AN ICY LABYRINTH. 267 



upper valleys is a rather serious matter to men taking- hard 

 exercise, and accustomed to some such support. 



The real work of the day now began. At first it did not 

 seem likely to prove very serious, for we found little snow- 

 valleys which led past and round the towers of broken ice, 

 and enabled us to turn the huge chasms which ran across the 

 slope to left and rig-ht of us. Our prospects of success began, 

 however, to look very questionable when these chasms 

 became more continuous, and cutting- in half the snowy 

 dells forced us to plunge into the intricate labyrinth of 

 ice-towers and crevasses, in our endeavour to force a way 

 through the tortuous mazes of the fall. The difficulties 

 of a broken glacier have been often and well described 

 by Alpine travellers, and those which we now encountered 

 presented no particular feature of novelty. They were, 

 however, the most numerous and complicated of their 

 kind any of us had ever battled with. Once, after 

 struggling through trenches, up walls, and under towers 

 of blue crystal, fair to the eye, but liable at any minute 

 to topj)le over, and therefore to be avoided or hastily 

 passed by, we came to a great chasm, which at first sight 

 seemed impassable. Behind us was ' clean starvation,' for 

 our stock of provisions would not hold out over another 

 day. The only alternative course was to descend to the 

 village of Zenaga, and try by signs to procure food there, 

 at the risk of being arrested as suspicious characters, and 

 sent down to give what account of ourselves we could at 

 the nearest Cossack outpost. Our situation, therefore, gave 

 us every inducement to j)ersevere, if not at all hazards, at 

 least as far as prudence would permit. 



A snow-bridge, which elsewhere might not have been 

 approved of as fitted for public use, was, uader the cir- 

 cumstances, voted worth trying, and Francois went ahead, 

 to make such improvement in the footway as the axe 



