The dazzle of the snow was now right in their faces, because the slope was so steep, and they could actually feel the reflected rays blister their noses. Their eyes smarted, their lips were cracking. But nobody had any time or chance to do anything about it. There was enough to do without that. Every second man had to be absolutely sure his stock was driven deep when the man above him took an upward step, and he had to pull out his own stock and drive it in firmly on a level with his face (no small muscular task) when it was his turn to take an upward step. The doctor was cutting good, high steps, too, a couple of feet to a rise. Bennie ached in every joint, and felt as if he were balancing on the edge of eternity—as, indeed, he was! But he climbed grimly, steadily, keeping the alternate rhythm with the doctor.
There was no chance to rest here. For half an hour they crawled up. Mr. Stone said he’d like a movie of it, but there didn’t seem to be any way to take a movie of it. It wasn’t safe for anybody to get off the rope; in fact, it would have been sheer recklessness. Bennie was never so glad of anything in his life as he was of his uncle’s call, “The top!” He scrambled up over the edge of a great drift, and found himself on a narrow spine of snow and lava blocks, a spine leading straight up to the northern end of the summit pinnacle.
When the rest were over the rim, they took off the rope, and sat down to rest on a lava platform. The wind had died down. It was calm and cloudless now, and there wasn’t a sound in the world—not a whisper of wind, not a bird song—nothing but the stillness of the everlasting snows, and their own voices, which sounded strange up here, almost startling.
The doctor took out his instrument for measuring altitude, called an aneroid barometer. It showed that they were over 9,000 feet. Their watches told them it was one o’clock.
“Wow, we’ve been climbing more’n nine hours since breakfast!” said Bennie. “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
“Funny, I don’t feel very hungry,” said Dumplin’.
“That is funny,” his father laughed.
“It’s the funniest thing he ever said,” Bennie added. “Didn’t hear you making many jokes coming up that old drift just now, Dump.”
“You won’t hear me making any jokes till we get down this mountain again,” Dump replied. “Gee, my lips are all cracked, and my nose feels as big as a house, and my back aches, and my eyes smart, and I haven’t got any wind and—and——”
He paused for breath.