McKay nodded. "We'll have to drive steam points ahead of every pile, I suppose, and we'll need Eskimos to work in that cold, but I guess we can manage somehow."
"That country is like an apple pie," said Tom Slater—"it's better cold than hot. There's a hundred inches of rainfall at Omar in summer. We'll all have web feet when we get out."
Sheldon, the light-hearted commissary man, spoke up. "If it's as wet as all that, well need Finns—instead of Eskimos." He was promptly hooted into silence.
"I understand those glaciers come down to the edge of the river," the superintendent ventured.
"They do!" O'Neil acknowledged, "and they're the liveliest ones I ever saw. Tom can answer for that. One of them is fully four hundred feet high at the face and four miles across. They're constantly breaking, too."
"Lumps bigger than this hotel," supplemented Slater. "It's quite a sight—equal to anything in the state of Maine."
O'Neil laughed with the others at this display of sectional pride, and then explained: "The problem of passing them sounds difficult, but in reality it isn't. If those other engineers had looked over the ground as I did, instead of relying entirely upon hearsay, we wouldn't be meeting here to-day. Of course I realized that we couldn't build a road over a moving river of ice, nor in front of one, for that matter, but I discovered that Nature had made us one concession. She placed her glaciers on opposite sides of the valley, to be sure, but she placed the one that comes in from the east bank slightly higher upstream than the one that comes in from the west. They don't really face each other, although from the sea they appear to do so. You see the answer?" His hearers nodded vigorously. "If we cross the river, low down, by a trestle, and run up the east bank past Jackson glacier until we are stopped by Garfield—the upper one—then throw a bridge directly across, and back to the side we started from, we miss them both and have the river always between them and us. Above the upper crossing there will be a lot of heavy rock work to do, but nothing unusual, and, once through the gorge, we come out into the valley, where the other roads run in from Cortez. They cross three divides, while we run through on a one-per-cent grade. That will give us a downhill pull on all heavy freight."
"Sounds as simple as a pair of suspenders, doesn't it?" inquired Slater. "But wait till you see it. The gorge below Niagara is stagnant water compared with the cataract above those glaciers. It takes two looks to see the top of the mountains. And those glaciers themselves—Well! Language just gums up and sticks when it comes to describing them."
Mellen, the bridge-builder, spoke for the first time, and the others listened.
"As I understand it we will cross the river between the glaciers and immediately below the upper one."