Among the Celestials : vol.1 / Page 272 (Color Image)

0272	Among the Celestials : vol.1

228 AMONG THE CELESTIALS. [CHAP. IX.

What, however, saved our party was my

holding my tongue. I kept quite silent as I

looked over the pass, and waited to hear what

the men had to say about it. They meanwhile

were looking at me, and, imagining that an

Englishman never went back from an enter-

prise he had once started on, took it as a

matter of course that, as I gave no order to go

back, I necessarily meant to go on. So they

set about their preparations for the descent.

We had brought an ordinary pickaxe with us,

and Wali went on ahead with this, while the

rest of us followed one by one behind him, each

hanging on to a rope tied round Wali's waist to

support him in case he slipped while hewing

steps across an ice-slope leading to a rocky

precipice which seemed to afford the only

possible means of descending the pass. This

slope was of hard ice, very steep, and, thirty

yards or so below the line we took, ended in an

ice-fall, which again terminated many hundreds

of feet beneath, in the head. of a glacier at the

foot of the pass. Wali with his pickaxe hewed

a way step by step across the ice-slope, so as to

reach the rocky cliff by which we should have

to descend on to the glacier below.

National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books