Brooke, as it happened, slept for six and then set out with the young doctor in blinding snow. He had forty to fifty pounds upon his back now, and once they left the sheltering timber it cost them four strenuous hours to make a thousand feet. Part of that night they lay awake, shivering in the pungent fir smoke in a hollow of the rocks, and started again, aching in every limb, long before the lingering dawn, while the next day passed like a very unpleasant dream with the young doctor. The snow had ceased, and lay without cohesion, dusty and dry as flour, waist-deep where the bitter winds had whirled it in wreaths, while the glare of the white peaks became intolerable under the cloudless sun. For hours they crawled through juniper scrub or stunted wisps of pines, where the trunks the winds had reaped lay piled upon each other in tangled confusion, with the sifting snow blown in to conceal the pitfalls between. By afternoon the doctor was flagging visibly, and white peaks and climbing timber reeled formlessly before his dazzled eyes as he struggled onward the rest of that day. Then, when the pitiless blue above them grew deeper in tint until the stars shone in depths of indigo, and the ranges fading from silver put on dim shades of blueness that enhanced their spotless purity, they stopped again, and made shift to boil the battered kettle in a gully, down which there moaned a little breeze that seared every patch of unprotected skin. The doctor collapsed behind a boulder, and lay there limply while Brooke fed the fire. "I'm 'most afraid you'll have to fix supper yourself to-night," he said. "Just now I don't quite know how I'm going to start to-morrow, though it will naturally have to be done." Brooke glanced round at the grim ramparts of ice and snow that cut sharp against the indigo. Night as it was, there was no softness in that scheme of color lighted by the frosty scintillations of the stars, and a shiver ran through his stiffened limbs. "Yes," he said. "Nobody not hardened to it could expect to stand more than another day in the open up here." He got the meal ready, but very little was said during it, and for a few hours afterwards the doctor lay coughing in the smoke of the fire, while his gum-boots softened and grew hard again as he drew his feet, which pained him intolerably between whiles, a trifle further from the crackling brands. He staggered when at last Brooke, finding that shaking was unavailing, dragged him upright. "Breakfast's almost ready, and we have got to make the mine by to-night," he said. The doctor could never remember how they accomplished it, but his lips were split and crusted with coagulated blood, while there seemed to be no heat left in him, when Brooke stopped on a ridge of the hillside as dusk was closing in. "The mine is close below us. In fact, we should have seen it from where we are," he said.