Crevassed, broken, a wilderness of towering seracs, it had the look of a sea in a gale whose breakers had been frozen in the very act of over toppling.
"Come," said Pierre.
"Keep the rope stretched tight, Wallie," said Garratt Skinner; and they descended into the furrows of that wild and frozen sea.

The day's work had begun in earnest; and almost at once they began to lose time.
Now it was a perilous strip of ice between unfathomable blue depths along which they must pass, as bridge-builders along their girders, yet without the bridge-builders' knowledge that at the end of the passage there was a further way.

Now it was some crevasse into which they must descend, cutting their steps down a steep rib of ice; now it was a wall up which the leader must be hoisted on the shoulders of his companions, and even so as likely as not, his fingers could not reach the top, but hand holds and foot holds must be hewn with the ax till a ladder was formed.

Now it was some crevasse gaping across their path; they must search this way and that for a firm snow-bridge by which to overpass it.

It was difficult, as Pierre Delouvain discovered, to find a path through that tangled labyrinth without some knowledge of the glacier.