The descent into the Dragon-Spine Ravine was a three-mile cross across fractured shelves of dark rock and black shale.
The height dropped from six thousand feet down to four thousand. Then, the howling gale of the high cirque transformed into a deep, deep-throated shaking that shook through the soles of Pei Jing’s boots. It wasn’t the sound of wind. It was the nonstop, bone-shaking thunder of thousands of tons of ice-slow meltwater falling through sheer mountain air.
By midday, the canyon walls closed in, rearing up four hundred feet on either side in sheer, upright columns of six-sided dark rock.
The gorge was narrow—less than fifty paces wide at the bottleneck—trapping the spray in a permanent, freezing fog. The surrounding air heat sat at fifteen degrees below zero, causing the suspended moisture to freeze onto every surface in coats of rime. The fir trees clinging to the ledges looked like pillars of frosted iron. The river boulders were wrapped in slippery domes of grey glaze.
At the head of the deep gap stood the cascade.
A torrent sixty feet wide erupted from a notch in the hanging glacier. It plunged one hundred feet straight down into a boiling, frothing plunge basin. The water was not blue. It was a pale, milky slate-grey, thick with crushed ice-slow silt and suspended rock flour.
