still higher wall. Ice sloped from its front at too
steep an angle for us to follow, but had melted in contact with it,
leaving a space three feet wide between the ice and the rock. We entered
this crevice and climbed along its bottom, with a wall of rock rising a
hundred feet above us on one side, and a thirty-foot face of ice on the
other, through which light of an intense cobalt-blue penetrated.

Reaching the upper end, we had to cut our footsteps upon the ice again,
and, having braced our backs against the granite, climb up to the
surface. We were now in a dangerous position: to fall into the crevice
upon one side was to be wedged to death between rock and ice; to make a
slip was to be shot down five hundred feet, and then hurled over the
brink of a precipice. In the friendly seat which this wedge gave me, I
stopped to take wet and dry observations with the thermometer,--this
being an absolute preventive of a scare,--and to enjoy the view.

The wall of our mountain sank abruptly to the left, opening for the
first time an outlook to the eastward. Deep--it seemed almost
vertically--beneath us we could see the blue waters of Owen's Lake,
10,000 feet below. The summit peaks to the north were piled up in
titanic confusion, their ridges overhanging the eastern slope with
terrible abruptness. Clustered upon the shelves and plateaus below were
several frozen lakes, and in all directions swept magnificent fields of
snow. The summit was now not over five hundred feet distant, and we
started on again with the exhilarating hope of success. But if Nature
had intended to secure the summit from all assailants, she could not
have planned her defences better; for the smooth granite wall which rose
above the snow-slope continued, apparently, quite round the peak, and we
looked in great anxiety to see if there was not one place where it might
be climbed. It was all blank except in one place; quite near us the snow
bridged across the crevice, and rose in a long point to the summit of
the wall,--a great icicle-column frozen in a niche of the bluff,--its
base about ten feet wide, narrowing to two feet at the top. We climbed
to the base of this spire of ice, and, with the utmost care, began to
cut our stairway. The material was an exceedingly compacted snow,
passing into clear ice as it neared the rock. We climbed the first half
of it with comparative ease; after that it was almost vertical, and so
thin that we did not dare to cut the foo