es upon
the trail in spring had led us to expect much irritation of the eyes
despite the use of snow-glasses, and we had plentifully provided
ourselves with boracic acid and zinc sulphate for eye-washes. But the
amber glasses, with their yellow celluloid side-pieces, were not a mere
palliative, as all other glasses had been in our experience, but a
complete preventive of snow-blindness. No one of us had the slightest
trouble with the eyes, and the eye-washes were never used. It is hard
for any save men compelled every spring to travel over the dazzling
snows to realize what a great boon this newly discovered amber glass is.
There is no reason anywhere for any more snow-blindness, and there is no
use anywhere for any more blue or smoked glasses. The invention of the
amber snow-glass is an even greater blessing to the traveller in the
north than the invention of the thermos bottle. No test could be more
severe than that which we put these glasses to.

We were now at the farthest point at which it was possible to use the
dogs, at our actual climbing base, and the time had come for Johnny and
the dogs to go down to the base camp for good. We should have liked to
keep the boy, so good-natured and amiable he was and so keen for further
climbing; but the dogs must be tended, and the main food for them was
yet to seek on the foot-hills with the rifle. So on 9th May down they
went, Tatum and the writer escorting them with the rope past the
crevasses as far as the first glacier camp, and then toiling slowly up
the glacier again, thankful that it was for the last time. That was one
of the sultriest and most sweltering days either of us ever remembered,
a moist heat of sun beating down through vapor, with never a breath of
breeze--a stifling, stewing day that, with the steep climb added,
completely exhausted and prostrated us.

[Sidenote: The Great Ice-Fall]

It is important that the reader should be able to see, in his mind's
eye, the situation of our camp at the head of the glacier, because to do
so is to grasp the simple orography of this face of the mountain, and to
understand the route of its ascent, probably the only route by which it
can be ascended. Standing beside the tent, facing in the direction we
have journeyed, the great highway of the glacier comes to an abrupt end,
a cul-de-sac. On the right hand the wall of the glacier towers up, with
enormous precipitous cliffs incrusted with hanging ice, to the North
Peak of t