ly consumed time, but
so completely absorbed the attention that for hours together I scarcely
noticed the marvelous landscape spread out beneath, and felt the solemn
grandeur of the scenery far less than many times before on less striking
mountains. Solitude at great heights, or among majestic rocks or
forests, commonly stirs in us all deep veins of feeling, joyous or
saddening, or more often of joy and sadness mingled. Here the strain on
the observing senses seemed too great for fancy or emotion to have any
scope. When the mind is preocupied by the task of the moment,
imagination is checked. This was a race against time, in which I could
only scan the cliffs for a route, refer constantly to the watch, husband
my strength by morsels of food taken at frequent intervals, and endeavor
to conceive how a particular block or bit of slope which it would be
necessary to recognize would look when seen the other way in
descending....

All the way up this rock-slope, which proved so fatiguing that for the
fourth time I had almost given up hope, I kept my eye fixed on its upper
end to see what signs there were of crags or snow-fields above. But the
mist lay steadily at the point where the snow seemed to begin, and it
was impossible to say what might be hidden behind that soft white
curtain. As little could I conjecture the height I had reached by
looking around, as one so often does on mountain ascents, upon other
summits; for by this time I was thousands of feet above Little Ararat,
the next highest peak visible, and could scarcely guess how many
thousands. From this tremendous height it looked more like a broken
obelisk than an independent summit twelve thousand eight hundred feet in
height. Clouds covered the farther side of the great snow basin, and
were seething like waves about the savage pinnacles, the towers of the
Jinn palace, which guard its lower margin, and past which my upward path
had lain. With mists to the left and above, and a range of black
precipices cutting off all view to the right, there came a vehement
sense of isolation and solitude, and I began to understand better the
awe with which the mountain silence inspires the Kurdish shepherds.
Overhead the sky had turned from dark blue to an intense bright green, a
color whose strangeness seemed to add to the weird terror of the scene.
It wanted barely an hour to the time when I had resolved to turn back;
and as I struggled up the crumbling rocks, trying now to rig