ng to share your
master's dinner and your master's bed; and there are few things more
sustaining than a sense of one's own importance in the general scheme
of things!

The fire was their mess-table, round which they dined together, to save
time and trouble in cooking; and also because community of hardship and
danger links men to one another with hooks of steel; dispels all minor
distinctions of colour and creed; reveals the Potter's raw material
underlying all.

And while they so sat, enjoying their one-course dinner as no gourmet
ever enjoyed a city feast, night and frost crept stealthily, almost
visibly, over the stupendous snow-peaks and pinnacles of opaque ice
that towered on all sides, breathing out cold; and contemplating, as if
in silent amazement, these atoms of 'valiant dust' who dared and were
beaten back, and dared again; who day by day pushed farther into their
white sanctuary of silence, in search of a pass whose existence was
guessed at rather than known. At sunset there had been a brief burst
of colour,--green and opal and rose; but by now the mountains shimmered
grey and hard as steel under the tremulous fire of the stars; and every
moment the grip of frost tightened upon half-melted glacier, upon man
and beast. For behind the little group of servants, who sat apart,
enjoying their own meal in their own fashion, stood twelve apathetic
Kashmiri ponies,--unconsidered martyrs to man's lust of
achievement,--who endured to the full the miseries of mountaineering,
and reaped none of its rewards.

Dinner over, the fire must be allowed to die down. A pipe over the
embers, and a sheep-skin bag shared with Brutus, was the evening's
unvarying programme on this detached expedition into the hidden core of
things; tents and lesser luxuries having been left with the heavy
baggage in charge of two Gurkhas at the foot of the pass.

While Lenox sat smoking, and encouraging the fire to keep alive as long
as might be, his men vied with one another in discovering sheltered
corners for the night. The Havildar was in high spirits after his
morsel of chupatti, washed down with a mouthful of rum; and the
laughter of his comrades echoed strangely among the ghostly peaks.

"You seem to be in great form, Chundra Sen," Lenox called out at last.
"What's the joke now?"

"We are seeking soft stones to sleep on, Hazur; and betting, like the
_Sahiblog_, which of us shall find the softest!" [Transcriber's note:
the "o" in "_