He called the men together again and gave them their marching orders. Whether the Mercurian understood what he said, Lamoureux didn't know. At any rate, it went along willingly.
They reached the place where McCracken had been standing, and Lamoureux stared where Big Muscles pointed. There were two mountains rising off in the distance, barely visible through the snow, and there was certainly a saddleback ridge between them. The only trouble was that one of the mountains was almost twice the height of the other. Kalinoff had reported them as approximately the same height.
"That doesn't fit Kalinoff's description."
McCracken said, "Maybe he looked at them from a different angle, sir. Then they might have seemed the same height."
"If he looked at them from a different angle, the ridge would no longer seem saddlebacked."
"That's true, sir. But then you know, sir, Kalinoff is a screwball—"
Lamoureux found this a little hard to take from a man he suspected of quietly trying to stab him in the back. But he continued to hide his feelings. "That's as may be, McCracken, but he's not cockeyed. These aren't the mountains he described. Still, we may as well approach them. We may be able to get a good view from the top of the taller one."
They moved onward again. A quarter of an hour's marching took them to the edge of the falling snow. As they walked further, the air became completely clear, and Lamoureux could see the mountains without straining his eyes. There was no doubt about it. They were not the mountains Kalinoff had described.
The Mercurian horizon was not so far away as the more familiar horizon of Earth, and it was a little difficult for Lamoureux to estimate distances. Still, the foothills of the mountains could not be more than twenty miles away. For the past day, little more than the rim of the Sun had been visible above the horizon, and while the peaks were ablaze with scarlet and golden colors, only the higher one was out of the shadow to any considerable extent. The saddlebacked ridge itself was a vague outline of dull black.