k upon it, for our course lay due west, and I
was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there
burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were
come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected
light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of
wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid
colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right
and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft
dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in
clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the
reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I
looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of
red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my
companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the
horizon, and they were golden.

It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the
reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep
is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the
memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and
zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have
passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk
has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I
can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again
that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable
ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth
and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses
all other regions of the earth.

[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]

That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the
Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man
to give us--a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual
service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways
across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the
greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the
other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being
himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting
about