the
down side of the tent, had to beat a hasty retreat into the colder
(but somewhat drier) weather outside. My clumsiness necessitated
a delay of nearly an hour in starting. While we were melting more
frozen snow and re-making the tea, we warmed up some pea soup and
Irish stew. Tucker and I managed to eat a little. Coello and Gamarra
had no stomachs for anything but tea. We decided to leave the Tucker
tent at the 20,000 foot level, together with most of our outfit and
provisions. From here to the top we were to carry only such things
as were absolutely necessary. They included the Mummery tent with
pegs and poles, the mountain-mercurial barometer, the two Watkins
aneroids, the hypsometer, a pair of Zeiss glasses, two 3A kodaks,
six films, a sling psychrometer, a prismatic compass and clinometer,
a Stanley pocket level, an eighty-foot red-strand mountain rope,
three ice axes, a seven-foot flagpole, an American flag and a Yale
flag. In order to avoid disaster in case of storm, we also carried
four of Silver's self-heating cans of Irish stew and mock-turtle soup,
a cake of chocolate, and eight hard-tack, besides raisins and cubes
of sugar in our pockets. Our loads weighed about twenty pounds each.

To our great satisfaction and relief, the weather continued fine
and there was very little wind. On the preceding afternoon the snow
had been so soft one frequently went in over one's knees, but now
everything was frozen hard. We left camp at five o'clock. It was
still dark. The great dome of Coropuna loomed up on our left, cut
off from direct attack by gigantic ice falls. To reach it we must
first surmount the saddle on the main ridge. From there an apparently
unbroken slope extended to the top. Our progress was distressingly
slow, even with the light loads. When we reached the saddle there came
a painful surprise. To the north of us loomed a great snowy cone, the
peak which we had at first noticed from the Chuquibamba Calvario. Now
it actually looked higher than the dome we were about to climb! From
the Sihuas Desert, eighty miles away, the dome had certainly seemed
to be the highest point. So we stuck to our task, although constantly
facing the possibility that our painful labors might be in vain and
that eventually, this north peak would prove to be higher. We began to
doubt whether we should have strength enough for both. Loss of sleep,
soroche, and lack of appetite were rapidly undermining our endurance.

The last slop