He had to stop many times. When he started again he wondered in the back of his splitting head and grinding consciousness where he was finding the energy to make that ascent. At times he was so ill with vertigo that his stomach was racked; perhaps it was only the intuitive fear of falling and rolling back that long and sharp slope to the bottom—into the fog again!—that kept him conscious.
He was clawing upward a few feet now, then stopping half-hours, it seemed, for rest. His tongue was swollen. He could not shut his eyes for the agony. He tried to swallow and his throat refused to function. It came to him that in those self-commands to go on, the voice was not his own. It was no voice at all. He was making crazy, growling, guttural sounds.
And then—the sun!
Raising his eyes after one of his pauses for rest, hanging weirdly above him he beheld a ball of pale lemon, lambent in the heavens. Was it the sun? Could it be the sun?
Of course it was the sun! Nathan laughed at himself for the question. He did not realize his laugh was a crazy cackle.
Nathan climbed out of the fog.
He emerged from the fog-belt in the space of a hundred feet, left it below him entirely.
It was not quite the top. Not yet!
But when he had climbed out of that fog-belt into the warm, enervating sunshine, he saw the top.