in its movements, only that there was this difference, that instead of the travellers stalking the bear, the animal seemed to be bent on stalking them.