“But except for that you’re feeling fine, eh?” Uncle Billy smiled. “Well, out with the lunches, everybody. We’ve got to eat and be on our way. We ought to have got here by eleven o’clock. But maybe we can go faster now. The snow is getting soft, and I won’t have to cut steps, and the shoulder won’t be very steep.”
They ate their lunches, huddled on the shady side of the lava block, to keep out of the sun glare, put more grease paint on their lips, noses, cheeks and necks, and set out again up the shoulder. The sun had been shining up here for several hours, and the snow was softened. Their feet sank ankle deep into it, in fact, and in a short distance it had soaked through their boots so that their feet were wet and cold, while their faces were burning. The pitch of the shoulder, too, turned out to be much steeper than they had reckoned. Even the doctor and Norman were fooled, old hands that they were at mountain climbing. It was so steep that the doctor kept them roped, and it grew steeper as they toiled slowly upward, like tiny black ants on the vast white expanse of the mountain. It was almost three o’clock when they reached a big jagged pyramid of lava which stuck up above the snow, just below the summit pinnacle, and found a level spot in its lee. Here the doctor gathered them together into a group, and pointed to the pinnacle, without at first saying a word.
Bennie looked up a forty-five degree slope of dazzling snow, frozen into little wind ripples like desert sand, for two or three hundred feet, and saw that slope end at the base of the pinnacle itself. The pinnacle, as he could see only too plainly now, was a sheer precipice at every place except the edge just above them. That edge—the north end, which the shoulder they were climbing on led to, was just enough off the perpendicular to make it a daring and desperate hazard. Even it, in some places, looked perfectly straight up. And those places were not snow covered, as Bennie could now see. They were just green, glistening ice! The pinnacle rose thus for a full 300 feet, into the naked blue sky.
Dumplin’ groaned. “I can’t do it,” he said. “Honest, Dad, I can’t do it! I didn’t say anything, but I got dizzy back on the shoulder, and my head’s aching now. Gosh, I don’t want to look at it!”
He turned quickly away. Bennie started to laugh, but stopped himself when he saw his uncle’s face.
“Sit down, Dumplin’,” the doctor said kindly. “You won’t have to climb it. Rest a bit, and don’t think about it. None of us is going to climb it.”
“Oh, why not?” Bennie exclaimed. “It doesn’t look to me as if anybody could climb it, but if they have, I guess we can, with you to lead us. Gee, think of getting this far, and stopping!”
“How long do you think it would take us to go from here to the top?” his uncle asked.
“Half an hour.”
“An hour,” Spider amended.