to the rocks which form the bottom of the valley, and of
course this ice fills it up. It may be fifty, a hundred, or five
hundred feet. Who can say?"

The thought was very terrible as he gazed down there, and once more
imagination was busy, and he mentally saw poor Melchior falling with
lightning speed down, down through that purply-blackness, to lie at last
at a tremendous depth, jammed in a cleft where the crevasse grew
narrower, ending wedge-shape in a mere crack.

He rose from the snow, beginning to feel chilled now; and he shook off
the glittering crystals and tramped heavily up and down in the warm
sunshine, glad of the reflection from the white surface as well, though
it was painful to his eyes.

But after forming a narrow beat a short distance away from the crevasse,
he ceased as suddenly as he had begun, feeling that he might even there
be doing something which would cause the ice to crack; and he had hardly
come to the conclusion that he would go gently in future, when a
peculiar rending, splitting sound fell upon his ears, and he knew that
it was the ice giving way and beginning to form a new crevasse.

For the first few moments he fancied that it was beneath his feet; but,
as it grew louder and developed into a heavy sudden report, he knew that
it must be some distance away.

He crept back to the crevasse, and listened and shouted again, to begin
wondering once more how deep the chasm would be; and at last, with the
horror of being alone there in that awful solitude creeping over him, he
felt that he must do something, and, catching up his ice-axe from where
it lay, he tramped away fifty yards to where a cluster of ragged
pinnacles of ice hung together, and with a few blows from the pick-end
of the axe he broke off a couple of fragments as big as his head, and
then bounded back.

None too soon, for the towering piece which he had hacked at suddenly
turned over towards him, and fell forward with a crash that raised the
echoes around, as it broke up into fragments of worn and honeycombed
ice.

As soon as he had satisfied himself that no other crag would fall, he
stepped back, and, as he picked up two more pieces about the same size
as he had selected before, he saw why the serac had fallen.

Heaped around as it had been with snow, it had seemed to have quite a
pyramidal base, but the solid ice of its lower parts had in the course
of time been eaten away till it was as fragile as the waxen comb it in