That ice must be chopped down level, and then steps cut
all round the rock. It took a solid hour to pass that rock. Here was a
great bluff of ice, with snow so loose and at such a sharp angle about
it that passage had to be hewed up and over and down it again. On either
side the ridge fell precipitously to a glacier floor, with yawning
crevasses half-way down eagerly swallowing every particle of ice and
snow that our axes dislodged: on the right hand to the west fork of the
Muldrow Glacier, by which we had journeyed hither; on the left to the
east fork of the same, perhaps one thousand five hundred feet, perhaps
two thousand feet lower. At the gap in the ridge, with the ice gable on
the other side of it, the difficulty and the danger were perhaps at
their greatest. It took the best part of a day's cutting to make steps
down the slope and then straight up the face of the enormous ice mass
that confronted us. The steps had to be made deep and wide; it was not
merely one passage we were making; these steps would be traversed again
and again by men with heavy packs as we relayed our food and camp
equipage along this ridge, and we were determined from the first to take
no unnecessary risks whatever. We realized that the passage of this
shattered ridge was an exceedingly risky thing at best. To go along it
day after day seemed like tempting Providence. We were resolved that
nothing on our part should be lacking that could contribute to safety.
Day by day we advanced a little further and returned to camp.

[Illustration: The shattered Northeast Ridge.]

[Sidenote: The Hall of the Mountain King]

The weather doubled the time and the tedium of the passage of this
ridge. From Whitsunday to Trinity Sunday, inclusive, there were only two
days that we could make progress on the ridge at all, and on one of
those days the clouds from the coast poured over so densely and
enveloped us so completely that it was impossible to see far enough
ahead to lay out a course wisely. On that day we toppled over into the
abyss a mass of ice, as big as a two-story house, that must have weighed
hundreds of tons. It was poised upon two points of another ice mass and
held upright by a flying buttress of wind-hardened snow. Three or four
blows from Karstens's axe sent it hurling downward. It passed out of our
view into the cloud-smother immediately, but we heard it bound and
rebound until it burst with a report like a cannon, and some days later
we sa