"I who speak am as dust beneath the feet of the Heaven-born. But consider, Hazúr, there will be many more such before the pass can be reached."
"It is possible," Lenox answered unmoved. "It is also possible that, like this one, they will keep out of our path. Make no more fool's talk. Go back to the ponies."
The Kirghiz was not mistaken. There were 'many more such' during the next few days. But Lenox was not mistaken either: for none of them came their way. Only the muffled thunder of their descent broke the stillness of a world whose mystery and grandeur surpassed anything Lenox himself had ever seen.
For on the second night, a night without wind or cloud, they camped in the heart of the great glacier: and all about them,—touched to ethereal unreality by the light of moon and stars,—were unnumbered crests and pinnacles, fantastically carven; black mouths of caverns, shaggy with icicles; sudden fissures and vast continents of shadow, like ink-stains on unsullied purity; and over-arching all, the still wonder of the sky, pierced with points of flame.
Tired as he was, Lenox resented the need for shutting his eyes upon a scene so stirring alike to the imagination and the heart: a scene that lifted both, past Nature's uttermost sublime, to the Master-Builder, whose mind is the Universe, and whose thoughts are its stars and worlds, and the living souls of men. But for all that Nature had her way with him; sealing up eyes and mind with the double seal of weariness and the supreme content of the climber who knows that the summit is at hand.
And upon the fourth day, in a blaze of sunlight, that set the uncharted snow-fields glittering like dust of diamonds, they crossed the Pass,—Lenox's own Pass, that no living man had set eyes or foot upon,—and looked at last on that elusive 'other side,' that draws certain natures like a magnet to the far-flung limits of earth.
And in this case the other side proved well worth the hardships endured to reach it. After 30 many days cooped up between ice-walls and precipitous heights, Lenox caught his breath at the magnitude of the view outspread before him; an amphitheatre of 'the greater gods', ridge beyond ridge, peak beyond dazzling peak, stabbing the blue, the highest of them little lower than Everest's self: while across the rock-bound valley a host of glaciers, like primeval monsters, crept downward from the mountains that gave them birth.
As Lenox stood feasting his soul upon the splendour of it all, he knew that this was one of the great days of his life: that only Quita's inspiring presence was needed to crown the triumph of it. Even in the first glow of achievement, his heart turned instinctively to hers for sympathy and approval: and, could she have known it, her haunting fear that the mountains would prove too strong for her had crumbled into nothingness there and then. For if 'many waters cannot quench love,' neither can many mountains dwarf it. When all is said, it is still 'the great amulet that makes the world a garden', and always will be, while God's men and women have red blood in their veins.
[1] Big dinner.
[2] Great excitement.