We worked our way forward, twisting and turning. Slowly but steadily we advanced, drawing near and nearer to that dark, frowning, broken mass, wondering (at any rate, I was) about the secrets that we should find there—unless, indeed, we were too late. What had Milton meant by that? How on earth could the apparition of the angel and the demon be in any manner contingent upon the movement of the ice?
Well, we were very near now; we were so near, in fact, that, if there was any one, any thing lurking there in the rocks, human or monster (or both) he or it could hear us.
We would soon know whether we had come too late.
Ere long we had got over the fissures and were moving over ice unbroken and smooth. I wondered if this was the spot where, so many years ago, White and Long had been killed. But I did not voice that thought. The truth is that this terrible place held me silent. And, when we moved into the shadow cast by the broken, towering pile, the scene became more weird and terrible than ever.
A few moments, and we halted, so close to the rocky wall, precipitous and broken, that I could have touched it with outstretched hand.
How cold it seemed here, how strange that sinister quality (or was it only my imagination?) of the enveloping shadows!
"Well," said Milton Rhodes, and I noticed that his voice was low and guarded, "here we are."
I made no response.
The silence there was as the silence of a tomb.