Beneath us stretched the desert, and beyond it a broad belt of fantastically shaped, snow-clad mountains, hundreds and hundreds of them; in front, to the right, to the left, as far as the eye could reach.
"They are just as I saw them in my dream so many years ago," muttered Leo; "the same, the very same." "And where was the fiery light ?" I asked.
"Yonder, I think;" and he pointed north by east.
"Well, it is not there now," I answered, "and this place is cold." So, since it was dangerous to linger, lest the darkness should overtake us on our return journey, we descended the peak again, reaching the cave about sunset.

The next four days we spent in the same way.

Every morning we crawled up those wearisome banks of snow, and every afternoon we slid and tobogganed down them again, till I grew heartily tired of the exercise.
On the fourth night, instead of coming to sleep in the tent Leo sat himself down at the entrance to the cave.

I asked him why he did this, but he answered impatiently, because he wished it, so I left him alone.
I could see, indeed, that he was in a strange and irritable mood, for the failure of our search oppressed him.

Moreover, we knew, both of us, that it could not be much prolonged, since the weather might break at any moment, when ascents of the mountain would become impossible.
In the middle of the night I was awakened by Leo shaking me and saying--"Come here, Horace, I have something to show you." Reluctantly enough I crept from between the rugs and out of the tent.