Apart from a smarting of the eyes and a recurrent series of heat waves, they made the climb with no great discomfort;--until the final turn brought them to an abrupt halt at the spot where the wide swath of red coals and flaming ashes marked the burning of the hillock foot bushes.
The Master jumped to earth and stood confronting the lurid stretch of ash and ember with, here and there, a bush stump still crackling merrily.

It was not a safe barrier to cross; this twenty-foot-wide fiery stretch.

Nor, for many rods in either direction, was there any way around it.
"There's one comfort," the Master was saying, as he began to explore for an opening in the red scarf of coals, "the fire hasn't gotten up to the camp-site.

He--" "But the smoke has," said the Mistress, who had been peering vainly through the hazecurtain toward the summit.

"And so has the heat.