Ah, thoughtless man! he little knew what daggers of envy were lacerating the heart of the mad artist who would have given all that he possessed—colour-box and camp-stool included—to have been allowed to hold that little hand even for a few seconds! Indeed he had, in a fit of desperation, offered to aid her by taking the other hand when half-way up that very slope, but had slipped at the moment of making the offer and rolled to the bottom. Lewis, seeing the fate of his rival, wisely refrained from putting himself in a false position by offering any assistance, excusing his apparent want of gallantry by remarking that if he were doomed to slip into a crevasse he should prefer not to drag another along with him. Antoine, therefore, had the little hand all to himself.
The Professor, being a somewhat experienced ice-man, assisted Emma in all cases of difficulty. As for the Captain, Gillie, and Lawrence, they had quite enough to do to look after themselves.
“How different from what I had expected,” said Emma, resting a hand on the shoulder of Nita; “it is a very landscape of ice.”
Emma’s simile was not far-fetched. They had reached a part of the glacier where the slope and the configuration of the valley had caused severe strains on the ice in various directions, so that there were not only transverse crevasses but longitudinal cracks, which unitedly had cut up the ice into blocks of all shapes and sizes. These, as their position shifted, had become isolated, more or less,—and being partially melted by the sun, had assumed all sorts of fantastic shapes. There were ice-bridges, ice-caves, and ice obelisks and spires, some of which latter towered to a height of fifty feet or more; there were also forms suggestive of cottages and trees, with here and there real rivulets rippling down their icy beds, or leaping over pale blue ledges, or gliding into blue-green lakes, or plunging into black-blue chasms. The sun-light playing among these silvery realms—glinting over edges and peaks, blazing on broad masses, shimmering through semi-transparent cliffs, and casting soft grey shadows everywhere—was inexpressibly beautiful, while the whole, looming through a thin golden haze, seemed to be of gigantic proportions.
It seemed as if the region of ice around them must at one time have been in tremendous convulsions, but the Professor assured them that this was not the case, that the formation of crevasses and those confused heaps of ice called seracs was a slow and prolonged process. “Doubtless,” he said, “you have here and there the wild rush of avalanches, and suchlike convulsions, but the rupture of the great body of the ice is gradual. A crevasse is an almost invisible crack at first. It yawns slowly and takes a long time to open out to the dimensions and confusion which you see around.”
“What are those curious things?” asked Nita, pointing to some forms before her.
“They look like giant mushrooms,” said Captain Wopper.
“They are ice-tables,” answered Antoine.
“Blocks of stone on the top of cones of ice,” said the Professor. “Come, we will go near and examine one.”
The object in question was well suited to cause surprise, for it was found to be an enormous flat mass of rock, many tons in weight, perched on a pillar of ice and bearing some resemblance to a table with a central leg.