ak of the mountain.]

[Sidenote: Last Camp]

On Friday, the 6th June, we made our last move and pitched our tent in a
flat near the base of the ridge, just below the final rise in the
glacier of the Grand Basin, at about eighteen thousand feet, and we were
able to congratulate one another on making the highest camp ever made in
North America. I set up and read the mercurial barometer, and when
corrected for its own temperature it stood at 15.061. The boiling-point
thermometer registered 180.5, as the point at which water boiled, with
an air temperature of 35 deg. It took one hour to boil the rice for
supper. The aneroids stood at 14.8 and 14.9, still steadily losing on
the mercurial barometer. I think that a rough altitude gauge could be
calculated from the time rice takes to boil--at least as reliable as an
aneroid barometer. At the Parker Pass it took fifty minutes; here it
took sixty. This is about the height of perpetual snow on the great
Himalayan peaks; but we had been above the perpetual snow-line for
forty-eight days.

We were now within about two thousand five hundred feet of the summit
and had two weeks' full supply of food and fuel, which, at a pinch,
could be stretched to three weeks. Certain things were short: the
chocolate and figs and raisins and salt were low; of the zwieback there
remained but two and one-half packages, reserved against lunch when we
attacked the summit. But the meatballs, the erbswurst, the caribou
jelly, the rice, and the tea--our staples--were abundant for two weeks,
with four gallons of coal-oil and a gallon of alcohol. The end of our
painful transportation hither was accomplished; we were within one day's
climb of the summit with supplies to besiege. If the weather should
prove persistently bad we could wait; we could advance our parallels;
could put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen thousand feet,
and yet another half-way up the dome. If we had to fight our way step by
step and could advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still
confident that, barring unforeseeable misfortunes, we could reach the
top. But we wanted a clear day on top, that the observations we designed
to make could be made; it would be a poor success that did but set our
feet on the highest point. And we felt sure that, prepared as we were to
wait, the clear day would come.

[Illustration: The North Peak, 20,000 feet high.

Our last camp in the Grand Basin, at 18,000 feet: the highest