So far he might be
accompanied by men of less soaring ambition; by an engineer who had been
mapping the country, or an artist who had been carefully observing the
mountains from their bases. They might learn in time to interpret
correctly the real meaning of shapes at which the uninitiated guess at
random. But the mountaineer can go a step further, and it is the next
step which gives the real significance to those delicate curves and
lines. He can translate the 500 or 1,000 feet of snow-slope into a more
tangible unit of measurement. To him, perhaps, they recall the memory of
a toilsome ascent, the sun beating on his head for five or six hours,
the snow returning the glare with still more parching effect; a stalwart
guide toiling all the weary time, cutting steps in hard blue ice, the
fragments hissing and spinning down the long straight grooves in the
frozen snow till they lost themselves in the yawning chasm below; and
step after step taken along the slippery staircase, till at length he
triumphantly sprang upon the summit of the tremendous wall that no human
foot had scaled before.
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