The afternoon was much as the morning and towards seven I reached a place which suggested itself as a good camping ground.  I had hardly fixed on it and halted, before I saw a few pieces of charred wood, and felt sure that my father must have camped at this very place before me.  I hobbled Doctor, unloaded, plucked and singed a duck, and gave the dog some of the meat with which Harris had furnished me; I made tea, laid my duck on the embers till it was cooked, smoked, gave myself a nightcap of brandy and water, and by and by rolled myself round in my blanket, with the dog curled up beside me.  I will not dwell upon the strangeness of my feelings—­nor the extreme beauty of the night.  But for the dog, and Doctor, I should have been frightened, but I knew that there were no savage creatures or venomous snakes in the country, and both the dog and Doctor were such good companionable creatures, that I did not feel so much oppressed by the solitude as I had feared I should be.  But the night was cold, and my blanket was not enough to keep me comfortably warm.

The following day was delightfully warm as soon as the sun got to the bottom of the valley, and the fresh fallen snow disappeared so fast from the snowy range that I was afraid it would raise the river—­which, indeed, rose in the afternoon and became slightly discoloured, but it cannot have been more than three or four inches deeper, for it never reached the bottom of my saddle-bags.  I believe Doctor knew exactly where I was going, for he wanted no guidance.  I halted again at midday, got two more ducks, crossed and recrossed the river, or some of its streams, several times, and at about six, caught sight, after a bend in the valley, of the glacier descending on to the river-bed.  This I knew to be close to the point at which I was to camp for the night, and from which I was to ascend the mountain.  After another hour’s slow progress over the increasing roughness of the river-bed, I saw the triangular delta of which my father had told me, and the stream that had formed it, bounding down the mountain side.  Doctor went right up to the place where my father’s fire had been, and I again found many pieces of charred wood and ashes.

As soon as I had unloaded Doctor and hobbled him, I went to a tree hard by, on which I could see the mark of a blaze, and towards which I thought I could see a line of wood ashes running.  There I found a hole in which some bird had evidently been wont to build, and surmised correctly that it must be the one in which my father had hidden his box of sovereigns.  There was no box in the hole now, and I began to feel that I was at last within measureable distance of Erewhon and the Erewhonians.