“No,” replied Saxe; “we may as well get to the top first.”
Dale smiled to himself.
“He has plenty of spirit,” he muttered; and he watched Saxe toiling on, with his feet sinking in the snow at every step, and how he never once glanced up at the top of the col for which they were making; but he gave a start and his face lit up as Melchior suddenly uttered his peculiar jodel.
“The top of the col,” he cried; and, as the others joined him where he stood, with his arm over the mule’s neck, he said, “Would the herrs like me to tell them the names of the different peaks?”
“Yes, after tea,” said Saxe, laughing. “But, I say, I thought this was a sharp ridge, like the roof of a church, and that we should go down directly off the snow.”
“Patience, herr,” said Melchior. “Come along, then. It is colder up here. See how low the sun is, and feel how hard the snow becomes.”
Saxe glanced at the great ruddy glow in the west, and saw how the different peaks had flashed up into brilliant light; he noted, too, that if he trod lightly, his feet hardly went through the crust on the snow.
“Why, it’s beginning to freeze!” he cried suddenly.
“Yes, herr; on this side it is freezing hard. On the other side it will be soft yet. That is the south.”
They went on for three or four hundred yards, over what seemed to be a level plain of snow, but which they knew from what they had seen below, hung in a curve from the dazzling snow peaks on either hand, and to be gracefully rounded south and north.