IMPRISONED IN SNOW
It was the place—he could not possibly doubt it. Was he the first to
reach it? Struck with anxiety, he hurried down to the sea, where the
land fell off sharply in a steep bluff. No craft lay in the great bay
that was the extension of the valley. Out in the wide channel he could
see nothing on the water, neither boat nor light, nor camp fire on the
shore.
He had won the race, after all; and now he could hardly be taken
unawares, for he could surely hear the _Chita’s_ engines for a long
way. He returned to his camp, however, and cleaned and dried his
firearms, taking out and wiping the cartridges, trying the action,
finally putting the pistol in his pocket and laying the rifle away
under sheets of dry bark.
To save time he ate his breakfast, knowing that it must be near dawn
by the moon. While he ate he gazed at the magnificent spectacle of the
glacier, which, as he finished began to grow dim at its upper edge,
and presently to redden faintly.
Too impatient to wait for full daylight, he hastened to the edge of
the valley, and scrambled down the twenty-foot precipitous sides. The
ravine was nearly half a mile wide, a dismal gulch of wet gravel, all
of it probably drift from the glacier, and it was several hundred
yards farther up to where the ice wall blocked the valley from side to
side, and even slightly bulged over the edges.
He walked up to the barrier. The ice wall towered above him, perhaps
forty or fifty feet high in some places, indescribably ancient
looking, greenish, full of streaks and beds of frozen gravel. It was
melting fast. Streams of water ran out everywhere, and down the center
splashed a good-sized cascade springing from a sort of cavern that the
stream had hollowed from the ice, and tumbling over rocks that might
be either drift or the underlying earth itself.
Here it must be that Morrison had found the stones, and here he must
have climbed and fallen and broken his ribs. Lang searched through the
wet gravel, poking it with a stick, but found nothing that looked even
remotely like any sort of crystal. The rocks were wet and icy and
slippery, but he was considerably younger and more active than the
explorer, and he scrambled up to the source of the stream without
great difficulty.
According to Morrison’s theory, the rock or gravel containing the
emerald pocket lay somewhere back in the ice, whence a few odd stones
had been washed out, probably by this very streamlet. Lang had
imagined himself chopping away the ice, following the stream back,
till it led him infallibly to the jewels; but he had by no means
realized the immense magnitude of the undertaking. It might not be
this stream at all; it might be any other of the scores of them; he
might have to tunnel back for yards, hundreds of yards. He need hardly
have feared being forestalled by any one; for there might be a whole
summer’s work in the digging out of the treasure.
Considerably dashed, and scarcely knowing how to begin, he climbed out
of the valley, and once more reconnoitered the sea. He returned to
camp and got the hatchet. He wished in vain for the lost ax and pick,
and made his way back to the little ice cave of the cascade, and began
to hew into the glacier.
The ice was rotten and soft. It was not frozen water, of course, but
compressed, frozen snow, fallen on the upper heights, and slowly,
slowly sliding down toward the sea, a mile, perhaps, in a century.
There was plenty of frozen gravel embedded in it, and Lang scrutinized
it all closely, but without discovering any green stones. Spattered
with water, covered with ice chips, he worked a narrow tunnel back a
long way, perhaps for ten feet, breaking through beds of sand and
stones of all sizes, several fairly large rocks, some piece of ancient
wood; and then the stream he was tracking broke into four or five
rivulets, each coming from a different direction.
He had never thought of such a thing. He had no idea from which of
these streamlets Morrison’s emeralds might have come. He hewed a
little farther mechanically, and then gave up, at a loss.
He crept back to the outer air, much discouraged. The enormity of the
task loomed larger than ever. The problem of that half mile of ice
staggered him.
He walked along the valley, scrutinizing the glacier end. Twice he
hewed tentatively into fissures whence strong, muddy streams were
gushing. The sun had clouded over; the clear morning was growing
misty, threatening the inevitable rain. It was getting toward noon, he
thought and he returned to his camp for refreshment and to think the
problem over.
His coal fire was still burning, and after he had eaten he busied
himself at making a shelter, a sort of low shed of poles and bark and
cedar branches, which would shoot off the worst of the rains. Complete
dryness was not to be hoped for, in this climate.
He was suddenly amazed at his own health and hardiness. He had been
shipwrecked, had tramped with a heavy load for Heaven knew how many
miles, had been wet day and night, had lived on the most undesirable
diet, and in spite of it all he felt rough, tough and full of energy,
without so much as a cold. His nervous breakdown had vanished; so had
all his mental torture at what Boston thought of his collapse; and all
his terror of the future. He did not care a continental for Boston,
nor for the whole medical profession. He remembered that the Northern
physicians had prescribed for him sea air and a moist and depressing
climate. They must have been right, and he had assuredly come to the
right place for moisture.
That afternoon he made an exhaustive search of all the expanse of
gravel under the glacier, on the chance that the rest of the emeralds
might have been already washed out. It took him nearly all the
afternoon, and he found a small scrap of rock full of greenish,
glasslike veins, which might have been emerald matrix, or might not.
That was the sole fruit of his prospecting. He ended at the other side
of the valley, and climbed to the top and came back across the surface
of the glacier. It was crumbly and softening. Little streams ran
everywhere, some falling down the glacier’s front, others dribbling
into cracks and fissures. There were a great many of these crevices of
all sizes, some of them a yard wide, and it occurred to Lang that he
might learn something of the interior of the glacier by letting down a
candle at the end of a cord, or he might be even able to scramble down
himself.
Evening came early, foggy and drizzling as usual. He went to look at
the sea from the coast, but could not distinguish anything beyond a
hundred yards. At any rate, there was no _Chita_ in the bay.
A snowslide came down the glacier that night with a tremendous roar
and rumble. Lang started up in a panic, imagining that he had heard
engines. It was heavily foggy, and he was not quite sure what had
really happened until morning, when he found a vast heap of snow at
the foot of the glacier, covering up the tunnel he had hewn out the
day before.
It was still darkly foggy, but not raining, and there was no wind as
he went up the slope to the glacier, carrying a long, thin cord, a
pocketful of candles, and the hatchet. The snowslide had mostly
discharged itself over the glacier’s edge, but a good deal had clung
to the surface of the ice. It was light, fresh snow, and it had been
flung up in great ridges and drifts where the slide had struck any
obstruction. The small ice cracks were covered over, but the larger
crevices had swallowed up the snow and stood open.
Lang looked down into several of them, deep and dark and precipitous,
going farther down than he could see. None of the depths showed any
rock or gravel, however, and he turned down toward the tongue of the
glacier.
He was fifty yards, perhaps, from its edge, plowing through the snow,
when he felt the surface give way under him. He made a wild plunge
aside—too late! A vast mass of snow seemed to dislodge itself, vanish,
and everything dropped from under his feet.
He snatched at something that went past, a projecting crag of ice amid
the whirl of snow, caught it, clung for half a second, and his hand
slipped off. He went down—down—losing breath, and landing in a great
mass of loose snow in which he went clear under.