154 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON 



taineering goes, according to the professional 

 climber, who was last in the string, beautiful 

 enough, but rather tame. 



For all of that there was one place in the climb 

 that gave me a shudder, and one moment of 

 thrill, when even the professional climber turned 

 pale. We had ascended perhaps a thousand feet 

 above Tie-up Rock when we came to a crevasse 

 across the glacier. It was a yawning gap, as clean 

 as some awful knife-wound through the blue ice, 

 and, illumined by the sunlight, which at that 

 moment shot straight down its unearthly walls, 

 revealed, as not even the heights above us could, 

 the grip of the cold, the depth of the death that 

 lies upon the world. And ten or twelve feet down, 

 taut from solid wall to wall across the crevasse, 

 stretched a stout hemp rope — a human thing 

 frozen into this eternal pit ! The sight of it, so 

 unexpected, mysterious, and horribly significant, 

 was shocking. But it proved to be only the rope 

 which the guides had left hanging from the sum- 

 mit the summer before. It had been buried to this 

 depth during the winter, and with slack enough at 

 this place to stretch without snapping when the ice 

 split and the crevasse opened across the glacier. 



