er floor they crept down squeezed them, and they reached the
interior valleys attenuated, depleted, and relatively harmless.

[Sidenote: Aneroids]

The aneroids had kept fairly well with the mercurial barometer and the
boiling-point thermometer until we moved to the ridge; from this time
they displayed a progressive discrepancy therewith that put them out of
serious consideration, and one was as bad as the other. Eleven thousand
feet seemed the limit of their good behavior. To set them back day by
day, like Captain Cuttle's watch, would be to depend wholly upon the
other instruments anyway, and this is just what we did, not troubling to
adjust them. They were read and recorded merely because that routine had
been established. Says Burns:

"There was a lad was born in Kyle,
But whatna day o' whatna style,
I doubt it's hardly worth the while
To be sae nice wi' Robin."

So they were just aneroids: aluminum cases, jewelled movements,
army-officer patented improvements, Kew certificates, import duty, and
all--just aneroids, and one was as bad as the other. Within their
limitations they are exceedingly useful instruments, but it is folly to
depend on them for measuring great heights.

Perched up here, the constant struggle of the clouds from the humid
south to reach the interior was interesting to watch, and one readily
understood that Denali and his lesser companions are a prime factor in
the climate of interior Alaska.

Day by day Karstens and Walter would go up and resume the finding and
making of a way, and Tatum and the writer would relay the stuff from the
camp to a cache, some five hundred feet above, and thence to another.
The grand objective point toward which the advance party was working was
the earthquake cleavage--a clean, sharp cut in the ice and snow of fifty
feet in height. Above that point all was smooth, though fearfully steep;
below was the confusion the earthquake had wrought. Each day Karstens
felt sure they would reach the break, but each day as they advanced
toward it the distance lengthened and the intricate difficulties
increased. More than once a passage painfully hewn in the solid ice had
to be abandoned, because it gave no safe exit, and some other passage
found. At last the cleavage was reached, and it proved the most ticklish
piece of the whole ridge to get around. Just below it was a loose snow
slope at a dangerous angle, where it seemed only the initial impulse was
ne