“Too bad, Bennie, your back isn’t very strong,” said Dumplin’.
“Well, if your back is strong, you’ll be able to scale Mount Everest,” Bennie retorted.
They moved out now across the second small snow-field, and then the third and fourth. They were working upward a little, as well as across, and the summit precipices grew nearer. Bennie looked up once at those cliffs towering almost over his head, absolutely precipitous and hung with ice—and looked quickly down again. Jefferson hadn’t seemed very hard to climb from a distance, but now that summit looked absolutely impossible, and sure death if you tried it. He preferred to keep his eyes on his uncle, who was methodically cutting steps across the frozen snow.
They rested a moment, and took a drink from the canteens, on the last lava spine before they tackled the big snow-field. Uncle Billy looked out across it with troubled eyes.
“I don’t like those two chutes down the centre,” he said, pointing to a couple of deep scars, like ditches, which started far up at the base of the pinnacle cliffs, swept down the middle of the field, and only ended at the top of the cañon wall far below.
“Nothing coming down ’em now,” Norman said. “I don’t believe there will be till the sun gets around this side. It’s coming down tonight that we’ll be in danger.”
“What has made them?” Spider asked. “They look like toboggan slides.”
“That’s about what they are. They are made by big hunks of lava and ice breaking off the pinnacle and sliding down, digging a chute as they go.”
“How fast do the hunks travel?” asked Dumplin’.
“Fast enough!” Norman laughed.