They all started merrily, and the burning sun soon dried their wet garments. Emmie ceased to shiver, and could smile when Dyke praised her courage and good humour. He said they had a bit of a ridge to get over in the next few days, but _after_ that it would be downhill again--all easy going, plain sailing, what you could do on your head.
It was an exhausting episode. The scene had become Dantesque, terrible; they were amidst a ruin and devastation that had been wrought by countless ages, and still the work of destruction was continuing. These gigantic hills were slowly crumbling to dust; their sides, torn and split, poured down together with torrents of melting ice the very fabric of which they were composed, so that their foundation lay buried beneath a vast, ever accumulating rubbish heap. And over and through this débris the little party laboured upward; through twisting lanes of detached rocks as large as churches, under high jutting crags that looked like fortresses shattered by a titan artillery, upon shifting beaches of smooth pebbles, in refuse that time had pulverised so finely that it was here a layer of sand and there a quagmire of mud. Riding was no longer possible. One led one’s mule, one panted and gasped for breath in the increasing thinness of the air. One stopped and rested every moment that one might.
On the first and the second night of the climb Emmie suffered a little and a great deal. The cold was almost unbearable; it numbed, it stabbed, it seemed to gnaw away the envelope of flesh and then play havoc with one’s bones. Dyke took the most tender care of her, but neither wraps nor solicitude could keep her warm. Towards morning of that second night he took alarm, scared by thoughts of frost-bite, when she confessed that after considerable pain all sensation seemed to have gone from her feet. He took off her boots, woollen socks, and stockings, and for a couple of hours rubbed her bare legs and feet. She was all right; the suspended circulation restored itself; and daylight showed him the white flesh stained with dirt, but not discoloured, and quite unswollen. He put grease on her feet; and Manuel brought them a breakfast of condensed milk, some ground sugar, and a biscuit. The lamps refused to boil water for tea, and only by much coaxing had they consented to give out heat sufficient to thaw the milk. It froze again before Emmie finished her portion.