He took his life in his hands and risked it, knowing the better way.

Yet all the while the light broadened, the great violet shadows crept down the slopes and huddled at the bases of the peaks.

Then the peaks took fire, and suddenly along the dull white slopes of ice in front of them the fingers of the morning flashed in gold.

Over the eastern rocks the sun had leaped into the sky.
For a little while longer they advanced deeper into the entanglement, and when they were about half way across they came to a stop.

They were on a tongue of ice which narrowed to a point; the point abutted against a perpendicular ice-wall thirty feet high.