"Around back of the Shelter. There is an easy trail leading up to the top, but that isn't the way you want to go. You want to climb. You shall. Have you your belts on?" He glanced over the girls critically. "All right," he added, "follow me."
Janus led the way around a rear corner of the Shelter, after having labeled and stowed their packs in the hut. He said they would be perfectly safe there, that no one would disturb them. But the girls were rather amazed when, instead of beginning to climb up, the guide started down a sharp incline, calling to his charges to follow.
"Thith ithn't up," cried Tommy.
"We have to go through this gully first of all, then we begin going up," he explained.
The couloir proved to be something of a hard proposition right at the beginning. Jagged rocks, sudden narrow miniature gullies, bushes with sharp thorns, slippery, treacherous shale, made the descent a trying one. Once Margery lost her footing on one of these shale shelfs. She fell flat on her back and slid screaming a full twenty yards, shooting out on a grassy slope little the worse for her slide, except that she had been badly frightened.
Tommy was delighted.
"Wouldn't Buthter make a fine toboggan?" she laughed.
Reaching the bottom of the gully, a long, narrow crevasse in the mountain, they began the real ascent. Up and up they went, now and then lying against a rock, to which they clung, out of breath from their exertions, their faces flushed and warm. Far above them Janus pointed out a little projection of rock that seemed no larger than a human hand.
"That," said the guide, "is where we camp to-night,"
"Thave me!" wailed Tommy.