ing myself to the
limit of my strength that I was able to keep near him. His example was
at the same time my inspiration and despair. I longed for him to stop
and rest, but would not have suggested it for the world. I would at
least be game, and furnish no hint as to how tired I was, no matter how
chokingly my heart thumped. Muir's spirit was in me, and my "chief end,"
just then, was to win that peak with him. The impending calamity of
being beaten by the sun was not to be contemplated without horror. The
loss of a fortune would be as nothing to that!

[Illustration: THE MOUNTAIN

He pointed to a little group of jagged peaks rising right up from where
we stood--a pulpit in the center of a vast rotunda of magnificent
mountains]

We were now beyond the flower garden of the gods, in a land of rocks
and cliffs, with patches of short grass, caribou moss and lichens
between. Along a narrowing arm of the mountain, a deep canyon flumed a
rushing torrent of icy water from a small glacier on our right. Then
came moraine matter, rounded pebbles and boulders, and beyond them the
glacier. Once a giant, it is nothing but a baby now, but the ice is
still blue and clear, and the crevasses many and deep. And that day it
had to be crossed, which was a ticklish task. A misstep or slip might
land us at once fairly into the heart of the glacier, there to be
preserved in cold storage for the wonderment of future generations. But
glaciers were Muir's special pets, his intimate companions, with whom he
held sweet communion. Their voices were plain language to his ears,
their work, as God's landscape gardeners, of the wisest and best that
Nature could offer.

No Swiss guide was ever wiser in the habits of glaciers than Muir, or
proved to be a better pilot across their deathly crevasses. Half a mile
of careful walking and jumping and we were on the ground again, at the
base of the great cliff of metamorphic slate that crowned the summit.
Muir's aneroid barometer showed a height of about seven thousand feet,
and the wall of rock towered threateningly above us, leaning out in
places, a thousand feet or so above the glacier. But the earth-fires
that had melted and heaved it, the ice mass that chiseled and shaped it,
the wind and rain that corroded and crumbled it, had left plenty of
bricks out of that battlement, had covered its face with knobs and
horns, had ploughed ledges and cleaved fissures and fastened crags and
pinnacles upon it, so tha