The Crystal Hunters: A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps

by George Manville Fenn

Then the way was dangerously narrow at times, one dripping place forcing them to stoop—so heavily overhung the rock above.

At last, just in front of them, the gorge seemed to end, for the place was blocked by a wall that ran across the narrow rift at right angles, and against this the whole body of water was propelled, to strike straight upon it, and rise up like a billow of the sea and fall back with a furious roar. Here the foam formed so dense a mist that Dale had crept right into it before he realised that, as the water fell back, it shot away through the gloom to his left, forming a fresh billow against a perpendicular wall before it again darted onward.

“Has this awful place no end!” he said, as he grasped the meaning of this fresh disturbance of its course; and he peered forward again for the path, it being absolute madness to think of seeing anything in the watery chaos below. Then, looking back, it was as if some icy hand had clutched his heart, for he was alone.

For the moment he felt that Saxe must have slipped and fallen, and in the agony he suffered he fancied himself back again in England facing the boy’s father and trying to plead some excuse for the want of care. Saxe was entrusted to him for a few months’ visit to the Alps—a visit to combine pleasure and instruction, as well as to gain more robust health.

As he thought this he was already on his way back to the sharp angle he had passed round, and as he reached it his horror and despair became almost unbearable.

But this part of his suffering had its termination; and he fully grasped that, like as in a dream, all this had occupied but a few moments of time, for a hand was thrust round the stony angle and searched for a projection, and as Dale eagerly grasped the humid palm, Saxe glided round and then followed him into the corner, beneath which the water roared and churned itself into foam, passed this in safety, and once more they crept on, thinking now only of getting out into the daylight and following the stream in the hope of finding poor Melchior’s remains.

The same thoughts occurred to both of them: suppose the poor fellow was beyond their reach, swept right away into the depths of some lake miles away—what were they to do? Retrace their steps to the mouth of the gorge, where their provision was left, or try to find their way somehow over the mountains? It would be a fearful task, ignorant of their way, faint from want of food, weak from exhaustion. It was now for the first time that Saxe realised how terrible the mountains were, and how easily a person might be lost, or meet with a mishap that would mean laming, perhaps death.

Then their thoughts of self gave place again to those relating to their poor guide.

“We must find him!” Saxe cried involuntarily, and so loudly that Dale turned and looked back at him wildly, for the thoughts had been exactly his own.

“Yes,” he said, his voice muffled by the roar of the waters; “we must find him. The place is not so very large, after all. Wait till we get out: I can’t talk here.”