upon the woods and the stars
came out. We were two thousand five hundred feet above the common world.
We lay, as it were, on a shelf in the sky, with a basin of illimitable
forests below us and dim mountain-passes-in the far horizon.

And as we lay there courting sleep which the blinking stars refused to
shower down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire,
which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent element that
comes and goes in a mysterious manner, as we see flame spring up
and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a
mysterious relation to the source of all things. "That flame," he says,
"you have put out, but where has it gone?" We could not say, nor whether
it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour,
and then vanishes away. Our own philosophy of the correlation of forces
found no sort of favor at that elevation, and we went to sleep leaving
the principle of fire in the apostolic category of "any other creature."

At daylight we were astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire
into our service to make a pot of tea, we carefully extinguished it or
sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the climb of some
thing over two thousand feet. The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine
peak has a compensating glory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple
Top had no stimulus of this sort. It is simply hard work, for which the
strained muscles only get the approbation of the individual conscience
that drives them to the task. The pleasure of such an ascent is
difficult to explain on the spot, and I suspect consists not so much in
positive enjoyment as in the delight the mind experiences in tyrannizing
over the body. I do not object to the elevation of this mountain, nor to
the uncommonly steep grade by which it attains it, but only to the other
obstacles thrown in the way of the climber. All the slopes of Nipple
Top are hirsute and jagged to the last degree. Granite ledges interpose;
granite bowlders seem to have been dumped over the sides with no more
attempt at arrangement than in a rip-rap wall; the slashes and windfalls
of a century present here and there an almost impenetrable chevalier des
arbres; and the steep sides bristle with a mass of thick balsams, with
dead, protruding spikes, as unyielding as iron stakes. The mountain
has had its own way forever, and is as untamed as a wolf; or rather
the elements, the frightful tem