from the summit, nearly eighteen
hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it
gave us the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some
white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles
away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision
to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of
the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its
mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its flanking
spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it
completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard
people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers
say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one
ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible
question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and
although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks,
while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the
man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could
have no doubt about it ever after.

How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch
of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its
stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb
that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its
apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved
even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to
reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these
seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and
resource may serve, please God, and I may have that one of my heart's
desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different
coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of
its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated,
broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal;
to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far
above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture,
and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach
it still.[D]

Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a
hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one m