Chapter VII: The Enchanted Mountain

Since the time she had been able to remember anything, these mountains of the far north, standing away in bleak triangles of lights and shadows, smoking with the eternally drifting snows, had always held an all but irresistible lure for Marian. Even as a child of six, listening to the weird folk-stories of the Eskimo, she had peopled those treeless, wind swept mountains with all manner of strange folks. Now they were fairies, white and drifting as the snow itself; now they were strange black goblins with round faces and red noses; and now an Eskimo people who lived in enchanted caves that never were cold, no matter how bitterly the wind and cold assailed the fortresses of rocks that offered them protection.

“All my life,” she murmured as she tightened the rawhide thong that served as a belt to bind her parka close about her waist, “I have wanted to go to the crest of that range, and now I am to attempt it.”

She shivered a little at thought of the perils that awaited her. Many were the strange, wild tales she had heard told round the glowing stove at the back of her father’s store; tales of privation, freezing, starvation and death; tales told by grizzled old prospectors who had lost their pals in a bold struggle with the elements. She thought of these stories and again she shivered, but she did not turn back.

Once only, after an hour of travel up steep ravines and steeper foothills, she paused to unstrap her field glasses and look back over the way they had come. Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was the wild, free laugh of a daring soul that defies failure.

Attatak showed all her splendid white teeth in a grin.

“Who is afraid?” Marian laughed. “Snow, cold, wind—who cares?”

Marian spoke to her reindeer, and again they were away.

As they left the foothills and began to circle one of the lesser peaks—a slow, gradually rising spiral circle that brought them higher and higher—Marian felt the old charm of the mountains come back to her. Again they were peopled by strange fairies and goblins. So real was the illusion that at times it seemed to her that if worst came to worst and they found themselves lost in a storm at the mountain top, they might call upon these phantom people for shelter.

The mountain was not exactly as she had expected to find it. She had supposed that it was one vast cone of gleaming snow. In the main this was true, yet here and there some rocky promontory, towering higher than its fellows, reared itself above the surface, a pier of granite standing out black against the whiteness about it, mute monument to all those daring climbers who have lost their lives on mountain peaks.

Once, too, off some distance to her right and farther up, she fancied she saw the yawning mouth of a cavern.

“Doesn’t seem possible,” she told herself. And yet, it did seem so real that she found herself expecting some strange Rip Van Winkle-like people to come swarming out of the cavern.

She shook herself as a rude blast of wind swept up from below, all but freezing her cheek at a single wild whirl.

“I must stop dreaming,” she told herself stoutly. “Night is falling. We are on the mountain, nearing the crest. A storm is rising. It is colder here than in any place I have ever been. Perhaps we have been foolhardy, but now we must go on!”

Even as she thought this through, Attatak pointed to her cheek and exclaimed:

“Froze-tuck.”

“My cheek frozen!” Marian cried in consternation.

“_Eh-eh_” (yes.)

“And we have an hour’s climb to reach the top. Perhaps more. Somehow we must have shelter. Attatak, can you build a snow house?”

“Not very good. Not build them any more, my people.”

“Then—then,” said Marian slowly, as she rubbed snow on the white, frozen spots of her cheek, “then we must go on.”

Five times in the next twenty minutes Attatak told her her cheeks were frozen. Twice Attatak had been obliged to rub the frost from her own cheeks. Each time the intervals between freezings were shorter.

“Attatak,” Marian asked, “can we make it?”

“_Canok-ti-ma-na_” (I don’t know.) The Eskimo girl’s face was very grave.

As Marian turned about she realized that the storm from below was increasing. Snow, stopping nowhere, raced past them to go smoking out over the mountain peak.

She was about to start forward when again she caught sight of a dark spot on the mountain side above. It looked like the mouth of a cavern.

“If only it were,” she said wistfully, “we would camp there for the night and wait for the worst of the storm to pass.”

“Attatak,” she said suddenly, “you wait here. I am going to try to climb up there.” She pointed to the dark spot on the hillside.

“All right,” said Attatak. “Be careful. Foot slip, start to slide; never stop.” She looked first up the hill, then down the dizzy white slope that extended for a half mile to unknown depths below.

As Marian’s gaze followed Attatak’s she saw herself gliding down the slope, gaining speed, shooting down faster and faster to some awful, unknown end; a dash against a projecting rock; a burial beneath a hundred feet of snow. Little wonder that her knees trembled as she turned to go. Yet she did not falter.

With a cheerful “All right, I’ll be careful,” she gripped her staff and began to climb.