eir background
of sky, from which, nevertheless, they remain sharply differentiated.
The rapidity and the variety of change in the appearance of the water is
nothing to that in the appearance of these magical walls and mountains.
Now near, now distant; now luring, now forbidding; now gleaming as if
with their own light; now gloomy in threat, they lose not their hold on
the eye for a moment. The unreality of McDermott Lake, the sense it
often imparts of impossibility, is perhaps its most striking feature.
One suspects he dreams, awake.

THE SCENIC CIRCLE

To realize the spot as best we may, let us pause on the bridge among
those casting for trout below the upper fall and glance around. To our
left rises Allen Mountain, rugged, irregular, forest-clothed half-way up
its forty-five hundred feet of elevation above the valley floor. Beyond
it a long gigantic wall sets in at right angles, blue, shining,
serrated, supporting, apparently on the lake edge, an enormous gable end
of gray limestone banded with black diorite, a veritable personality
comparable with Yosemite's most famous rocks. This is Mount Gould. Next
is the Grinnell Glacier, hanging glistening in the air, dripping
waterfalls, backgrounded by the gnawed top of the venerable Garden Wall.
Then comes in turn the majestic mass of Mount Grinnell, four miles long,
culminating at the lakeside in an enormous parti-colored pyramid more
impressive from the hotel than even Rockwell is from Two Medicine
chalets. Then, upon its right, appears a wall which is the unnamed
continuation of the Garden Wall, and, plastered against the side of
Swiftcurrent Mountain, three small hanging glaciers, seeming in the
distance like two long parallel snow-banks. Then Mount Wilbur, another
giant pyramid, gray, towering, massively carved, grandly proportioned,
kingly in bearing! Again upon its right emerges still another
continuation, also unnamed, of the Garden Wall, this section loftiest of
all and bitten deeply by the ages. A part of it is instantly recognized
from the hotel window as part of the sky-line surrounding famous Iceberg
Lake. Its right is lost behind the nearer slopes of red Mount Henkel,
which swings back upon our right, bringing the eye nearly to its
starting-point. A glance out behind between mountains, upon the
limitless lake-dotted plain, completes the scenic circle.

McDermott Lake, by which I here mean the Swiftcurrent enclosure as seen
from the Many Glacier Hotel, is