Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/342

336 rout of all prophetic lamentations. A halt was unanimously decreed to welcome the return of the prodigal; the treasured store of tobacco was extracted from its recesses, and, soothed by the sacred fire, we agreed that all things tend to happiness in this best ordered of worlds.

Preparing to resume the descent, we found ourselves in a position of some difficulty. It would obviously be very dangerous, even if possible, to cling longer to the left bank of the glacier. Immediately below, a tributary ice stream from the great snow fields that lie on the ridge dividing the Adyr and Bashail valleys, dropped over a low rocky wall in a series of almost incessant avalanches, threatening the traveller with very complete annihilation. On the other hand, any attempt to reach the centre of the glacier seemed scarcely possible. The ice in front of us was riven in the most extraordinary way, the merest knife-edges, and flakes of rottenest ice, alone intersecting the blue depths of vast crevasses. Unlike the ordinary broken glacier, where the crevasses may be regarded as merely dividing and breaking up the solid ice, here it seemed as if one great chasm had been frailly partitioned and separated by a shattered network of frozen foam. So unpleasing did these crevasses appear to Zurfluh, that he set off by himself to examine the cliff under the hanging glacier. The Tartar, evidently thinking him ignorant of the danger involved, expostulated