“We’ll have some provisions for lunch, and take the big hammer and chisel: I shall want the rock marked, so that I can examine it when I come next year, or the year after.”
The orders were obeyed, the tent closed up, water and fuel placed ready for their return, and Melchior led off with the mule to cut across a corner before descending to the edge of the ice.
Before they had gone a dozen yards there was a loud b–a–ah! from overhead, and the goat came bounding down from rock to rock in the most breakneck fashion; but it ended by leaping into their track, and ran up and butted its head against Saxe.
“How friendly that animal has become!” said Saxe, as they walked on, with the goat munching away and trotting beside them; till Dale said suddenly, “Here—we do not want it with us: send it back.”
Saxe drove the goat away, but it took his movements as meaning play, and danced and skipped, and dodged him and then dashed by, and on ahead, the same gambols taking place at every attempt to send the animal back.
“There—let it be,” cried Dale at last: “you’ll tire yourself out before we fairly start. Why, it follows us like a dog! Perhaps it will get tired soon, and go back.”
But the goat seemed to have no such intention, and it would have been a difficult task to tire out the active creature, which was now tickling the mule’s ribs with one of its horns, now scrambling up some steep piece of rock, now making tremendous leaps, and trotting on again as calmly as if it were thoroughly one of the party.
In due time the foot of the great glacier was reached, after a difficult scramble down the steep, smoothly polished rocks which shut it in on either side.
Here the mule was unloaded by a shabby amount of pasture, ice-axes and hammers seized, and the trio started over the level bed of the glacier streams, the main rivulet dividing into several tiny veins, which spread over the soft clayey earth brought down by the water. But this soon gave place to rock as they neared the piled-up ice, which looked to Saxe like huge masses of dull white chalk, veined in every direction with blue.
As they advanced the rock became more and more smooth, looking as if the ice had only lately shrunk from its surface, but, on Melchior being referred to, he shook his head.