While I Am Sitting Waiting For The Men To Finish Their Meal, I Feel
A Chill At My Back, As If Some Cold Thing Had Settled There, And
Turning Round, See The Mist From The Summit Above Coming In A Wall
Down Towards Us.
These mists up here, as far as my experience goes,
are always preceded by a strange breath of ice-cold air - not
necessarily a wind.
Bum then draws my attention to a strange funnel-shaped thing coming
down from the clouds to the north. A big waterspout, I presume: it
seems to be moving rapidly N.E., and I profoundly hope it will hold
that course, for we have quite as much as we can manage with the
ordinary rain-water supply on this mountain, without having
waterspouts to deal with.
We start off down the mountain as rapidly as we can. Xenia is very
done up, and Head man comes perilously near breaking his neck by
frequent falls among the rocks; my unlucky boots are cut through and
through by the latter. When we get down towards the big crater
plain, it is a race between us and the pursuing mist as to who shall
reach the camp first, and the mist wins, but we have just time to
make out the camp's exact position before it closes round us, so we
reach it without any real difficulty. When we get there, about one
o'clock, I find the men have kept the fires alight and Cook is
asleep before one of them with another conflagration smouldering in
his hair.
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