y its entire
area, roughly circular in outline, and something more than three miles
in its largest diameter, is broken up into terraces, into slopes and
hillocks, into hollows and mounds, all strewn with, bowlders and loose
stones, with here and there uprearing rocks of fantastic and
suggestive shapes. There is no life there,--no birds, no conies or
chipmunks that inhabit most high places of these mountains; no
flowers, no grass, no sign of vegetation; nothing but granite. The
trail runs sometimes plainly across level reaches of loose stones,
sometimes over long smooth surfaces of rock, sometimes in and out
among wildernesses of shattered and tumbled fragments of the
mountain's blasted head. At varying intervals, particularly in its
more difficult stages, it is marked by small pyramids of stones, and
by crosses cut crudely in the rock. Care must be taken not to miss one
of these marks; for the trail, in avoiding inaccessible heaps of
granite, goes in places perilously near the edge of the summit, which
falls away in more than one known precipice a thousand feet to the
unknown gulch below.

The wind was cold, and Haig felt that its strength was steadily
increasing, though it yet blew fitfully. He made the second level
without mishap, but was brought to a momentary standstill there by the
fiercer rush of wind on the higher terrace. It seemed strange, at
first thought, that the wind had not blown away the vapors that now
enveloped him; but he saw presently that it was not blowing across
the mountain, but rather in a circular, whirlwind motion that
gradually became more violent. The terrace he now crossed was as
smooth as a floor, and he found his way only by means of the crosses
carved in the rocks beneath his feet. Then the trail dropped
suddenly into a shallow trough; mounted to another field of
crumbled stones; and rose unevenly to a barrier that he remembered
with a pang of chagrin. This was what at the first glance would have
appeared to be a solid and insurmountable wall of rock, perhaps
fifteen feet in height, and stretching away to the very edge of the
plateau at his right, and to a wilderness of granite on the left.
But directly ahead of him the wall was cleft, and there was a
narrow pathway climbing up between two huge rocks that had been
carved by the elements into shapes bearing a fanciful resemblance to
human figures. These were the Twin Sisters.

Here Haig had been caught by a storm that hurled him back de