it, which overtops it ninety-three feet, is
merely the climax in a tempestuous ocean of snowy neighbors which are
only less lofty; Rainier towers nearly eight thousand feet above its
surrounding mountains. It springs so powerfully into the air that one
involuntarily looks for signs of life and action. But no smoke rises
from its broken top. It is still and helpless, shackled in bonds of ice.
Will it remain bound? Or will it, with due warning, destroy in a day the
elaborate system of glaciers which countless centuries have built, and
leave a new and different, and perhaps, after years of glacial recovery,
even a more gloriously beautiful Mount Rainier than now?

The extraordinary individuality of the American national parks, their
difference, each from every other, is nowhere more marked than here.
Single-peaked glacial systems of the size of Rainier's, of course, are
found wherever mountains of great size rise in close masses far above
the line of perpetual snow. The Alaskan Range and the Himalayas may
possess many. But if there is anywhere another mountain of approximate
height and magnitude, carrying an approximate glacier system, which
rises eight thousand feet higher than its neighbors out of a parkland of
lakes, forests, and wild-flower gardens, which Nature seems to have made
especially for pleasuring, and the heart of which is reached in four
hours from a large city situated upon transatlantic railway-lines, I
have not heard of it.

Seen a hundred miles away, or from the streets of Seattle and Tacoma, or
from the motor-road approaching the park, or from the park itself, or
from any of the many interglacier valleys, one never gets used to the
spectacle of Rainier. The shock of surprise, the instant sense of
impossibility, ever repeats itself. The mountain assumes a thousand
aspects which change with the hours, with the position of the beholder,
and with atmospheric conditions. Sometimes it is fairy-like, sometimes
threatening, always majestic. One is not surprised at the Indian's fear.
Often Rainier withdraws his presence altogether behind the horizon
mists; even a few miles away no hint betrays his existence. And very
often, shrouded in snow-storm or cloud, he is lost to those at his foot.

Mysterious and compelling is this ghostly mountain to us who see it for
the first time, unable to look long away while it remains in view. It is
the same, old Washingtonians tell me, with those who have kept watching
it ever