“Do the goats use this chimney?” he shouted up.
“Sure,” Mills replied. “Can’t you see the marks of their hoofs? They jump from side to side right up it.”
“All I can say is, I’d like to see ’em,” was the somewhat sceptical answer.
The chimney work was great sport, but it was also hard work. Tom’s back was sore, his hands bruised, his arms weary, before they reached the top. But finally he saw Mills disappear over the rim, and then the doctor; and finally he himself crawled out of the cleft, and stood on the very summit of the precipice. And then Tom gasped, and forgot he was hot, forgot he was tired, forgot his hands were bruised by the rough rocks, forgot the moments when his heart had been either in his boots or his throat, forgot everything but the bigness of that prospect! He almost forgot to look at his watch; but the doctor didn’t.
“Four hours and a half to go two thousand feet!” the doctor said. “That’s the hardest rock climb I ever made. You don’t need to go to Switzerland for real mountain climbing, Mills. You’ve got it here, right in your back yard.”
CHAPTER XVII—Tom Sees Both Mountain Sheep and Goats Do Their Wild Leaps Down Dizzy Ledges
Below the great wall up which they had climbed lay the little green lake, and now they could see a horseback party which had come up to the shore, see them with the utmost distinctness, like tiny toys. Out beyond the lake stretched the green cañon, back to camp, and all to the south the piled up peaks and white snow-fields. But it was to the north that the view was best. The spot where they stood was not on the Divide, but a spur, or spine of rock running east from the Divide. This spine was only thirty or forty feet wide in places, and plunged down to the north, not quite so steeply, but quite steeply enough, to another little lake, and beyond that lake shot up the ragged gray and brown and red battlements of Mount Merritt. Merritt also stands just east of the Divide, so that they were looking into a second horseshoe amphitheatre, and on the high, steep sides of this amphitheatre, extending almost to the top of Mount Merritt, were no less than five glaciers. It was a wild, desolate picture, far wilder than the Iceberg Lake cirque, because there was less verdure, and not a trail or human being in it—only glaciers and precipices and wild, tumbled, jagged mountains.
The doctor gazed in silence for several minutes, and then he said,
“Tom, how do you like it?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful! I never knew anything in the world could be so—so big and lonely and sort of endless.”