Nearer and louder grew the appalling sound. Then a great cloud of snow-dust burst in their faces, half blinding them: and, with the roar of an express train, the avalanche sped down the ravine; burying the ice-slope they had just crossed; and obliterating their footsteps as man's work is obliterated by the soundless avalanche of the years. All five men let out their breath in an audible murmur. "_Burra tamasha_,[2] Hazur," Yusuf Ali remarked gravely. "Never before have I seen the like." But for the moment Lenox had lost his voice. Ten minutes' delay in starting, and they had been swept out of life, without a struggle or a cry. It is this significance of trifles in determining large issues that at times staggers faith and reason. "The Sahib still goes forward?" the Pathan added presently, as one who merely asks for orders: and the Sahib nodded. But this was too much for the Kirghiz. Emboldened by terror, he flung himself on the ground. "I who speak am as dust beneath the feet of the Heaven-born. But consider, Hazur, there will be many more such before the pass can be reached." "It is possible," Lenox answered unmoved. "It is also possible that, like this one, they will keep out of our path. Make no more fool's talk. Go back to the ponies." The Kirghiz was not mistaken. There were 'many more such' during the next few days. But Lenox was not mistaken either: for none of them came their way. Only the muffled thunder of their descent broke the stillness of a world whose mystery and grandeur surpassed anything Lenox himself had ever seen. For on the second night, a night without wind or cloud, they camped in the heart of the great glacier: and all about them,--touched to ethereal unreality by the light of moon and stars,--were unnumbered crests and pinnacles, fantastically carven; black mouths of caverns, shaggy with icicles; sudden fissures and vast continents of shadow, like ink-stains on unsullied purity; and over-arching all, the still wonder of the sky, pierced with points of flame. Tired as he was, Lenox resented the need for shutting his eyes upon a scene so stirring alike to the imagination and the heart: a scene that lifted both, past Nature's uttermost sublime, to the Master-Builder, whose mind is the Universe, and whose thoughts are its stars and worlds, and the living souls of men. But for all that Nature had her way with him; sealing up eyes and mind with the double seal of weariness and the supreme content of the climber who knows that the summit is at hand. And upon the fourth day, in a blaze of sunlight, that set the uncharted snow-fields glittering like dust of diamonds, they crossed the Pass,--Lenox's own Pass, that no living man had set eyes or foot upon,--and looked at last on that elusive 'other side,' that draws certain natures like a magnet to the far-flung limits of earth.