There was plenty of snow in places where the sun had as yet failed to evict it, but everywhere melting and warmth were encountered. The summer was reigning, and the verdurous garb of green and colored things was drawn like a veil over the rugged grounds, soothing them into a transient loveliness. We could see the rivulets from the snowbanks coursing everywhere, and could hear from the glacier the gurgle, rush, and tinkle too of hidden rivers, while towards the coast, in the daytime, the sun revealed a shield of wide-spread waters where the floods from the melting ice poured over the shore, and cut long, wide lanes in the rapidly vanishing shore ice.
When we had struggled to the glacier wall we found it an almost imperceptible rise to its surface, and once there, our faces turned toward the ice-river to gauge its character. It was badly crevassed, and although the snow sheeting it over had been heavy, much had disappeared. Along the sides where the lateral moraine somewhat shielded it the snow still remained, but the depressions traversing it, sometimes in herringbone fashion, showed the position of the masked depths, in whose icy jaws our whole party, sledge and dogs might readily be entombed.
Goritz went first with the dog leader, then came myself at the head of the team, with Hopkins and the Professor on either side of the forebraces of the sledge. We were roped together, and the sledge—the only survivor of its kind from the storm—was heavily loaded. We each carried about twenty pounds of condensed food, ingeniously harnessed on our backs. It was an inconsiderable load and might prove serviceable if the sledge vanished.
At first we advanced gingerly, bridging crevasse after crevasse, but our confidence increased as the snow flooring, although yielding, repeatedly proved itself adequate for our support. At one point the sledge smashed the weakened crust and threatened to drag the dogs backward with it, as it hung almost vertically into a wide slit, forty or fifty feet deep, wherein the ice, to our eyes, was an aquamarine mass of jewels. Hopkins lashed the dogs and they hauled the sledge back again on the snow.
We had reached a turn in the glacier’s track, and a patch of outrageous confusion. The whole surface seemed shattered, and serac-like monuments, poised all over, threatened us. We were constantly startled by crashes, and we moved with alarmed caution, for not only were the holes deep but they opened into sluiceways of hurrying water quite capable of sucking any unwary intruder into subterranean tunnels of ice. The dull plangor of the beating currents arose to us with an ominous warning. The dogs here became nervous and unmanageable. Again and again we bridged the chasms with the sledge, and crept one by one over the improvised crossings, coaxing the dogs to follow. We now did not have the protection of the friendly banks. Goritz had concluded to ascend the mountainous ridge before us on the opposite side of the glacier, where the glacier itself, like a small “jokull” terminated, or began, in a neve loaded cirque.
To do this we were compelled to cross the glacier. After a good deal of dangerous work, with one or two nearly fatal mishaps, we attained the central dome of the ice and found here an ideally fashioned space for resting and feeding. The dogs were restless or sullen from hunger, and we needed the encouragement of food ourselves. The worst limb of our trip remained.
But it was a beautiful picture on every side. The day was clear and warm, and, as we gazed far below at the ice-flecked ocean over the glacier’s marge, or upward into the rugged bowl, walled with bold precipices, streaked ever and anon with spouting waterfalls, or higher still to those mute, imperishable peaks, guarding the secrets of the wonder-land towards which we were slowly, so slowly, moving, or lastly at the nearer edges of land on either side, the constricted throat of the glacier serpent, bountifully sprinkled with a vermeil of audacious blossoms and tender grass, we felt the thrill of our strange adventure keenly, and rejoiced in it. But a few minutes later our spirits were harshly dashed, and despair almost broke our hearts.
It was about two in the afternoon; everything was repacked and we had resumed our snail-like progress. The path, if it had been marked by a line, would have been revealed as a maze of loops, necessitating countermarches and criss-crossings, but its widest indirection, after hours of work, showed that we were nearing our goal. The flowers on the cliff beyond us were now almost individually visible. They seemed like a lure to invite us to hasten to their side, when a jolt and tug, that nearly knocked my legs from under me, and then a recoil that sent me sprawling among the dogs.
The rope had parted; I saw its end fly upward, even as I saw the tall form of Goritz with tossing arms sink from sight. My God! Goritz had fallen into a crevasse and—how the thought lacerated me!—they were deepest, widest, on this side! Hopkins and the Professor knew it almost as quickly as myself. We recovered ourselves, and ran forward. Lying flat, on the rim of what had been a snow bridged crevasse, and held in position by the other two, I leaned out. Never shall I forget the horror of my feelings at that moment. Below me caught on an ice arm, which held him above the seething ice water, still deeper down on the floor of the gash, was Goritz, those splendid eyes imploringly lifted to mine:
“Quick, Alfred—the rope!” I tore the rope from around me, noosed it, shouting all the time in a sort of delirium I think, “Hold on Antoine, you’re safe! Hold on! On! On!” And then, with a glance at Hopkins and the Professor, whose faces were almost whiter than the snow at our feet, was on my stomach again, the rope in my hand, and the noose lowered carefully to my friend. He lay on his side on a shelf of ice; a movement and he would slip into the tide below him. It was a critical moment, and yet only with the utmost precautionary slowness and delicacy of adjustment could the rescue be effected. Goritz knew that, though it seemed incongruous to watch a man, prostrate, literally on the brink of destruction, approach the measures of salvation with the deliberation with which one might crack the shell of his breakfast egg. Slowly—the seconds seemed ages—he drew the loop to himself, caught one arm in it, thrust his head through it, and was endeavoring to extricate his other arm from its chancery beneath him, to engage it too in the friendly loop, when—I heard the snap—the shelf broke away! I slammed backward, called to the others to pull, jabbed my spiked shoes into the ice, and held on. Goritz’s voice came thickly from his imprisonment: