“This must be Oakes’s Gulf,” I ventured, in order to break the silence, after we had all taken a pull at the flask.
“This is Oakes’s Gulf—agreed; but where in perdition is my hat?” demanded the colonel, wiping the big drops from his forehead.
After he had tied a handkerchief around his head, we crossed this Devil’s Bridge, with the caution of men fully alive to the consequences of a false step, and with that tension of the nerves which announces the terrible or the unknown.[9]
We had not gone far when a tremendous gust sent us reeling toward the abyss. I dropped on my hands and knees, and my companions followed suit. We arose, shook off the snow, and slowly mounted the long, steep, and rocky side of Franklin. Upon gaining the summit, the walking was better. We were also protected by the slope of the mountain. The worst seemed over. But what fantastic objects were the big rocks, scattered, or rather lying in wait, along our route! What grotesque appearances continually started out of the clouds! Now it was an enormous bear squatted on his haunches; now a dark-browed sphinx; and more than once we could have sworn we saw human beings stealthily watching us from a distance. How easy to imagine these weird objects lost travellers, suddenly turned to stone for their presumptuous invasion of the domain of terrors! It really seemed as if we had but to stamp our feet to see a legion of demons start into life and bar our way.
Say what you will, we could not shake off the dread which these unearthly objects inspired; nor could we forbear, were it at the risk of being turned to stone, looking back, or peering furtively from side to side when some new apparition thrust its hideous suggestions before us. What would you have? Are we not all children who shrink from entering a haunted chamber, and shudder in the presence of death? Well, the mountain was haunted, and death seemed near. We forgot fatigue, forgot cold, to yield to this mysterious terror, which daunted us as no peril could do, and froze us with vague presentiment of the unknown.
Covered from head to foot with snow, bearded with icicles, tracking this solitude, which refused the echo of a foot-fall, like spectres, we seemed to have entered the debatable ground forever dedicated to spirits having neither home on earth nor hope in heaven, but doomed to wander up and down these livid crags for an eternity of woe. The mountain had already taken possession of our physical, now it seized upon our moral nature. Neither the one nor the other could resist the impressions which naked rock, furious tempest, and hidden danger stamped on every foot of the way.
In this way we reached Mount Monroe, last of the peaks in our route to the summit, where we were forced to pick our way among the rocks, struggling forward through drifts frequently waist deep.
It was here that, finding myself some distance in advance of the others—for poor George was lagging painfully—I halted for them to come up. I was choking with thirst, aggravated by eating the damp snow. As soon as the colonel was near enough—the wind only could be heard—I made a gesture of a man drinking. He did not seem to understand, though I impatiently repeated the pantomime. He came to where I stood.
He drew it slowly from his pocket, and handed it to me with a hang-dog look that I failed for the moment to interpret. I put it to my lips, shook it, turned it bottom up. Not a drop!