“How far do you say they are, John?” he asked.
“Anything from forty miles upwards; impossible to tell from here. When we camp I’ll plot some kind of a base-line and see if I can get an estimate. But the main point is that now we know we can reach them.”
He led off again down the slope, and we continued the march. Owing to our late start and the high dunes, we made but ten miles that day, but we camped with joyous hearts. The cloud-cap still hung over the hills, but seemed to be thinning toward sunset.
The tent was up, and Firoz busy with the evening meal, when Wrexham, who had been taking bearings from two dunes nearly a mile apart and was now at work on a rise above us, called to Forsyth and me sitting by the tent.
“Quick, you two! The clouds are lifting, and you can see the snow.”
We ran up to the top where he stood, and there, above the hills which showed sharp and clear—a long jagged wall—we could see to one side of the centre a patch of white below the clouds. A minute or two later these rolled off it, and there, stabbing the sky with two sharp-toothed peaks, was a great snow mountain vivid in the low rays of the westering sun. The last clouds lifted ere the sun went down as though to give us a full view.
The mountain rose in a long swell, not unlike a camel’s back, from the centre of the wall of lower hills, and after rising gently for some way sheered up steeper in a high wall of snow topped with two great peaks with a sharp dip between. The snow-line lay considerably below the bases of the peaks, which looked like the horns on the head of some gigantic beast. Below the snow was faint blue haze that told us that the mountain was a considerable distance behind the low hills we had first seen, since these stood out clear and sharp.
“That mountain is on no map in the world,” said Wrexham as he took its bearing. “You remember all this part and several hundred miles on it is empty desert even on the latest maps. We shall have the pleasure of naming a new mountain among our other finds. It’s high, too—I should say twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet, at least—to show snow at this time of year so low as that. What shall we call it?”
“I think we’d better wait till we get there. The white-skinned people have probably got a name already.”
“I wonder if it will be a name redolent of old Greece,” said Forsyth. “Perhaps one of the goddesses of old times. Anyway, if it hasn’t, I’m for giving it something a d——d sight more poetic than K2 or K5 or any other of the beastly insults that the Survey of India put on some of the most beautiful things in the world. Even the unpoetic Indian treats them better than that. Nanga Parbat is at least graceful.”