al except Walter--and nothing ever interferes
with his sleep--but, although our slumbers were short and broken, they
seemed to bring recuperation just as though they had been sound. We
arose fresh in the morning though we had slept little and light.

On the 30th May we had made our camp at the Parker Pass; on the 2d June,
the finest and brightest day in three weeks, we moved to our first camp
in the Grand Basin. On the 3d June we moved camp again, out into the
middle of the glacier, at about sixteen thousand five hundred feet.

Here we were at the upper end of one of the flats of the glacier that
fills the Grand Basin, the serac of another great rise just above us.
The walls of the North Peak grow still more striking and picturesque
here, where they attain their highest elevation. These granite ramparts,
falling three thousand feet sheer, swell out into bellying buttresses
with snow slopes between them as they descend to the glacier floor,
while on top, above the granite, each peak point and crest ridge is
tipped with black shale. How comes that ugly black shale, with the
fragments of which all the lower glacier is strewn, to have such lofty
eminence and granite-guarded distinction, as though it were the most
beautiful or the most valuable thing in the world? The McKinley Fork of
the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is black as ink with it, and
its presence can be detected in the Tanana River itself as far as its
junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble in water, and where
melting snow drips over it on the glacier walls below were great
splotches, for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had been
upset.

[Illustration: Second camp in the Grand Basin--looking down, 16,500
feet.]

[Sidenote: The Flagstaff]

While we sat resting awhile on our way to this camp, gazing at these
pinnacles of the North Peak, we fell to talking about the pioneer
climbers of this mountain who claimed to have set a flagstaff near the
summit of the North Peak--as to which feat a great deal of incredulity
existed in Alaska for several reasons--and we renewed our determination
that, if the weather permitted when we had reached our goal and ascended
the South Peak, we would climb the North Peak also to seek for traces of
this earliest exploit on Denali, which is dealt with at length in
another place in this book. All at once Walter cried out: "I see the
flagstaff!" Eagerly pointing to the rocky prominence nearest the
summit--the