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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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coat for each man, some native biscuits, tea and a large tea-
kettle, and a bottle of brandy. The ascent to the pass was
easy but trying, for we were now not far from nineteen thousand
feet above sea-level, and at that height, walking uphill through
deep snow, one quickly becomes exhausted. We could only
take a dozen or twenty steps at a time, and we would then
bend over on our sticks and pant as if we had been running
hard uphill. We were tantalized, too, by the apparent nearness
of the pass. Everything here was on a gigantic scale, and
what seemed to be not more than an hour's walk from the
camp was in fact a six hours' climb. It was nearly midday
when we reached the top of the pass, and what we saw there
I have already related in the letter quoted above. There was
nothing but a sheer precipice, and those first few moments
on the summit of the Mustagh Pass were full of intense anxiety
to me. If we could but get over, the crowning success of my
expedition would be gained. But the thing seemed to me
simply an impossibility. I had had no experience of Alpine
climbing, and I had no ice-axes or other mountaineering
appliances with me. I had not even any proper boots. All
I had for foot-gear were some native boots of soft leather,
without nails and without heels—mere leather stockings, in
fact—which gave no sort of grip upon an icy surface. How,
then, I should ever be able to get down the icy slopes and
rocky precipices I now saw before me I could not think; and
if it had rested with me alone, the probability is we never
should have got over the pass at all.
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 enterprise he had once started on, took
it as a matter of course that, as I gave no order to go back,
I meant to go on. So they set about their preparations for
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