The Purple Flame

  CHAPTER VII THE ENCHANTED MOUNTAIN

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

  "All my life," she murmured as she tightened the rawhide thong thatserved as a belt to bind her parka close about her waist, "I have wantedto 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. Manywere the strange, wild tales she had heard told round the glowing stoveat the back of her father's store; tales of privation, freezing,starvation and death; tales told by grizzled old prospectors who had losttheir pals in a bold struggle with the elements. She thought of thesestories and again she shivered, but she did not turn back.

  Once only, after an hour of travel up steep ravines and steeperfoothills, she paused to unstrap her field glasses and look back over theway they had come. Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was thewild, 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--aslow, gradually rising spiral circle that brought them higher andhigher--Marian felt the old charm of the mountains come back to her.Again they were peopled by strange fairies and goblins. So real was theillusion that at times it seemed to her that if worst came to worst andthey found themselves lost in a storm at the mountain top, they mightcall upon these phantom people for shelter.

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

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

  "Doesn't seem possible," she told herself. And yet, it did seem so realthat she found herself expecting some strange Rip Van Winkle-like peopleto come swarming out of the cavern.

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

  "I must stop dreaming," she told herself stoutly. "Night is falling. Weare on the mountain, nearing the crest. A storm is rising. It is colderhere 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 andexclaimed:

  "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 wemust 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, frozenspots of her cheek, "then we must go on."

  Five times in the next twenty minutes Attatak told her her cheeks werefrozen. Twice Attatak had been obliged to rub the frost from her owncheeks. 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 wasincreasing. Snow, stopping nowhere, raced past them to go smoking outover the mountain peak.

  She was about to start forward when again she caught sight of a dark spoton 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 nightand wait for the worst of the storm to pass."

  "Attatak," she said suddenly, "you wait here. I am going to try to climbup there." She pointed to the dark spot on the hillside.

  "All right," said Attatak. "Be careful. Foot slip, start to slide; neverstop." She looked first up the hill, then down the dizzy white slope thatextended for a half mile to unknown depths below.

  As Marian's gaze followed Attatak's she saw herself gliding down theslope, gaining speed, shooting down faster and faster to some awful,unknown end; a dash against a projecting rock; a burial beneath a hundredfeet 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 andbegan to climb.