e great battalion that billowed up an hour
later, enveloping glacier, peak, and crag, and sealing up the pass for
seven months to come.

But by then, they were clattering recklessly down the slope,
helter-skelter, like a pack of children let out of school; slithering
over fissured glacier and moraine, sending loose boulders flying from
rock to rock; the Gurkhas shouting and laughing, the Kashmiri coolies
breaking into weird snatches of song. Even The Rat lost his sober
little head, and in scuttling over a glacier slope sat suddenly down
upon his tail, dog fashion, landing Lenox on his feet, and sliding away
from under him, to the vociferous delight of every one but himself.
Only the two Pathans and the Scot accepted reprieve as imperturbably as
they had accepted sentence of death; suggesting by their silence, in
the midst of excitement, the large reserves of strength common to the
natures of both.

Before five they had sighted the willows and poplars of Darkot; and by
sunset they were encamped outside the village, walled in with a rugged
amphitheatre of granite and limestone cliffs. Here they found the man
in charge of the welcome caravan of supplies and heavy baggage, taking
his ease, a little puzzled, yet in no wise troubled at the Sahib's
delay.

Lenox, broken with fatigue, relief, and incipient illness, realised, as
he sank into his camp chair, that throughout the past week he had kept
himself going by pure force of will. And his record was a fair one,
even as Frontier records go:--incessant marching in wet clothes, on a
minimum of food, culminating in ten hours of severe exposure and the
acutest anxiety he had ever known. And over and above all such
incidentals of the day's work,--achievement, in full measure, of that
which he had set out to do; not merely in respect of his mission, but
in respect of that hidden struggle and victory, 'that weighed not as
his work, yet swelled the man's amount.' For he knew now that by the
God-given power of sheer, unwearied resistance he had vanquished an
evil the most insidious and alluring that can assail a man; knew that
he had put the accursed thing under his feet; and he meant to keep it
there.

But the struggle, combined with hardship and privation, had left its
mark on him. The protests of Nature had been disregarded; and now she
took her revenge in the sledge-hammer fashion that is hers.

By next morning the man's skin was like hot parchment, his limbs rigid
wi