I brought my weight down on the rear-bar and pulled and rocked and levered the sledge back away from the edge of the crevasse. It did not come easy. But I threw my weight hard on the bar and tugged until it began grudgingly to move, and then slid abruptly right away from the crevasse. Estraven had got his hands onto the edge, and his weight now aided me. Scrambling, dragged by the harness, he came up over the edge and collapsed face down on the ice.
I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His lips were cyanotic, one side of his face was bruised and scraped.
He sat up unsteadily and said in a whistling whisper, “Blue—all blue— Towers in the depths—”
“What?”
“In the crevasse. All blue—full of light.”
“Are you all right?”
He started rebuckling his harness.
“You go ahead—on the rope—with the stick,” he gasped. “Pick the route.”
For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick. In the white weather one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it—a little late, for the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step. Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall, and fall… An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.
“What’s up, Genry?”
I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids together. I said, “I’m afraid of falling.”
“But you’re on the rope,” he said. Then, coming up and seeing that there was no crevasse anywhere visible, he saw what was up and said, “Pitch camp.”
“It’s not time yet, we ought to go on.”
He was already unlashing the tent.
Later on, after we had eaten, he said, “It was time to stop. I don’t think we can go this way. The Ice seems to drop off slowly, and will be rotten and crevassed all the way. If we could see, we could make it: but not in unshadow.”
“But then how do we get down onto the Shenshey Bogs?”
“Well, if we keep east again instead of trending south, we might be on sound ice clear to Guthen Bay. I saw the Ice once from a boat on the Bay in summer. It comes up against the Red Hills, and feeds down in ice-rivers to the Bay. If we came down one of those glaciers we could run due south on the sea-ice to Karhide, and so enter at the coast rather than the border, which might be better. It will add some miles to our way, though— something between twenty and fifty, I should think. What’s your opinion, Genry?”
“My opinion is that I can’t go twenty more feet so long as the white weather lasts.”
“But if we get out of the crevassed area…”
“Oh, if we get out of the crevasses I’ll be fine. And if the sun ever comes out again, you get on the sledge and I’ll give you a free ride to Karhide.” That was typical of our attempts at humor, at this stage of the journey; they were always very stupid, but sometimes they made the other fellow smile. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I went on, “except acute chronic fear.”
“Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.” Estraven’s smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. “It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”
“Give me your notebook a moment.”
He had just noted down our day’s journey and done some calculation of mileage and rations. He pushed the little tablet and carbon-pencil around the Chabe stove to me. On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. “Do you know that sign?”