The Guide Said There Was Little Danger, Only If One Slipped
One Might Slide Down To Safety, Or One Might (Much Less Probably) Get
Over Rocks And Be Killed.
I was chattering a little with cold; but as
he did not propose a return, I followed him.
The surface was
alternately slabs of frozen snow and patches of soft new snow. In the
first he cut steps, in the second we plunged, and once I went right in
and a mass of snow broke off beneath me and went careering down the
slope. He showed me how to hold my staff backwards as he did his
alpenstock, and use it as a kind of brake in case I slipped.
We had been about twenty minutes crawling over that wall of snow and
ice; and it was more and more apparent that we were in for danger.
Before we had quite reached the far side, the wind was blowing a very
full gale and roared past our ears. The surface snow was whirring
furiously like dust before it: past our faces and against them drove
the snow-flakes, cutting the air: not falling, but making straight
darts and streaks. They seemed like the form of the whistling wind;
they blinded us. The rocks on the far side of the slope, rocks which
had been our goal when we set out to cross it, had long ago
disappeared in the increasing rush of the blizzard. Suddenly as we
were still painfully moving on, stooping against the mad wind, these
rocks loomed up over as large as houses, and we saw them through the
swarming snow-flakes as great hulls are seen through a fog at sea.
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